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+{"text":"\n\nANGELS OF PATTAYA\n\nINSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THAI PROSTITUTION\n\nG.T. GRAY\n\nForeword\n\nIt would be a wonderful world if we all came from homes with enough room for everyone, and two loving parents who had enough time and education to help us with our homework, who had money to send us to good schools, buy us books and computers. But the world isn't that way. People have to make the best lives they can for themselves with what they have available to them. For the women in this book, life is that way.\n\nMost of these interviews were conducted over an 18-month period beginning in 2008. I hope some of these women have moved on, I found that tracking most of them was next to impossible. I don't know if the stories they tell are completely truthful. Like all of us, they probably exaggerate some aspects of their lives and downplay others.\n\nAngels of Pattaya is not an apology for the way things are or a cry to sweep the bars and streets. This book was compiled because I thought the women should have a chance to tell their own stories. I found that listening to them talk about their own lives was illuminating. What struck me first was that the women don't want anyone to feel sorry for them: they just want people to understand why they do what they do. The women who were gracious enough to speak to me seemed to appreciate someone taking the time to listen. Almost without exception they thought the book was a good idea and wanted to have their stories heard, hoping it would bring a little understanding of them and the lives they lead.\n\nMany of the women, despite having to drop out of school at anywhere from seven to 15 years of age, are bright and articulate. No matter how you may view these women, they have feelings about their lives and what they do.\n\nSome are in the business out of desperation for money, others out of greed. Some see it as an easy lifestyle (sleeping until the afternoon, hanging out with friends all night \u2013 the act of being with a customer only takes up about an hour of the day). Some hold out a genuine hope of meeting a good man who will take them out of the hard life and into a better one. Many who get out of the life return \u2013 relationships are difficult. Language and cultural differences are many times insurmountable.\n\nInterviews were conducted by providing the women with a list of questions written in Thai. Those who were willing to talk I met with a translator for interviews. Some spoke English well and were able to conduct the interview in English. Transcriptions were written in Thai-English; this is the way that the women spoke to me. Whenever possible, after translating the stories, the women were contacted to clear up any questions I had.\n\nAll of the women interviewed for this book are over 18. They have all made a choice (in most cases based on economic necessity) whether to be \"in the business\" or not.\n\nAll the women were paid for their time. I am grateful to them for their willingness to speak frankly about their chosen profession and the life that it entails.\nBackground\n\nWhile most people think of prostitution in Thailand in modern terms, it is helpful to understand it in the historical context. In 1905, the Slave Abolition Act ended all forms of slavery in Thailand. Prior to this a system of \"bonded slavery\" had existed in Thailand, whereupon a citizen could choose to sell him or herself into servitude to pay off a debt or to provide for the remaining family. The Sale of Wives by Husbands Act, which outlawed husbands who sold their wives without their consent, was enacted by King Rama IV in 1868. However, there remained three categories of women within the law. The law allowed men to buy women to become \"third\" wives, the lowest category of wives. The first category were legally wed wives; the second were women not legally wed to the men, but who bore their children (minor wives); and the third were, in simple terms, sex slaves. Following the Slave Abolition Act in 1905, as the slave wives disappeared, many of the women who would have been third wives entered prostitution, as brothels were legal at the time.\n\nProstitution remained legal in Thailand, and in the 1930's prostitutes were registered so that they could receive medical care. In 1960, under pressure from the United Nations, Thailand passed the The Act to Deter Prostitution. Anyone who offered sex for sale would be fined and\/or given a jail sentence (up to two months). But in 1966 the Thai government passed another law which allowed for the creation of entertainment establishments offering \"special services\". This law was introduced in large part to generate income from the large numbers of American servicemen stationed in Thailand and Vietnam. The law did not legalize prostitution, but allowed the government to look the other way.\n\nResponding to the demands of their clientele, many Thai entrepreneurs transformed their coffee shops and bars into brothels. Go-go bars and \"anything goes\" establishments offering sex shows opened.\n\nWord of American servicemen's \"R & R\" \u2013 military slang for rest and recuperation (or rest and relaxation), is a term used for the free time of a soldier in the U.S. military \u2013 ventures in Bangkok and Pattaya gradually spread, and as the Vietnam War wound down and ended tourists began to frequent Thailand and the bar scene. Thailand's reputation for cheap and easy sex became as much a part of its lore as its temples and beaches.\n\nHow many prostitutes are there in Thailand? Estimates vary from the Government Health Department's number of 75,000 to some Non-Government Organization's (NGO's) estimates of up to two million. Both numbers are hard to imagine. For the NGO's number to be accurate we must believe 9% of Thai women between the ages of 18 to 49 are prostitutes. (Thailand's total population is approximately 64 million. The adult age group of 18 to 49 accounts for approximately 70% of the total population, and using 50% as the number of women, rounding off numbers, that gives us around 22,500,000 women in that age group). A more realistic estimate of women involved in the sex industry would probably be 400,000 to 500,000.\n\nIf you are moved by any of the stories in this book and want to do something about it, an organization of former sex-workers, called The Empower Foundation, could use your help. Visit www.empowerfoundation.org and ask how you can assist them.\n\n\"Over the last two decades more than 30,000 sex workers have studied with Empower. For some of us it has been the first time we have been able to access our right to study. For others of us who finished school or university, we have gained new skills, knowledge and friendship.\"\n\n\u2013 The Empower Foundation website.\n1\n\nGoy and Su: \"We are real, not video\"\n\nGoy and Su are friends who work at a Bangkok massage parlour. It's one of the \"fish-bowl\" parlours, where the women sit behind a glass partition while the customers sit in a bar area and look them over before making a selection. This one caters to western and Indian customers; there are others around Bangkok that cater for Japanese, Korean and Thai men. A massage here costs 1,500 baht, of which the women get 500. Tips are optional. They were interviewed in a restaurant before starting their 5:00pm to 2:00am shift. Both were wearing heavy make-up, miniskirts and high-heeled shoes. There is no mistaking they are working girls. Goy is short, just over five feet tall, with dark skin, long straight black hair and big round eyes; without the make-up she would almost look Polynesian. Su is taller, and a bit heavier. Her hair is long and wavy.\n\nQ: How old are you?\n\nGoy: I am 22 years old.\n\nSu: Me, I am 19 years old.\n\nHow long have you been working at this massage parlour?\n\nGoy: I have been here for one year.\n\nSu: Only two months.\n\nWhere do you come from?\n\nGoy: I come from Isaan.\n\nSu: I was born in Bangkok. I live here all my life.\n\nWhat did you do for work before working here?\n\nGoy: I was maid in condo. Job was okay, but not make enough money to send home to family. Salary only 4,000 baht every month. Pay for room, for food, clothes, nothing to give for family and daughter.\n\nSu: I take care my baby. She is three year old; she stay with my mother while I work.\n\nGoy, How old is your daughter?\n\nGoy: She is four year old. She stay in Isaan with my mother and father. Yes, I miss her very much. I see her maybe one time in two month. I can go home for two or three day then.\n\nSo how many days a month do you work?\n\nGoy: I work everyday. No work, no money.\n\nSu: If I make good money in one week, maybe I not come for one or two day. But Mamasan not like a girl to not come and work. If customer come in and ask for girl, and she not working, maybe customer go home.\n\nGoy: And it good for business to have many girls here everyday.\n\nHow much money do you make in one month?\n\nGoy: For massage customer pay 1,500 baht. Girl get 500. Customer pay tip, sometimes 500 baht, sometimes 1,000, sometimes 2,000. Sometimes tip nothing. I can make maybe 10,000 baht, 15,000 for good month, good tip. One time a customer tip me 200 US dollars.\n\nSu: First month I make about 10,000 baht. This month I think I make more. Have customer come back to see me. I give 3,000 baht to my family. Cannot give more. They think I work restaurant.\n\nGoy: I send 5,000 baht to my family every month.\n\nHow did you start to work here?\n\nGoy: I have a friend work here, she tell me I can make more money. I was afraid at first. Never go with farang man before.\n\nSu: I have friend work at massage parlour on Ratchada Road (an area with many massage parlours, mostly catering to Thai and Chinese clientele). But I cannot work there, my skin too dark. So she tell me maybe I can work here at this place. More foreign men, like dark skin.\n\nWhy do you think western men like your dark skin and Asian men do not?\n\nGoy: Not sure why farang man like us. They like small girl with dark skin. Maybe different from farang lady? They always say \"my wife fat\" or \"my wife old\". Thai man and Chinese man like pew kow. They say dark skin is ugly, for farm girls. So we cannot work in place for Thai and Chinese man.\n\nSu: All Thai ladies want white skin. We think it is beautiful. Like on TV.\n\nWhat do you think about the customers?\n\nGoy: They come for good time. Have sex with girl. If they have good heart, okay, I like. But sometime they smell, are dirty. No good. First time I work, customer take me out, buy me clothes, jewellery. Stay at nice hotel. (Laughing) I think \"this very good job.\" I never see him again. I remember him many times. I think, \"Does he think about me, does he think good or bad?\"\n\nSu: I don't think too much about customer. They are customer. Some come back and are good men. Good tip, fun.\n\nDo you ever like having sex with them?\n\nGoy: (Laughing) Oh yes. Sometimes. If they make love slowly, not push me around. I am small, yes? So I don't like fat big man. But yes, sometimes feels good.\n\nSu: I like some customer for sex. Same \u2013 if he go slowly, smile, say nice things, okay. If he let me do what I want for making love, I can like it, too.\n\nDo you worry about AIDS and other disease?\n\nSu: YES! I always tell customer use condom. I will not make love if him not use. Some man say give me more money, but I say no, must use. If not want, then only chock-wow (use hand).\n\nGoy: I want man to use condom. I afraid [of] AIDS. Owner tell girl have to go to hospital for test blood. If have problem here (points to crotch) cannot work. Must stay home until finish.\n\nWhat if you don't want to go with a customer?\n\nGoy: We cannot see customer. They look at us in window, we cannot see them. But if we come out and see and we not want to go, we can say \"sorry, not feel good, maybe better you pick different girl.\" But then Mamasan cut money for (from) next customer.\n\nSu: Better to go with and try to finish man soon.\n\nDo you like the job?\n\nGoy: Sometimes, yes. Meet many men from different country. Learn many things. Learn to speak English. But we have to work hard. Job is to make man feel good. Sometimes make love to three, four men in one day. And give massage.\n\nSu: I think it is okay. I want money, so work no problem. For money, good. Sometimes if no customer, boring. Sit, watch TV, talk with girls.\n\nDo the girls like each other, or have problems?\n\nSu: I never have problem with other girl. Only one time, yes, customer want to take two girls, I not want to go. I can go with two girls but I not want to with that customer. Other girl get angry me. But we talk, okay, now no problem.\n\nGoy: We are okay together. But sometimes have a problem. If a girl spy for owner.\n\nHow do they spy for the owner?\n\nGoy: Sometimes customer want to take girl outside. Meet after finish work. If owner find out, have big problem. Sometimes customer say \"here phone number or room hotel, come see me.\" If a girl see another girl outside with man, maybe have problem.\n\nYou two are good friends, right? Did you know each other before?\n\nGoy: No, I not know her before. We like each other. Sit, talk, laugh together.\n\nSu: Yes, we have good time together working. She help me when I come to work first time. Tell me not to believe customer. Lie too much. Lie about \"no, I no have girlfriend\" [or] \"Oh, darling I think about you all the time, I come back see you everyday.\"\n\nWhere do you live, who do you live with? Can you tell me about your room or house?\n\nGoy: I live in a small room, near the northern bus station. I live alone, but have small room, only bed. No shower or toilet, that is outside, share with everyone. I pay 1,500 baht every month. In Isaan have a house with buffalo, chicken. I like house there. But there is no work, so I have to live here. I do not like Bangkok, but it is good for money.\n\nSu: I live in Pratunam neighbourhood in Bangkok with my mother and father, my daughter and my young brother. It is a small house; I sleep with my daughter when I come home. Before [I get home] she sleeps with my mother and father. My brother sleep in big room (main room of the house). He go to school, he is 15 year old.\n\nHave either of you ever been married, and do you have a husband or boyfriend now?\n\nSu: I have husband before, but now divorce. We always fighting. He run around, drinking, gambling.\n\nHow long were you married?\n\nSu: I don't know, maybe three year I think. I think he will be good father of my daughter. No, father of baby is different man. I have baby when I am 16. I stop going to school to have baby. Now, no boyfriend. Thai man I don't want, they don't want girl to work like this, but want money so they can run around. Farang, maybe sometime, if he is good man and take care me and baby.\n\nGoy: I have no boyfriend. I am divorce from my husband, now almost three year. We marry when I am fifteen.\n\nDid you leave school?\n\nGoy: No, I not go to school. I work in restaurant with my mother.\n\nWhen did you stop going to school?\n\nGoy: When I am very young, maybe seven years old. Have to work to help my family.\n\nYou stopped going to school when you were seven years old? How is your reading and writing? I am sorry to ask, but in the West it is illegal for children not to attend school.\n\nGoy: My reading is okay. My writing not too good. But better now. Maybe sometime I can go to school again. But for now, I am okay. But I cannot get a good job, I know.\n\nWhat do you want to be doing in five or ten years time?\n\nGoy: I want my own house in Isaan, and a shop, so I can take care of my daughter. Yes, I want a husband too. I think to stay alone no good.\n\nHow is it no good?\n\nGoy: Who will take care when sick? What about when old? And will be lonely.\n\nSu: I want a small house for me and baby, and a shop to sell things, so I don't have to work like this anymore.\n\nWhat about a book about the women of Bangkok \u2013 do you think it's a good idea?\n\nGoy: Yes, it is good idea, I think.\n\nSu: Not sure. Maybe if farang read the book, I don't know. But I don't want some Thai girl to read and think we have good job.\n\nWhat do you want to say about your life to the people who might read the book?\n\nGoy: This life is hard, not easy. People think we are lazy, but we work for our family. No one can take care but us.\n\nSu: Yes, we work. And farang not understand our life here. We want to have man treat us nice. We are not same as a movie, we are real, not video.\n\nUPDATE: Six months after the initial interview, Goy and Su have moved on together to an upscale bar, which charges 3,500 baht for 90 minutes with a girl. The girls get half the fee, plus whatever tip the customer gives. The bar has private rooms upstairs to entertain customers (including having sex). They now see just one customer per night, work 26 days a month, and make an average of 50,000 baht per month (three times what the average office worker makes, almost ten times what a factory worker makes). They both have new mobile phones, and are dressed in clothes befitting office workers on a day off, or casual college students.\n\nI asked them what they thought of their new situation:\n\nGoy: It is much better here. Boss is nice to the girls, if we are tired we can go home, if we are sick we can call to him and say cannot work. It is no problem.\n\nSu: The customers are better. More money (laughing). Oh yes, we have man come here this week and go with me and Goy together. After he tip $100 U.S.! One to me and one to Goy. I am happy here. Soon I will not have to work anymore. I have money in my bank. I can take care my daughter.\n\nGoy: Yes, me too. My daughter she will go to school, and I will go home and be her mother again (at this point she begins to cry a little). She will not have a life the same as me. That is what I want. I am sorry I cry. I never talk like this before (Su also starts to cry a little and holds Goy's hand).\n\nSu: I help my mother and father and my brother. Sometimes I do not like what I do to work, but I can take care my family and I am happy.\n\nHow much longer do you think you will work like this?\n\nGoy: (Still crying a little) Maybe three months, maybe six months. I hope it is three. I want to go home and leave Bangkok. I never want to come here again.\n\nSu: (To Goy, laughing) You have to come to see me, I am your sister now. I stop when Goy goes home. I cannot be here without Goy. I will be alone too much.\n\nWhat would you say to a girl who was thinking of working or just starting to work as a prostitute?\n\nGoy: If a girl cannot work another job and must take care of her baby or her parents, okay. But some girls think to work like this is fun. Meet foreign man and make money for go out to disco. Okay, but I think they will not be happy if they work like this for a long time. It is better to do some other job. Because maybe they will take drugs and drink too much so they can work like this. For many girls I see that happen. You must have a good friend to talk with and help you. Because it is lonely. And sad.\n\nSu: If this the work they have to do, okay, it is their life. But I think they should know many times it is not a good life. I have been working for only about one year. Many times I am very sad. Yes, it is a sad life sometime. For us we have a hard life.\n2\n\nFon: \"Nothing make me sad, nothing make me cry no more.\"\n\nI met Fon at a restaurant across from the beer bar she works in as a free-lance bar girl. She and her friends sit at the bar waiting to meet a customer. Sometimes they meet a customer within five minutes, sometimes they go home without finding one. On the day that I meet her, there is no mistaking what Fon does for a living. She is wearing a short, tight mini-dress and spiked heels. She is wearing too much make-up and has shoulder length hair died a pale orange. She is tall and thin, and seldom smiles.\n\nQ: Hello Fon, I am writing a book about the women who work in the bars of Thailand. Can you tell me a little about yourself \u2013 how old you are, where you are from, about your family?\n\nFon: Yes, I can tell you I am 29 year old. I come from Bangkok. You know Klong Toei? (a slum neighbourhood in Bangkok, notorious for drugs and guns) I born there. I now live there. I have one brother and one sister, they younger than me. I not see them for many year. I think my brother in the jail. My sister is good person, good in school, very smart. Now she have a job in some company about import and export. She good in school, good in life. My parent are...they have a problem. Many problem in their life. My father drink too much whiskey. Drunk many time, I remember he hit my mother, I cry, she cry, he hit and throw something. I am about six or seven year old, he leave. I think go some other place in Bangkok. He want to come back many time, my mother not want him. My mother take care me, my sister and my brother. To do this she work maid for company (a cleaning service). She work everyday and night, too. We not see her because she work too much.\n\nSo you took care of yourselves?\n\nYes. And then my mother she work so hard and she start to take drug \u2013 yaba \u2013 because she work too much. After her life and our life not good because we not have a mother. She work and take drug. (Shrugs)\n\nDid you know that she was taking drugs?\n\nNot know for long time. But we know she different, not the same before. And I stop to go to school when I am about 15. I get boyfriend and I have baby girl, when I am 15.\n\nAnd what did your mother say?\n\nShe is sad I stop school but happy have a girl. And happy I can leave Klong Toei.\n\nYou moved away? How did your life go from there?\n\nYes, I stay with my boyfriend and his family. They live near our room, but not in Klong Toei. Have a nice house, big. My home is Klong Toei is one room. Yes, for everybody. With boyfriend family I think everything okay, but then something happen. We are together about three year. And my boyfriend his family not like me anymore. They say I must leave but my daughter will stay with them. Why they say this I don't know. Maybe because I come from Klong Toei, maybe because my mother take drug, I do not know. My boyfriend he not talk to me. They tell me to leave. My daughter she is about three year old. I am 18.\n\nSo you just had to leave their house? Why didn't you go to someone to help you?\n\nThey (Fon's inlaws) tell me I can see my daughter, but cannot live with them. I ask what is problem, they never say to me. Who can help me? I am poor girl from Klong Toei. His family more important than me. Police not listen me, no one listen me, no one care. So I go away and wait to see daughter again. But they lie and I not see her again.\n\nYou never saw her again, even now?\n\nNo. Last time I see her more than ten year ago.\n\nThat must be very difficult for you...\n\nThat time, yes. Now, no. It like everything now. Nothing make me sad, nothing make me cry no more.\n\nCan you explain more about that?\n\nHow? I lose my daughter. My mother she die already. My brother in jail, I not see my father for so many year. Only my sister has good life, but I do not see her for about five year, she not like what I do and not talk with me any more. So in my life many thing happen no good. I not know why. I am not a bad person. If I cry I cry everyday. So I stop, now nothing make me cry again. And my heart turn hard.\n\nWhat happened to you after you left your husband's family?\n\nI come back Klong Toei, but stay with friend. Have about four or five friend stay together. One friend she tell me can go to Sukhumvit Road and find the westerner to have sex, can get money 500, 600 baht every time. She can go with two, three men every night. So I go with her.\n\nWhat did you think about going out to have sex for money?\n\nI don't care. I lose what is important to me, my daughter. What can happen I feel more bad than that? And I think maybe if I can have some money and nice room I can have my daughter again. But not happen.\n\nAnd what has happened over the past ten, eleven years?\n\nI work Sukhumvit until 20 year old. Then I go to bar beer, work one, two year. I dancing in go-go bar some time, but I don't like. Go work bar beer in Phuket, Pattaya. Now I stay Bangkok again.\n\nHave you had more children or a boyfriend or husband?\n\nNo more children for me. Only my daughter. I have boyfriend every night (Fon laughs \u2013 the only time during the interview). I never get marry again, but I have some boyfriend. One come from England I think, one from America. I have one Japan man send me money, I think he take me Japan. He good man, young man. But his family tell him cannot come back to Thailand, he call me and tell me he sorry but family want him to stay Japan, must do what parent say. So I not see him again.\n\nDid his family know about you?\n\nYes, he say they not want him to be with Thai lady, only Japan. And we finish.\n\nAnd what did you think about him?\n\nHe was nice boy. Now he gone, so I not think about him.\n\nAnd the other boyfriends?\n\nSay many thing like \"I love you\", \"I come back for you\". Lie. Now I don't know them.\n\nSo what do you think of your customers in general?\n\n(Shrugs) Some are nice. But they are only customer. Why do I think they buy sex? I not know. I not care. Only care they come to me and pay me.\n\nAnd how much do they pay you? How much do you make in one month?\n\nNow. Customer must pay 1,500 baht for short-time. Long time 3,000 baht. I can make about more than 25,000 baht in one month.\n\nSo now you are working out of (named) beer garden, right? Do you go anywhere else? Do you work every night?\n\n(Shrugs again) Up to me. I only come beer garden and wait for customer. Sometime come afternoon. Sometime come evening. If have customer in afternoon, maybe go home, maybe come back Beer Garden. Sometime if have money go another beer garden with friend, look for customer. Maybe go disco, if have money. If have money can work or not work. Up to me.\n\nDo you ever think of doing something else? Your English is pretty good.\n\nNo, no different job for me to do. I don't want to work factory or cashier. Why not? Not money enough. So I go with man.\n\nDo you ever hope or think you will see your daughter again?\n\nNo, I think I will never see her again. My husband family go somewhere, move near to Bangkok many year ago, but I do not know where. And now I am lady from the bar \u2013 what can I say to her? I think \"do she think about me?\" I always miss her, miss her forever.\n\nDo you have friends you spend time with, other girls from the bar?\n\nYes, sure. We talk, go to shopping at market, many thing.\n\nWhat do you talk about? Work, customers?\n\nWe talk about many thing. Some girl talk about the customer, me I do not. Why not? I not think, not care about customer. Maybe talk about money someone pay me sometime. If someone know some customer pay a lot of money maybe she will tell.\n\nAnd the sex, do you like it, not like it?\n\n(Shrugs again) I not like. For me it is work. But I not feel good or bad. Sometime I like to talk in bar to customer. Talk about their life. Sometime interesting. Say something funny.\n\nWhat about HIV? Do you always use a condom?\n\nYes, customer must use condom. For young guy is no problem, they say \"okay\". Old man not want, but must use. I not want to get sick, die.\n\nSo you have been doing this for ten years. How many years do you think you will work? Do you have any plan or dreams for the future \u2013 five, ten years from now?\n\nNo, my dream stop many year ago. Before I think I work like this only a short time, but now is more than ten year already. Now I do not know if I work like this until I am old. Maybe sometime I will have money to open some shop like beauty shop or mini-store.\n\nOkay, thank you for talking with me, Fon. What do you think of a book about the women who work in the bars? Is there anything you want to say to people who will read it?\n\nMany girl here have a hard life. Not want to talk about this life. Me? No, I do not like to talk about it. It make me think about many thing I not want to think about. I do not like to talk about my life because I not understand why if I am good person I cannot have a good life. No one can tell me that. Can you?\n3\n\nNu: \"I think many men lonely\"\n\nNu met me at a bar down the street from where she works in the city of Pattaya \u2013 famous for its number of bars, discos and available women. She is 22, just over five feet tall and says she weighs about 80 pounds, with long black hair that is tied back in a pony tail. Nu doesn't look like an exotic dancer, wearing a baggy t-shirt and \"camo\" shorts with sandals. But she has been dancing at three or four different go-go bars over the past year.\n\nQ: Nu, can you tell me where you come from?\n\nNu: I come from Nakhon Si Thammarat, in the south of Thailand. My parents not live in city, they live about 20 kilometres outside.\n\nWhat do they do?\n\nThey have a small shop to sell part for car and truck. My father can fix car, truck, motorcycle also. My brother work there. But they don't make any money anymore, so two year ago I go to Bangkok in Samut Sakon (small industrial town outside of Bangkok) to work in factory with my aunt. I make a food from fish.\n\nWhy didn't you just stay at that job?\n\nOh my God! The smell is so bad! (Laughing). Everyday I go home and smell like a fish. Everything. Hair, clothes. Always smell like a fish. And make so little money. 6,000 baht for one month.\n\nAnd how did you end up in Pattaya?\n\nOne girl at the factory her sister work here in bar. Make money about 30,000 baht in one month. So I ask what she have to do. Her sister (at the factory) give phone number to me and I call to girl here. She tell me she dance at the go-go bar. I ask her about what she have to do \u2013 sleep with man? She tell me, sure, but money is nice, so it no problem, if not want to go with man, not go. If go, get 1,500 baht for one night, maybe can get more if tourist who is rich. So, I like to dance, I come to visit Pattaya, go to go-go bar. I think it is okay. Wear bikini, dance, drink with customer. So I say yes.\n\nWhat did you tell your aunt, does she know?\n\n(Laughing) No no no! I tell her I go to work cashier restaurant. Does she believe? I don't know. She say okay, my parents say okay. So I start dancing at go-go about one year ago.\n\nAnd what did you think about it when you started?\n\nIt was no problem. Wear bikini, dance, listen to music. Other girls are nice to me. Customer seem like nice man. I don't go with man for about one month, then Ma (Mamasan) tell me I must go with the man.\n\nWhy didn't you go at first?\n\nNot want to. I make money about 15,000 baht from salary and drinks and tip. Money enough (laughing). Was I virgin? (Laughing again) No! But I never go with farang before so I worry a little bit. About what? Don't know \u2013 (laughing) but other girls tell me \"oh farang so big, not like Thai man.\" Is that true? (Continues laughing) Yes!\n\nSo what do you think now about the work after one year? You said you have worked at several bars, why?\n\nI change bar because first bar many girl take drug. I do not take a drug. Many girl there take yaba or another drug so I leave that bar. Another bar I go to I must dance nude. No problem. After one night it is same as bikini dance. Not think about to be nude, just dance. But at that bar the owner try to cheat the girl. Take money if not get enough customer to buy drink or pay bar. He tell me salary one month 11,000 baht for nude dance. But when he pay me first time, he say \"Oh, you have customer pay bar only four time, lady drink not enough, late two time, must cut salary.\" So I get salary less than 9,000 baht and get new job at new bar. I dance there now more than seven month. It is okay. Good salary and tip. Nice customer. But now I am boring (bored) with job. Maybe not job, but boring (bored) with my life. In the future what can I do? If I dancing and go with man for how many year? What can I do when I am old lady? I think serious about this. So now I try to save my money, help my family. I hope in one year or two year I can go home and open a shop in my home. What shop? Maybe beauty shop or like a 7-Eleven. I think in two year I can have about 100,000 baht to bring home.\n\nI don't mind to go with the man. If he is clean and not angry or drunk, sure it is not problem. Can go out to disco, food, maybe go to island or other beach to ride banana boat, shopping to Bangkok. I think many men lonely. Sex with man is short time, understand? About 30 minutes. But if man take me for long time like two days or more, then they want a girl to talk with them and be nice. That is okay, I can do that.\n\nWhat if you met a nice foreign man, would you marry him or go abroad?\n\n(Nu thinks about this for a long minute) I don't know. He would have to be rich (shrugs her shoulders). My family would not like it for me to marry a foreign man, but if he would take care of them they would say okay I think. I don't want to leave Thailand. I don't think I will like some other country. I would miss Thai people. And some other country is very cold, right? UK, German, Sweden. I see the picture of snow!\n\nSome people would say that dancing nude in a bar and having sex with strange men is not a good job, that it is bad for a woman to do this job. What do you think?\n\nI think people can think that. I know what people think about a bar girl. But they don't know. What if they lose the good job? Or have some mother or father get sick and need to make money more? So they can think what they think, but I don't think it's good they talk about a girl like that. Maybe they have to do this one day! I don't like to talk bad about someone, even customer. I don't like someone to talk bad about the bar girl \u2013 we only try to help our family.\n\nYou haven't mentioned children \u2013 do you have any?\n\nNo, no children. When I finish bar I will get married and have children, make sure they have a good life. That they can go to school and are happy.\n\nThank you Nu, is there anything else you want to say to the people who will read this book?\n\nCome to Thailand, enjoy. If come to Pattaya be nice to ladies, we want to have good time like you, but this is our job, and we have family we must take care [of]. \n4\n\nPhen: \"I like money\"\n\nI interviewed Phen at the Bangkok bar where she works. The bar isn't open for another two hours, but the girls are sitting around watching a Korean movie dubbed into Thai on the television. The bar is a \"beer bar\", with no entertainment other than drinking, watching TV, and talking with the women. If a customer wants to take a woman out of the bar, the \"bar fine\" is 500 baht, of which the girls get 100 baht for the first ten fines each month, and 250 for every one after that. Phen charges customers 1,500 baht for a \"short time\", and 2,500 or 3,000 for all night. Phen is small, slim and has short hair, parted on the side and slicked down with gel. The haircut sets her apart from the other girls in the bar. She hasn't yet changed into her \"uniform\" \u2013 either a short dress or miniskirt \u2013 and hasn't put on her make-up. In her sandals, jeans and black sleeveless turtleneck, she looks like a 60's co-ed. You do notice her gold right away \u2013 it's worn as fashion, and also a sign of pride and status by many bar girls. She has a gold chain around her neck, with a gold amulet attached. She has gold bracelets on each wrist and also has a gold chain around one ankle.\n\nQ: Hi Phen, can you tell me a little about yourself \u2013 how old are you, how did you start working here?\n\nPhen: I am 20 year old. I work in this bar since I am 18 year old. What else can I do? I have a baby when I am 16. I get pregnant when I am 15. I meet a Thai man. He already have a wife, I know that, but I am young and stupid. He tell me he give money for the baby, but that is a lie. My mama and papa ask him for money after I have the baby, and he tell them \"No, I cannot.\" His family is important, and he tell my parents if they make trouble, they will have some problem. I have to leave school, I cannot get job anywhere. I have to leave my baby two year ago with [my] mama and come here for work.\n\nHow did you know to come to Bangkok and go to work in a bar?\n\nI know girls from the village who come to Bangkok. Everyone in the village know a girl who come here.\n\nWhat do people in the village think of girls who come here to work?\n\nThey know what us girls do here, some people think bad about it. But if their daughter or son (laughing), have to do it \u2013 their daughter or son send 5,000 baht every month it is not so bad to them.\n\nWhat about working here \u2013 what do you think about it?\n\nAbout my work? I like money. You see, I have gold for my neck, wrists and ankles. I have money in the bank, too. How much? (Laughing) More than anyone back in my home. Sometime I look at the girls who sell some things on the street \u2013 food or fruit or lottery. I am from Isaan \u2013 the same as them \u2013 you can know we are because the skin, it is pew-dam. We cannot get good jobs, we are only poor farm girls; the only thing they can do is sell noodles or somtam (spicy Thai papaya salad). You look how people \u2013 Thai people \u2013 work in the office: look at them. They do not respect them. Would I be happy to make noodles for someone who does not respect me? For how much? 200 baht for one day? I think I could not do that. When I go home to the village now, I have money to give Mama, my sister and my baby. That make me happy.\n\nWhat else does money buy?\n\nI can go to shopping with my friends. Or to dancing or to buy something special for my baby. And for the bank.\n\nHow much money do you make?\n\nIn the bar I can make 2,000 or 3,000 baht in one night. Customers take me to Phuket and Pattaya, stay in nice hotels, sleep late, go for trip to island.\n\nBut do you make that much every night? There must be nights when you don't have a customer. How much do you make in one month?\n\n(With a smirk) No, I have a lot of customer. In one month, maybe I can make 40,000, 50,000 baht. Yes, sometimes, no customer. But I think I am smart here \u2013 I know the customer \u2013 if he will go with me or only want to talk.\n\nHow do you know that?\n\nNot sure, but I look everything in the man \u2013 I look his face, what he drink, if he buy me drink, if he look other lady while he talk to me. Maybe he do not want me to touch him. Many things.\n\nWhat do you think of the men who come to the bar?\n\nSome men are nice, and we want to know \"why do you come here, why you not have a girl at home in Australia or Germany or England?\" Why they not want to meet one girl and stay with her? Why man always want to [be a] playboy? But if a man is nice, treat girl nice, like to have a good time, okay, no problem, I will have fun with a man like that.\n\nHow about working with the other girls, are you all friends?\n\nYes, the girls are my friends. We understand each other. I like to be friends with all other girls. We joke about our life, joke about the customer. If a girl have a problem we listen. If one has a broken heart, we all cry. Me? I will never have broken heart again. Before yes, but not now. Too many men lie, how can I believe? They say \"oh, I write to you, I come back for you, I miss you.\" I don't believe from a long time ago. I tell them [to] send money.\n\nDo they send money?\n\nSometimes they send money and letter, or e-mail, say nice things. Sometimes I don't remember the face, or what they look like, you know? So if a man come in the bar and say \"Hello sweetheart, I miss you\", I don't know if they joking or not. I don't know if they come in last week or last year. But I say \"oh, tee-lock (sweetheart), I miss you too\" and kiss big. And I ask question \"how is your life? How is your job?\" [I] Try to remember who he is (laughing).\n\nHow long do you think you will work in the bars?\n\nNot sure, maybe someday I will have enough money to stop working, I hope before I get too old (laughing). How much is money enough? Never enough, but maybe I will meet a rich man and will give me enough to stop working.\n\nDo you have a boyfriend?\n\nNow, my life is okay. I do not need boyfriend. Thai men only want money. Foreign man only want sex.\n\nAre you ever lonely?\n\nSometimes I am lonely, I miss my baby always. But I have friends.\n\nDo you live alone?\n\nI live with two girls, they work in another bar, right over there (pointing across the walkway). We have apartment, we pay 5,000 baht every month. It is nice. We have one bedroom and another room. We have TV, tu-yen (refrigerator), sofa, tables. Not like when I first come here to Bangkok and live up there (points above the bar) and share a little room with only a bed with two more girl.\n\nWould you ever bring a customer to your room?\n\nNo, I would never bring a man to my room. It is ours. For us only.\n\nAre you happy in your life?\n\nI am happy I can take care [of my] baby and family. I not worry about myself. I like to buy nice things \u2013 clothes, cosmetic, gold. It make me happy. So to be happy I must do this job.\n\nIs there anything else you want to tell people about you and your friends, your lives?\n\nWe do what we do. If you are nice, we are nice. But we have sex different man everyday. We try to have many so we make more money. I know I'm thinking sometimes a man think we are like, what, the fish that eats everything. Shark? So, how would you be if this was your job? \n5\n\nBuey: \"I don't feel good, I don't feel bad\"\n\nI met Buey at a Thai fast-food restaurant, half a block away from the corner she stands on almost every night. The corner is a bus stop on one of Bangkok's main streets, but doubles as a hang-out for working girls. If the police ever do decide to ask them what they are doing, the answer is \"waiting for the bus\". Buey is tall, a bit heavy, and with her make-up and shortie t-shirt, baggy jeans and black high top sneakers she could be an LA gangster girl. At first glance she looks a lot younger than 27, but from under the make-up the lines of a hard life show through.\n\nQ: Hi Buey, tell me about yourself \u2013 where you are from, how old you are, your life today, what you would like for the future.\n\nBuey: I come from Buriram in the northeast of Thailand. I am 27 year. Now I am a girl who work here on the soi, waiting for man.\n\nYou are from Buriram. How long have you been in Bangkok, why did you come here?\n\nI come here to earn money to take care of my family. In my family are many people, my two sons who stay with my mother, my grandmother and grandfather. I also have two brothers, but they are no good. And I have sister work at massage near to here.\n\nYou said your brothers are no good, why not?\n\nMy father die when we are young. I am six, my sister five, my brothers very young, maybe one or two and three year old. So my mother and grandmother and grandfather must take care us. I cannot go to school after I am about 12 year old. I must work. What I do? I work in restaurant my grandmother have. My grandfather is farmer. My younger sister go to school until she is same \u2013 about 12 year old. Then she help work in restaurant. My brothers can go to school, but when they are, what you say, teenager, they start to be bad boys. Steal motorcycle, some other things. Have a lot of trouble for my mother. So the police take them away, maybe [for] one year. They come back and [are] sometime good, sometime bad. But their friends always bad and they start to take drug. Now they stay [in] prison because they take money from some shop. Two year already. Must stay more, maybe two or three year, I don't know. So they do not help my family. I come to Bangkok about more than three year ago. Before in Buriram I have Thai guy stay with me. He is father of my sons. But he now stay with another girl. Because he like to drink and he hit me and sons. So my grandfather go to kill him one day. He run away (laughing) and never come back. My grandfather tell me he say he is sorry, but I think nevermind. I think this is better for my sons.\n\nSo did you come here to work like this or did you do something else first?\n\nI find job, work in office near to here, work was maid. I am maid for about two year, then stop work because company say [they] have too many maid and I stop.\n\nWhat was your salary for being a maid?\n\nMy salary about 5,500 baht for one month.\n\nAnd how did you start doing this?\n\nI was maid at night. I walk around here, I see many farang and many lady. Sometime at night farang (foreigner) say something to me. I talk with other lady who are maid. One girl she say she go with farang sometime and give her 800 or 1,000 baht for sex. So when job finish I just walk around one night and meet farang guy over there (pointing to a coffee shop). He ask me can I go with him and I say okay I ask him how much he give me he say have 1,000 baht but must pay for short-time hotel about 180 baht, so I can have 800 baht. I say \"okay\". That [was] about two year ago. (Laughing) I still see that guy sometime.\n\nSo, do you work in a bar?\n\nNo, I work over there \u2013 waiting for bus (laughing).\n\nAnd do you meet a man every night?\n\nNot now. But [during] tourist time I can.\n\nAnd how much do you charge for sex?\n\n1,000 baht. But if man say [he] can give 700 baht and [I] have no customer, I say okay.\n\nAnd how much do you make in one week or one month?\n\nDepend on man. How many. Sometime I can get two or three men one night, then I wait for two or three day, come back. In a month I can get about 15,000 baht or more.\n\nDo you think this is dangerous? What about AIDS?\n\nAbout AID, man use condom or [I do] not go. Yes always. [I do] not want to die. I have two son to think about. I must take care for them.\n\nAnd what do you think about the work? Does it bother you?\n\nI don't think so. That is my life. Not so happy sometime, but what can I do?\n\nYou can be a maid again.\n\n(A look of shock and disgust crosses her face) No. I will not be a maid again. I cannot do that. This is better than maid. People treat maid like dirt.\n\nWhat about the sex, does that make you feel bad?\n\nNo. Not bad, not good. I have sex with man for short time, it is what I must do. I don't feel good, I don't feel bad.\n\nAnd the future? How long can you do this?\n\nUntil I am not beautiful anymore (laughing). Then I must go home. I don't know. I send some money to my family every month. They put in the bank. But I don't want to go home. My mother take care my sons. I like to live in Bangkok. So maybe I will try to find some job here in restaurant. I can cook Isaan food. Make somtam very delicious. Then I think I will be happy in my life.\n\nOkay. What about this book I am writing \u2013 do you think it's a good idea? Anything you want to say to people who will read it?\n\nGood idea? I don't know. Who will read it, someone who want to come to Thailand? Up to them to come here. Yes, I want to say come to Thailand, I will be here and wait for my bus. Every night. \n6\n\nKwan: \"If I was rich or had good luck I would not have this life\"\n\nI met Kwan at a coffee shop down the street from where she works as a waitress 29 nights a month \u2013 in a beer bar outside a popular nightclub. If she meets a customer who likes her and wants to pay the bar fine (600 baht), she can go with him for the night. She looks tired when we meet at 3pm, but says she's fine. As the interview goes on I get the sense the tired look is not from a lack of sleep, but from life.\n\nQ: Hi Kwan, thanks for coming to meet me. Can you tell me about yourself \u2013 where you are from, how old you are, how did you start working at the bar?\n\nKwan: I come from Samut Prakan, very near to Bangkok. I am 29 years old. I have been working at this bar for about four years. I came here to work because I cannot find a better way to pay for my daughter to go to school and grow up.\n\nHow old is your daughter, and where is she?\n\nShe lives with my mother in Samut Prakan. She is 12 years old and goes to school. I see her one time every two, three month. She is very smart and good student. I hope she never have to work in a bar like me.\n\nSo you don't like working in the bar?\n\nFor me, I don't mind. I have to pay for my daughter, so it is what I do. My mother must stay home to care about her at the house. My mother not have a husband, he die about three year ago from cancer.\n\nWas that your father?\n\nNo, my father die when I am young. He was work on construction and have accident, get hurt and cannot do anything; cannot move. And die soon, maybe one week after accident.\n\nI'm sorry to hear that. It must have been hard for you and your mother. Do you have any brothers or sisters?\n\nI have one sister, older than me [by] two year. She go to school and finish and get married and have three children, but live far away. You know Pai? It is in the north. Her husband come from there. She live on a farm there with him.\n\nIs it okay to ask you where your daughter's father is?\n\nHer father die when she is young. He walk home drunk one night because lose motorcycle and truck not see him, run him over. Die. I got married again about three year after that, but my second husband, I find out he married already, so I leave him and live with my mother.\n\nYour second husband was already married when you married him?\n\nYes, he have another wife in another city. I don't know about that for about six month. Then one night he drunk and tell some friend and they tell me. It's okay, he [was] not good man after we married. Drink too much, not work. I have to work in factory, then take care [of] house. So he go and I stay with mother. But cannot take care [of] daughter and mother so I come to Bangkok and work.\n\nAnd was this your first job in Bangkok?\n\nNo, first I work big Thai restaurant, but no money. I try to work in disco over there \u2013 but no job, so I come here and they tell me sure, can work waitress, and can go with customer for more money.\n\nWhat did you think about that?\n\nI think, oh I know about this kind of place. But I know I can make more money. First time I [was] afraid of farang customer. I cannot speak English too much. But I learn.\n\nYou said you don't want your daughter to work in a bar, but you don't mind working like this?\n\nYes, my daughter too smart and good to work in place like this. For me, it is my life. My husband die, and I marry wrong man, so I must work here now. But my daughter I want to have different life, I hope so.\n\nDoes anyone in your family know what you do?\n\nNO! They only know I work waitress.\n\nAnd how much more do you earn here than in the restaurant?\n\nIn restaurant it is not so bad. I can earn 7,000 baht one month. But here can earn 12,000 or 15,000 or even 20,000 if [I] have good customer.\n\nHow many men do you go with in a month?\n\nSometime many. If I can go every night it is good for me. More money.\n\nAnd how much do they pay you?\n\nI ask them for 1,500 short time and 2,500 long time. Sometime if they good guy and say \"too much\" and I need some money I say okay, pay me not so much then. Maybe 1,000 short time.\n\nHave you ever had any bad experiences with the customer?\n\nBad?\n\nYes, was there ever a customer who didn't pay you or treated you badly?\n\nI don't think so. Maybe one time a guy say he cannot pay. But I call the bar and he say \"okay, okay, joking\".\n\nWhat would have happened?\n\n(Laughs once) I don't know. I think nothing I can do. But before one girl I heard story [that] she go to police and tell them man not pay. They say okay you pay us 500 baht and we go talk to him. But she not have money so cannot pay police, so they tell her will they (they will) get 1,500 baht from man and she get 500, they get 1,000. Police go to hotel. Go see man, come out give girl 500 baht and tell her to go back to bar. Later that man friend tell us he must give police 5,000 baht or go to jail. If true, I don't know.\n\nHow long will you do this work?\n\nI think maybe four year. I try to save my money a little, but my daughter need so much for school and clothes and music. She learn music now. She can play ranat ek (Thai xylophone) so good. I want only for her to be good and happy.\n\nDoesn't she miss you because you are not at home?\n\nIt is not so bad, I can see her one time every month. Some children not see mother or father long time. They work in another country or far away. But this is our life. She can understand.\n\nAre you happy or unhappy about your life?\n\nI am happy when I see my daughter and I think about her and how she will have different life.\n\nThis is for a book about the women of Bangkok and Pattaya who work in the bars. Is there anything you want to say about your life to the people who will read it?\n\n(Thinking) No, I don't think so. I have my life, It cannot change. If I was rich or had good luck I would not have this life. But I cannot change what has happened in my life. So I will do this until I go home. \n7\n\nBee: \"Who would understand what I feel when I come home?\"\n\nBee works at one of the large bath massage (ab nuat) establishments in Bangkok, in a Thai neighborhood known for its massage and karaoke bar scene. I met up with her at a restaurant near her \"shop\", as she calls it. The \"shop\" looks much more like a Las Vegas casino. However, it has neon lights, larger-than-life posters of girls and is surrounded by Roman columns. A valet greets customers as they drive up and they are ushered along a red carpet and through large red double doors by two men in suits.\n\nBee is medium height and thin, with white skin. Her hair is cut just below her ears. Even though it's a hot and sunny day, she shows up wearing a long sleeved shirt and a baseball cap. \"I must keep my skin white,\" she says. Her English is excellent, with a hint of a British accent in some phrases.\n\nQ: Hi Bee, can you introduce yourself? How old are you, where are you from, and how did your English get to be so good?\n\nBee: Ha. I'm not sure about my English. But I lived in England for two years. I'm 31 years old, I come from Chonburi, it's on the way to Pattaya. But I don't come from Pattaya.\n\nHow did you come to live in England for two years, and how long ago was that?\n\nI got a visa to visit a friend who had married an English guy. That was about six years ago. And once I was there I got a job in a bar as a waitress. Then someone told me how much money I could make as a call girl. I didn't believe it, but it was true.\n\nSo you just decided \"Okay, I'll be a call girl\"?\n\nI was 25 years old. I was not a virgin. I was not stupid. In Thailand I made 8,000 baht a month working in a shopping mall. As a call girl I could make 8,000 baht a day. What would you do?\n\nBut most people would say there is a difference between working in a mall and working as a call girl.\n\nWell, (smiling) then I'm not most people. For me, sex is sex. You think some woman marry a rich guy and gets a big car, nice house, money for spend on what she want \u2013 you think she not trade sex for money?\n\nThat is an old argument. The thing is you sell yourself for sex \u2013 is that okay with you?\n\n(Shrugs) Yes. Okay then, okay now. You know what I have done with my life? I bought a house for my mother. My sister I pay for Thai university. Now she work in a bank \u2013 it is a good job, maybe she will work there until she is old. I do that for them. For me I start to buy a small condo. You see, I don't have a lot of gold \u2013 just one chain for Buddha and one small ring. I don't have car. But I can take (of) care my family and myself.\n\nSo you worked in England for two years, why did you come back?\n\nI miss Thailand. And I stay over my visa, so I must come home.\n\nAnd when did you start to work at ---- massage?\n\nAs soon as I get back. I know here I can make money okay. Not like England (laughing), but is okay.\n\nAnd what is okay? Do you mind telling me how much you make in one month?\n\nI can earn 45,000 \u2013 50,000 baht one month.\n\nHow many men do you massage in a day?\n\nOne, sometime two.\n\nAnd you have sex with all of them?\n\nI don't fuck all of them, if you say that is sex. Some are just massage and use hand.\n\nWho are your customers?\n\n(Laughing) Men with money.\n\nAre they Thai, Japanese, western?\n\nMost are Thai. Businessmen. Some western guys, some Japanese, some Korean, some Chinese.\n\nIs that why you need the white skin?\n\nI like my skin white. My skin would be white even if I did not do this work. My grandfather is Chinese. But it is good for getting customer, yes.\n\nSo, what does your family think you do, or do they know?\n\nNo. They don't know. I told them I work in restaurant in England. Now I say I am manager [in] Thai massage shop.\n\nAnd who are your friends?\n\nI have friends. They work another job \u2013 in a disco or club.\n\nDo you have a boyfriend?\n\nNo. I not have boyfriend for many years. It's not problem for me.\n\nWhy not?\n\nI have my life. I enjoy. A boyfriend would be a problem for me.\n\nBecause of the job?\n\nYes and no. Actually I like women (laughing). Are you shocked? But man or woman, who would want their girlfriend to do what I do?\n\nSo are you lesbian?\n\nI don't think I am lesbian. I don't mind man, but I like to be with a woman to make love. With a man for so many years it is just fucking. So to feel love, I will sleep with a woman.\n\nBut you don't have a girlfriend?\n\n(Frowning) No, I don't.\n\nWould you like to have one?\n\nI don't think so, not now. I have my life, And who would understand what I feel when I come home? Another massage girl? But I do not want a massage girl for a girlfriend.\n\nSo how long will you do this? Do you think you will ever have a normal life after this?\n\nI don't think about this. I go to work every day. I take care [of] my mother. Maybe I do this two years, three years more. Then I open a business, I don't know.\n\nSo will you ever want a usual life \u2013 to be with one person?\n\n(Laughing) I don't think so. Maybe I am too old to start that now. I will be an aunt for my sister's children. She will get married next year. But when I am finish I can decide.\n\nYou have travelled. You are intelligent. What do you think about the sex business in general?\n\n(Thinking) I know there are bars, go-go bar. The massage is to take care of a man, relax. More than sex.\n\nBut why is the sex business so big here?\n\nIt is big in England, too. I know. I could fuck three, four guys a day there if I want. So it is not [just] Thailand, sex is everywhere. But is big in Thailand because the girl need money. And many man come here because the weather is good, and the girl is cheap.\n\nIs it a bad thing for Thailand?\n\n(Thinking) I don't know. Many thing good and bad for country. Drugs are bad for everyone. People who rob are bad for country. Some people in England don't want Asian and Indian people to be there. They were very mean to us sometimes. So is sex bad? I don't think so.\n\nAnd what do you think about this book that I am working on \u2013 asking women in the business about their lives? Is it a good idea, a bad idea?\n\nYes, it's a good idea. I'm not a 500 baht bar girl, I don't know what they are like. Maybe they are on drugs, or need money. Many prostitutes in England were on drugs. Cocaine, heroin, ecstasy. Where I work it is not like that. We are not drunk girls, do not have disease. Yes, this is a good idea, to talk about this life. I would read this book (laughing). \n8\n\nMaem: \"The drug have me forget what I do, what I am\"\n\nYaba. It's a form of amphetamine popular with some, although, surprisingly, popular with only a few of the women involved in prostitution. It is relatively cheap, gives a quick buzz and allows the user to leave their world for a brief time. Maem is \"25 or 26\", but looks ten years older. She's short and frighteningly skinny. Her nails are bitten to the quick and unpolished. She chain smokes and has a nervous habit of constantly looking over her shoulder (I interviewed her at a friend's apartment). I offered to buy her food, but she declined, drinking a beer over ice. She was the only woman I interviewed who insisted on being paid before she started talking with me.\n\nQ: Hi Maem, thanks for coming to talk with me. Can you tell me about yourself? How old are you, how long have you been working?\n\nMaem: Maem is my name. I am 25 or 26 years old. I have been working this time for two years. Before I had a boyfriend for about one year, but I work before that for three years, I think. Yes, I start when I am about 19.\n\nWhere do you come from?\n\nI come from Nong Kai, in north Thailand, near Laos. My family is good; my father have a shop there that sells things for tourist \u2013 things people in town make, stamps, coins. He learn English when a war was in Vietnam and Laos. I learn to speak English from him and the customers. I also learn in school.\n\nWhy did you come to Bangkok?\n\nWhen I was 17 I want to leave Nong Kai and come Bangkok. I want to have something for my life, and I am boring (bored) in Nong Kai. So I take the train to Bangkok and come to hairdressing school here. Then I get a job right away. But it was hard. I worked six, sometimes seven days a week \u2013 cut and wash hair. I do not make much money.\n\nThen I meet another girl come from Nong Kai who tell me about go to disco to meet foreign men. She said they pay 1,000 baht or more to sleep with me. Before I had a Thai boyfriend and I'm thinking a man crazy to pay that much to sleep with a woman. I hear before there are places in Nong Kai, but there Thai and Lao (Laotian) men pay 100 or 150 baht for a short time in a room with a girl.\n\nSo I start to go to disco with my friend. She introduce me to people she knows, and I speak English okay, it easy for me. To meet the men. To sleeping with them was not too hard. I only go with the men I want to. And never go for lower [than] 1,500 baht a night. If man look rich I ask for 2,500, maybe I get 2,000. I can make more in one night sleeping with man than I can one week to cut hair. I quit job and only go out with men.\n\nSometimes I meet a man and he take me to Phuket or Jomtien for weekend, sometimes more. I put money in bank, and save a lot - I have more than 150,000 baht save. True. Then I meet a man while I was with another man in Phuket. This guy was American man and he ask me if I know where to buy ecstasy \u2013 the drug, you know? I go out with him to buy at disco. I leave the man I stay in Phuket with, and go with this guy for the week. It was terrible mistake. I stay with him for about one year. When that time finish I am taking ecstasy and yaba every night. All the money I save is gone.\n\n(At this point Maem starts to get upset. She takes a long drink of water and takes a quick walk around the apartment to calm down.)\n\nOkay Maem, can you tell me what happened after that?\n\nHe go home to America and I try to go back to disco I go before, but I look ugly and people know I am not the same. I find small room to stay in. I have to start work, so I go to different bars, not nice like the disco, but I go in the afternoon and get a customer, come back in the bar six o'clock, find another man, and go back [at] ten o'clock, try another man. If they don't want to pay 1,000 baht I say, \"Okay, 700\". Now, if I want yaba, I go for 500 baht, but only for smoking (slang for oral sex).\n\nMaem, do you want to get out of this life?\n\nOne and a half years ago I go to jail \u2013 three months. I am with Thai man on a motorcycle in Klong Toei (a slum area known for drug trafficking) and we have accident. He try to run, and some people stop him. Police come. He have a lot of drugs in his jacket. I don't even know him, but they don't believe me. They say they see me with him before and know I am addict. I try to tell police my parents are dead. I don't want them to know. Did they know ever? Yes, but I tell them [it was] only a mistake. I stay in jail for three months, then came out. I try not to do drugs now. I know it not good for me, but I'm bored, so what else can I do? After I finish with a man, yaba have me forget what I do, what I am. Sure I want another life, a different life. But now, I cannot.\n\nWhat do you think will happen in the future? Do you ever think about what you will do in five, ten years time?\n\nIn ten years what will I do? I don't know. I hope I am still not working, but I cannot see something else now for my life. I don't like it, but sometimes I think about what has happen with me. My family is good family. I not go back [to] Nong Kai for two years. I miss my family, yes. I talk with Mama and Papa on the telephone. I tell them I am good, okay. Have a job I cannot leave. I know they are very sad sometimes that they cannot see me. But if they do, I think they will feel sad more. I wish I can go back to Nong Kai and start again. But now this is my life, so what can I do?\n\nSo you want help for your problem with drugs, Maem; to go to a hospital?\n\nNo. I am okay now. But now I have to go to work. I am sorry.\n\nUPDATE: Later I learned from two of the girls, who I had seen Maem with on previous occasions, that she had been arrested for selling ten yaba pills to an undercover policeman. She had been sentenced to one year in prison, and had been there about six months when I got the news. \n9\n\nFah: \"I give sex, he give money\"\n\nFah has curly brown hair that is cut just above her shoulders. She meets me in a new shopping mall in the city of Pattaya. She has a round face, and a beaming smile. She's wearing a low cut t-shirt, tight jeans and spike heels. She has either an expensive watch or a good copy of an expensive watch on her left wrist, and a gold bracelet on her right. She has tanned skin; in fact looks like she's just come in from the sun, something Thai women usually avoid. I notice she has old razor scars running horizontally across her left arm, from inside her elbow down to her wrist. I had been introduced to Fah the evening before at the beer bar where she works. She said she would be happy to talk with me, but had a customer picking her up, so we agreed to meet the following afternoon. Her English was relatively fluent so we did not need a translator for most of the interview.\n\nQ: Hi Fah, thank you for coming to see me.\n\nFah: Yes, nice to meet you again.\n\nWell, I told you yesterday I would like to know about your life, so can you begin by telling me where you are from, how old you are, how long you have been working in the bar?\n\nYes, I am 36 year old (laughing); do I look more than 30? I hope not! I come from Yasothon, it is in northeast Thailand. Where I come from it is poor. I lived in a small village outside the town, maybe 100 people live there. I live in the same small house for many year, until I am 17. I have stayed in Pattaya now for about one and a half year. That is this time. I lived here before for three year also. Now I have been working at the ---- Bar for about one and a half year.\n\nIs Pattaya where you started working in bars?\n\nFirst I work in massage. That was before. I have a job in Thai massage in Khan Kaen (one of the largest cities in the northeast), but I learn I can make more money in Pattaya and get a job doing ab nuat shower massage.\n\nSo you are a masseuse?\n\nYes, I learn massage at school in Khan Kaen, get a job. But the money is only a little. I have two children I take care [of] by myself, so I must make more money and I go to Pattaya for more money.\n\nYou have two children? How old are they and where are they?\n\nMy son is 16 year old, he live with me in Pattaya. I have daughter 18 year old, she stay in Chontaburi (large city in eastern Thailand) with husband. She been married two year already.\n\nOkay, I have to ask \u2013 does she have any children yet?\n\nYes, she have a son about one year old.\n\nSo you are a grandmother?\n\n(Laughing) Yes, oh my God that is true. But I am not old, not yet.\n\nSo what did you do before \u2013 you said you lived in your house until you were 17. You grew up there. And you left when you had your daughter?\n\nI live with parents and older brother, he now about 50 year old. We are very poor. Have a small house. Two room. The toilet is outside. And shower outside. No have a kitchen, only, what you say, barbeque? I cannot go to school. No money for uniform or shoe or book. I feel sad because other children go to school and play, I stay home and help Ma with many small job \u2013 dry the pepper, sew some shirt, clean some pot for restaurant near house.\n\nWait, you never went to school?\n\nHave lady live near to our house, she help me to read, write, even maths. She give me book, she is very nice. One time she give me bicycle. I am so happy then. But I have friends, we play, work. When I am 16 year old I have a boyfriend, and I got married when I am 17 year old. I have my daughter when I am 18 year old. My husband was 20 year old, we got a job for making plastic \u2013 for window \u2013 in factory near Bangkok. We stay in small room, but have good life. Many people from Isaan work in the factory and live with us. Work is hard but everyone enjoy. I have my daughter after about one year. Then I stop work at the factory, open small shop to sell fruit outside factory. I have my son about two years after I have daughter.\n\nThen my husband meet a new lady, and he leave me. I have two children and husband leave. I am 21 year old. I get married and have children because that man want to marry and have children. Then he leave me for woman also about 18 year old. I go back home to Yasothon, stay with Ma and Pa. I open small shop in my house, sell candy, water, coke, snack. I can take care [of] my children there. I stay there in my shop for many year. My children go to school. My parents get old, they die. I have my brother, he is older [than] me [by] about 15 year. He stay in Korat, never see him until parents die. Then he come and want to have house. I cannot believe. I take care Ma, Pa many year, never see him! I tell him no, this is my home, my shop. He can stay but I work very hard for shop and house. Then (Fah is getting more animated and stops for a moment to catch her breath) sorry, okay, one day I take children to school and come home and everything burn.\n\nBurn? You had a fire? How?\n\nYes. I come home on motorcycle from the school. I see the smoke, I don't know what, and I arrive I see all the people stand around and looking, some people they try to help me with put water on fire, but lose everything in shop and house. Have no, what do you call, if have accident? Insurance, yes, insurance. Lose everything. That is when I do this (Fah shows us the scars on her arm).\n\nYou tried to kill yourself...\n\nYes, I think nothing will ever be good in my life. I work hard, I take care children, I take care Ma, Pa. For what? Someone, I know who but I cannot say, burn my shop, my house...\n\nYour brother...?\n\nI cannot say. I never see him again. Even now, never see him. If he die, I don't care.\n\nSo, how many years ago did this happen? And when did you cut your arms, when the fire happened or after?\n\nOkay, this happen in about eight year ago, year 2000 maybe. My children are ten year and eight year old. I take my children to house of my friend, about five kilometre away, in another village. She is married to man from Finland. She say we can stay. But in night time I drink Thai whiskey and when go in my room there I think I cannot take care [of] my children, maybe they will find some other mother better than me. I cannot remember when I do this (she makes a cutting motion across her left arm) but my friend, she find me and take me to hospital.\n\nI stay in hospital for two day; talk to doctor, see my children. They have nowhere to go, no one to take care [of them]. My friend say she can take care for only short time. But my friend she talk to husband and ask [for] money to help me. Her husband nice man and give enough for me to go to Khan Kaen and I can learn massage. So I go with children to Khan Kaen. I am very happy there. I study massage about two month and then work in massage shop. Thai massage, you know? No sex (laughing).\n\nBut the money is not enough. I speak with lady work massage and they tell me if [I] go to Pattaya [I] can make a lot of money, maybe 30,000 or 40,000 baht every month. I say \"True?\" I think they lie to me. In Khan Kaen I make about 8,000 baht. They tell me [it] is true, I can go [to] Pattaya and massage for farang or Chinese man and the salary and tip is very good (laughing). But must do sex with customer. I ask what they think about that. They think is not so bad. Have one lady she call another friend in Pattaya, I send photo and the shop in Pattaya tell me \"come on\". So I go [to] Pattaya and work ab nuat. My children stay with me in room near shop. They like Pattaya: see the beach and everything tunten (exciting) for them. I work massage there almost three year. My life good. My children go to school, my salary and tip good! One day I am drive motorcycle near the beach and BOOM, one truck hit me. I fall down, hurt very bad. What you say, sleep? Knockout, yes knockout. One day. You see here? (At this point Fah shows me her front teeth, which I hadn't noticed before, which are chipped) And here (Fah pulls her hair back to show a scar where it looks as though someone has tried to cut her lower ear off) and here (turns over her right elbow to reveal a deep scar covering her entire elbow), and my leg here to here (points to just below her hip and to the side of her shin) have a lot of blood. I stay in hospital about one week. Have some customer from massage take care [of] me, pay bill. I cry, how can they do that for me? More than 30,000 baht they pay for me. When I leave hospital I cannot work massage again. I cannot move leg the same, so cannot massage. (In Thai Fah explains that because her leg muscles were damaged in the accident, she cannot stay in one position long enough to massage any more). I worry, have children to take care [of], what can I do? Another customer he tell me can talk to owner at ---- Bar and can get me job. I go to Chontaburi to rest, stay with my daughter and her husband. Yes, she meet nice man, family has business there about selling fruit. So now I have been come back to Pattaya working one and a half year.\n\nIn the bar?\n\nYes. My son he want to stay [in] Pattaya. He have a good school here. I work the bar.\n\nAnd how do you feel about the job?\n\n(Gives a questioning look) How do I feel? It is my job. Sometime is good, sometime is not so good.\n\nWhat is your average day like?\n\nI come to work [at] 11:30. Get dressed for bar, sit and wait for customer. Customer come in maybe 12 o'clock. Talk with customer. Ask to buy drink for me. Yes, if buy drink I get 50 baht. And if I like customer I can ask to pay bar and take me to room upstair for sex. How much? For short time upstair, pay bar 300 baht and pay me, up to customer, but more than 500 baht. If want to take me away bar for long time, pay bar 500 baht, pay me more than 1,000 baht.\n\nOkay, you are a mother and a grandmother \u2013 how do you feel about selling sex?\n\n(Another quizzical look) No. It is my job. I take care [of] the customer.\n\nDo you think there is anything wrong with selling sex? What do you think about your customers?\n\nMy job is my job. Why something wrong with that? I know many people think bad about lady work bar, but look how many lady work bar in Pattaya. Man want to have sex, I give sex, he give money, I take care [of my] son. Some person get dat pom (haircut). Pay for cut hair, they take care [of] family with money. Same [for] me.\n\nBut many people would say sex is different than a haircut...\n\nFor the customer yes; for me, no.\n\nDoes that mean you don't like having sex?\n\n(Fah shrugs her shoulders, then thinks a moment) Sometimes I like [it]. (Shrugs her shoulders again) Sometimes I like the customer, I like sex. Many time not enough time to like. Just make customer finish and get money and find new customer. But if customer nice, funny, give a good tip, then yes, like everything.\n\nBut you don't know about the tip until the end, right?\n\nSometime [I] ask how much they pay. Sometime customer tell how much they pay.\n\nSo what do you think about the customers? What do you think about them paying for sex? Have you ever had a boyfriend who was a customer?\n\nThe customer are a customer. Not a boyfriend. I have customer get angry [with] me for go with another man. What can I do? You pay for me every month 40,000 baht, I will stop working bar.\n\nYou make 40,000 baht a month?\n\nSure. Yesterday I have two customer. (Fah looks in her purse and pulls out a small notebook, flips a few pages and studies it) Four lady drink, 200 baht for me. Short time bar fine, 150 baht for bar and customer give me 600 baht. [long time] 250 baht for bar, customer pay [me] 1,200 baht. 2,400 baht for one day. (She pushes the notebook with figures in it across the table.)\n\nThat's pretty good math for someone who never went to school.\n\nThank you (big smile). And customer give me 100 baht for telephone card and 100 baht for petrol for motorcycle and buy food and drink.\n\nBut no boyfriend?\n\nNo, I will take care [of] myself and my son, then my son and daughter can take care [of] me. I don't need boyfriend. Maybe I will be lonely a little, but I think it is better stay with my son only now. Maybe when I stop work in the bar, okay, I will look for a boyfriend or husband.\n\nWhen will you stop working in the bar. Soon?\n\nI don't know. When no customer want me anymore (laughing). I think I can work at the bar about three more year, then my children take care [of] me. Maybe I have my own bar \u2013 \"Fah Bar\" (laughing).\n\nDo your kids understand what you do? Do you think it bothers them?\n\nThey know I work in bar. I don't tell them I go for sex, they don't ask me.\n\nWhat if they did ask you? What if your daughter lost her job, would it be okay with you if she worked in a bar?\n\nYes, she can work in bar if she want. It not make her bad person. You have good lady who work in bar, you have bad lady work somewhere like restaurant or hotel. Why work in bar make you bad person? We have good heart. If she have to work bar, it her life, what she must do. I not think bad about her.\n\nWhat do you think of a book that tells the stories of women who work in bars and massage here in Thailand?\n\nSure, good idea. Many people think we are bad. We are not bad. You think I am bad? If I can be a movie star or singer I will be a movie star or singer. If I can be a rich person, I will be a rich person. But I am a poor girl from Isaan. Sometime my life good, sometime hard. But my life will be okay, I am strong (smiling and nodding).\n\nUPDATE: Fah called me to say she was no longer working at the bar. She says she has invested in a noodle stand and is now selling noodles on the street outside a market in Pattaya.\n\nI ask her if she is done at the bar and she says:\n\nNow I am done at bar. I will sell noodle with my friend and have a different life.\n\nSo you are done with the sex business?\n\n(There is a pause on the phone) I am not working there now. I want to try this with my friend. I hope I will not work at bar again. But we cannot make so much money doing this, so sometime a customer call me and want me to go with him after I finish noodles, I go. Why? Money. Money, money, money.\n10\n\nJen: \"Like a movies\"\n\nJen is a nude dancer in a go-go bar in one of the big entertainment plazas. She is tall and thin with dark skin and long black hair. Her eyes are small and wary. She is wearing a cut-off t-shirt which displays a large dragon tattoo on her lower back, and a pair of shorts that reveal two large scars on her left knee \u2013 they look like the marks of an injury that you would expect to see on the knee of a veteran football player. Jen's are the result of a motorcycle accident. She has a habit of narrowing her eyes when thinking about her answers, as if she is trying to sense if the person she is talking to believes her. Almost every answer was followed with kow-chai-mai? \u2013 do you understand?\n\nQ: Jen, please tell me about yourself \u2013 how old are you, how long have you been working as a dancer?\n\nJen: I am 19 year old. I have been dancer in Bangkok about two year. First time in bar Patpong (the infamous entertainment area, now filled mostly with booths that sell counterfeit goods), now I work here maybe six month. Here is better. Patpong make more money, but too many problem with bar, with customer. Problem like bar charge too much for lady drink. And customer there get drunk too much. Here is better.\n\nYou just said that you are only 19, but you have been working for two years. Don't you have to be 20 to work in a bar?\n\nMy sister older is more than 22. I have her ID card, so no problem.\n\nWhere do you come from?\n\nI come from a place in Isaan, name Si Saket. It is poor. My family does not have money, but they very good people. I have my papa and mama and two sisters and two brothers. I miss them. Too much sometimes. I go to visit family maybe three, four time last year, I think. But I do not want them come to see me. I tell them I working in market (laughing). I think my mama know about what I do, but she not say anything to me.\n\nWhat do you think about your work? Do you like dancing?\n\nI like this job. I like dancing. Not the same like I first start dance. I am very shy before. I have to think I am not dancing without my clothes, and so the men look at me dancing I feel shy. Now, it is really no problem for me. I like the music. I like to meet nice farang, have them buy me drink and take me out.\n\nHow about the other girls here \u2013 are you friends with them?\n\nI like the other girl here. Almost all girl is very nice. Sometimes a girl maybe drink too much, then the boss tell her \"Okay, one time, okay, but cannot drink too much again at work.\" I think one time or two time girl take drugs, but the boss tell them cannot work here, so they go.\n\nWhat do you do for fun?\n\nI don't know. Sometime go to disco, or only go home, watch TV. Go shopping. Clothes, jewellery. Go to movie. Good Thai movie, or maybe farang movie like some romantic story. Titanic, you know? All Thai girl love Titanic. Love story, romantic movie, very good.\n\nHow long did you go to school?\n\nWhen I live in Si Saket I go to school, I stop when I am 14 year old. Now I cannot go to school. Yes, I would like to go school and learn English. Everyone say if learn speaking English can get a good job, and I not have to be dancing. But to go school cost money, and I need money to live, so I have to work.\n\nYour bar has sex shows \u2013 do you ever work in those?\n\nYes, our bar has shower show \u2013 lesbian show. I try one night when one girl not come to work. I got paid 100 baht, but I don't like it. So I not do it again.\n\nHow much money do you earn at the bar?\n\nI get salary 8,000 baht (per month), but if girl is late, or not come to work, not sell drinks, the bar take some salary. Man pay the bar fine, pay me, I make good money, okay? Maybe in one month I can make 20,000 baht. Sometimes more.\n\nHow many men do you go with in one month?\n\nDifferent, sometimes maybe two in one week, sometimes more. Sometimes stay with man for more than one night. Last year one man take me to Phuket [for] Christmas. Very good man. I tell him I want 10,000 baht for one week. He say \"no problem\". We go to island, ride boat. He live Switzerland. He write me before. He tell me he come back for me and next time we go someplace nice, and maybe he take me back Switzerland one month. I hope he not lie. But if he not come, he not come.\n\nDo you worry about AIDS or other diseases?\n\nYes, I am afraid [of] AIDS. I think every girl scare about it. No, not talk too much about it. I tell every man use condom. Switzerland man? No, after two times, not use. Because I trust him. And Switzerland good country. Not same Germany and England, America.\n\nI hope that foreign men who read this book learn more about what Thai women working in bars think about their lives. What would you want to say to foreign men?\n\nBe nice to the girl. We like to have good time. But do not tell me \"I love you\" if you not love me. We know you lie. \"I like you\" okay. Not love.\n\nWhat do you think you want for your life in ten years time?\n\nIn ten year what do I want? Not sure. A good life, go away from here \u2013 the bar. Some girl go to other country, but they come back. I think it is not so easy to live away from Thailand. Some girl go to America, Canada, Europe. I only want nice life in Thailand. Maybe meet nice man who want to stay here. Live near beach someplace. And, yes, not work in bar. I think it nice to love one man forever. Like a movies. \n11\n\nNewie: \"Some day it will be better\"\n\nNewie works in a massage parlour that caters to Korean, Japanese and Western customers. She is short and stocky, with very light skin. She wears no make-up. Her eyes are large and round, her nose is thin. She smiles a lot during the interview and her smile is one that lights up the room.\n\nQ: Hello Newie, thank you for talking with me. Can you tell me about yourself \u2013 how old you are, where you come from?\n\nNewie: I am 23 years old. I come from NongKai, near Laos.\n\nHow long have you been working here?\n\nHere, I have been working for less than one year. Before I work massage about one year.\n\nAnd here you give Thai massages, but is there also sex?\n\nYes. If customer want to have special massage we can give.\n\nDoes it bother you or make you feel bad, to have sex with customers?\n\nSometime, yes. Depend on customer. If they are good customer, it is okay. When I start to do this business, I always feel bad, but now, maybe bad not much.\n\nWhat do you think about the customers?\n\nI don't think about them. This is my job. They come here for massage and service. My job is for their service.\n\nHow did you get started in massage \u2013 did you have a job before, or did you go to school?\n\nNo, I stop to go to school when I am 11 year old. My family have no money, so I must stop. I help my family with selling things at market, then when I am 15 I go to work as coolie.\n\nWhat do you mean by coolie?\n\nI work construction. Make a house. You see \u2013 I am strong (laughing, she grabs my arm and squeezes \u2013 she is surprisingly strong). I can do construction no problem. But then they have no more work, so I come to Bangkok to look for job. Have a job, but not pay money enough. So I go to work massage.\n\nHow much money did you make working in construction, and how much do you make here?\n\nConstruction in Bangkok I make about 4,500 baht every month. And work very hard. Everyday. Go to work maybe seven in the morning, finish [at] six or seven. Can do nothing but come back to the place where we stay, eat and go to sleep.\n\nSo this is better?\n\n(Laughing) YES! More money! And not so tired everyday.\n\nHow much more money do you earn?\n\nI earn here about 10,000 baht per month.\n\nAnd where do you live?\n\nI live here. Upstair. Have some room for the girl who work here (there are rooms upstairs for the girls who work here).\n\nYou have your own room?\n\nNo. I never have own room in my life. I stay with three other girl.\n\nIn one room?\n\nSure. We can stay together. We don't have problem.\n\nAnd what about the other massage parlour? Why did you leave there?\n\nMy friend tell me this is better. Other massage okay, but money is not so good. Sometime make only 4,000 or 5,000 baht one month.\n\nWhat about your family? Do they know what you do?\n\nMy family think I do Thai (legitimate) massage. They don't know I do this. I send them money every month to take care [of them].\n\nDo you have any children?\n\nNo, not yet. I am never married. So I don't have any children,\n\nWhat about the future? How long do you think you will work here? Do you want to get married and have a family?\n\nOf course I want to get married. I would like to meet a nice man and have a family so someone can take care [of] me. I always take care [of] everyone since I was little. I hope someday someone can take care [of] me, too. Maybe I will work here one or two years, then I hope I have enough money to go home. Have a business in my hometown. Now I can speak English, so it's good for a business in Nong Khai. We have a lot of foreigner come there. So I think if I have a business like tour or guest house I can have a good life.\n\nWould you like to marry a Thai or a foreigner?\n\nAs long as good man and can take [care of] me, I don't care; can be Thai, Chinese, Japanese, English. But have to take care [of] me and be good man. And take care my family, too.\n\nIs there anything you want to say to people who read this book about your life?\n\nWhat about my life? I don't think anyone want to know about my life. I am just one person, cannot read, cannot write, can only do massage and coolie.\n\nWell, what do you think of your life? Are you happy? Should people feel sorry for you?\n\nI don't want anyone have to feel sorry for me. I'm strong. Strong hands, strong heart (laughing). My life is okay. Someday it will be better life I think. I believe that. \n12\n\nLin and Dah: \"Someday [we] will leave this life and have a good life\"\n\nLin and Dah are sisters. They work out of two \"beer-bars\" on one of Bangkok's main tourist strips. They arrive for work anywhere from 10:00pm to 1:00am, and stay until one or both find customers \u2013 some nights that can be five in the morning. Dah is 22, a bit overweight, with a round, plump face and wide oval-shaped eyes. She wears a lot of make-up, which makes her appear older. Lin is 19, thin, but with the same round face and eyes. She has her hair cut just below her ears, and wears little make-up. Dah speaks excellent English and Lin speaks it fairly well, although she is shy and lets Dah do most of the talking, unless she is asked a question directly. They are both cheerful, and look at each other and laugh throughout the interview. I spoke with them at a restaurant before they set off to their regular spots at the bar.\n\nQ: Hi Dah, hi Lin, can you tell me where you come from?\n\nDah: We are from Bangkok, we live near the old airport, with our parents and brother and Lin's baby.\n\nWere you born in Bangkok?\n\nDah: Lin was born in Saraburi. I was born in Bangkok. We have lived in our house since Lin was a baby. (Lin pokes her younger sister in the ribs and laughs)\n\nIs your brother older or younger, and what does he do?\n\nDah: He is 16. He goes to school \u2013 a good boy.\n\nDo your parents or brother know where you go every night?\n\nDah: They do not ask now. Before I tell my mother we work in restaurant. I think maybe they know, but not want to talk. No, never ask where money come from. We only leave in box for my mother.\n\nLin, can you tell us about your baby \u2013 do you have a boy or a girl and how old are they?\n\nLin: I have baby girl, daughter. She is now four years old. She is very smart, she will go to school next year I think. Yes, the father is Thai man, my boyfriend before, but now I never see him. He leave me about maybe two years ago. I think he have a wife, but not sure. So I must take care of my baby.\n\nHow many nights do you both work? And Lin, who takes care of your daughter when you come to work?\n\nLin: My mother take care. It is no problem for her.\n\nDah: Sometimes we come to work every night, but if we have enough money, we not come to work. How much is enough money? Not sure (looks at her sister, they both smile and shrug), enough to give to my parents and brother. To help with food, rent, and their shop.\n\nHow much do you make in one month?\n\nDah: Not sure \u2013 sometimes not the same all the time. Lin have more customer than me (they both laugh).\n\nOkay, Lin how much do you make in one month?\n\nLin: I can say if many farang come to bar, about 25,000 baht in one month.\n\nIs that together or just you?\n\nLin: Only me. Dah make how much? (laughing)\n\nDah: Maybe not that much. Farang like Lin, she skinny, I am fat (laughing).\n\nLin: Not true, only a little fat. But have nom yai (big breasts) \u2013 farang like too much! (she gives one of Dah's breasts a squeeze \u2013 they both start laughing)\n\nDo you always have this much fun together?\n\n(Dah and Lin look at each other and make faces)\n\nDah: Yes, we are like this together all the time.\n\nLin: Sometimes serious.\n\nSerious about what?\n\nLin: Want to change our life sometime. In this life there are good and bad people. I think we are good people.\n\nWho are good people \u2013 you and Dah, or all the girls?\n\nLin: I know for Dah and me, good people. Do not smoke, or drink too much, or steal. And we want to stop work like this someday.\n\nDah: Yes, I want to finish my school and get a good job.\n\nDah, you go to school now?\n\nDah: Yes, I go to school to learn about secretary. I go more than one year already.\n\nLin, do you go to school?\n\nNo, I stop school after I am pregnant \u2013 I am 16 years old then.\n\nDid you learn to speak English in school? Both of you speak very good English.\n\nDah: I learn some in school, but learn most from talking to foreign man.\n\nLin: Same.\n\nHow did you start working, and why did you start?\n\nDah: We have a friend tell us we can make money if we meet farang in a bar. She is working for about one year, have some nice things.\n\nLin: Yes, we have no money from working with mother and father, and so we want money to have life like some friends.\n\nWhat kind of life is that?\n\nDah: I want to have fun, and pay to finish my school. Get a job like secretary or reception.\n\nLin: I like to go to beach, mountains with friends. And go to shopping.\n\nAnd you cannot have that life some other way?\n\nDah: (Thinking) Maybe in the future, not now.\n\nLin: No. When work like this we can give money to parents and have money for us, not have to ask parents for money.\n\nWhat did you think when your friend told you about what you have to do to make the money?\n\nDah: Good idea for money, bad idea for work.\n\nLin: I need money for my baby, and we want to help family.\n\nWhy do you think it's a bad idea for work?\n\nDah: Not good for lady to work like this. Sometimes not a good job, but for money, okay.\n\nLin: Don't like to go with man who can give a problem to lady \u2013 get angry or not pay.\n\nDah: Before many times scared of farang. Now we do not go if not a nice man.\n\nIs there anything you like about doing this besides the money?\n\nDah: Sure, many times meet nice man, go to movie, go to eat, go to disco for dancing. Meet many different farang, speak English with them. Many are good man, tell a joke, have a good time.\n\nLin: Maybe can meet a good man for husband (both start giggling). I hope I can do that.\n\nWhat do you think about the customers \u2013 do you remember them, do you like them?\n\nDah: Yes, I remember them. Many are good, but I don't like any that talk bad to the women, or drink too much.\n\nLin: Yes, I remember them too. And I think the same \u2013 if drink too much or say and do bad things, then no good. I think many are good person.\n\nWhat about having sex \u2013 do you ever like it, or is it only for money?\n\nLin: I do not. I like to be with a man if he is nice, but not for make love.\n\nDah: Me, okay, I can enjoy to make love with nice man. If he is nice, and I know he will pay a lot of money! (Both start laughing again)\n\nDo either of you have or want a boyfriend \u2013 either Thai or foreign?\n\nDah: No. But I am thinking about it. I think I would like one \u2013 farang or Japanese. Thai man no good. Drink, never come home.\n\nLin: No boyfriend. I don't want boyfriend. I want husband. Yes, I think the same about Thai man.\n\nOkay, you said you had no money working for your mother and father. What work did you do for them?\n\nDah: Work for the shop they have near our home \u2013 sell flowers.\n\nSo is it better to work here? Was it bad working for them?\n\nDah: Boring. Nothing to do. Wait in shop and watch TV. Clean shop.\n\nIsn't working like this boring \u2013 to do the same thing every night?\n\nDah: Yes, some times if there are no farang to talk to, it is boring. But if we talk to men, it is not.\n\nLin: Sometimes boring, but if I do not like, I can go home, not have to work. Up to me.\n\nHow much does a man pay to go with you?\n\nDah: Can be not the same all the time. I say I want them to pay 1,500 baht for short time. I cannot go all night because our mother worry if we not come home.\n\nLin: Same. Sometimes if no customer I will say okay for 1,000 baht for short time, but cannot go with man if he does not pay so much. More? Yes!!! (laughing)\n\nWhat is the most money a man has given you?\n\nLin: 4,000 baht. Good man (laughing). And one man take me to Phuket, for one week give me 10,000 baht.\n\nDah: And we have two men take us to Pattaya for three days, give about 7,000 baht for each. Pay for hotel, food, movie, disco.\n\nSo you want to stop working sometime \u2013 do you think about how long you will work like this?\n\nDah: Maybe one year, maybe two years.\n\nLin: The same.\n\nDah: If you work like this you meet good and bad people. I am afraid it is hard to stop this life if work too long. I hope when I finish this work I can stop thinking about what I do here.\n\nDo you have a dream or a plan for your future?\n\nDah: Finish school and get a good job.\n\nLin: Take care [of] my family and [my] baby. Maybe have a shop one day \u2013 but not flowers (laughing). I think a restaurant would be good.\n\nDah: I would like to have money in my bank and be with family.\n\nWhat do you think about the idea for this book \u2013 to let the girls talk about their working lives \u2013 and what do you think the book should say?\n\nDah: I think maybe it is a good idea. But many girls do not want to talk about this life. The job is not a good one. Can Thai people read this book? Thai people do not look at this life in a good way. Maybe you can write about problem for girl in Thailand \u2013 no work, no good opportunity for the future.\n\nLin: The book can say I am looking for good husband (laughing).\n\nSure, no problem. Is there anything else you want to say to the people who will read this \u2013 maybe it will be customers.\n\nDah: Be a good and kind man when you are with me. Then I can like you and enjoy.\n\nLin: Do not think that because we do this we are not good persons. We can have a kind heart and good heart if you are the same.\n\nDah: A life with family is not the same as this \u2013 it is different life. If you work like this you have to know this is a different life, and someday you will leave this life and have a good life.\n\nUPDATE: I ran into Dah about a year after this interview. Dah had finished school, but had not yet looked for a job \u2013 she claimed Lin did not want to work alone. I asked her when she thought she would stop working and for the first time since I began talking to her a year before, her face fell. \"I don't know,\" she said, \"I have to go now, Lin is wait me at the bar.\" \n13\n\nNat: \"Better than the factory\"\n\nNat is 27 years old and works at a beer bar in a tourist area. She is short and very nondescript. Her black hair comes to her shoulders, she's slightly built and wears no make-up. She's wearing a loose fitting t-shirt, cargo pants and flip-flops. Nat has a wary look upon her face, as if she doesn't believe that someone is paying her to simply sit and talk. My translator notices the same look and tries to reassure her...\n\nQ: Nat, can you sit and talk for awhile? I just want to ask you a few questions about your work and your life? Is that okay?\n\nNat: Yes, I think so.\n\nGood, can you tell me about yourself? How old are you, where do you come from?\n\nI am 27 year old. I come from Bang Phlii, not so far from Bangkok.\n\nWhen did you come to Bangkok, and why?\n\nI come to Bangkok about two year ago.\n\nWhy did you leave Bang Phlii?\n\nNothing to do there, work in factory for small money, get old, have Thai man not work, lazy, drink, gamble. Here is better \u2013 work in beer bar. Play pool, drink, talk with customer, not serious.\n\nSo in Bang Phlii you had a job and boyfriend or husband?\n\nYes, I work in factory there. Have Thai boyfriend. Same I say, same friend \u2013 he no have job; drink, play card, snooker all night. Take my money. So I leave him, come here to work bar.\n\nHow did you know about working in a bar?\n\nI have friend in Bang Phlii, she work bar over there (pointing). She not complain, talk about some good man, some bad man, but money is good.\n\nSo how does the money compare to money earned working in a factory? Was she telling the truth?\n\nYes, she not lie. Factory salary about 6,000 baht in one month. In bar I can make same salary but get tip and if go with man 1,500 baht (per month) or more.\n\nAnd how long have you been in the bar, two years?\n\nYes, since I come from my home.\n\nAnd what is the most money you have made in a month? Do you save money?\n\nSometime I make 25,000 baht one month. Sometime I make 15,000 baht, sometime 10,000 baht. For one year I not save money, only give to my family. Now I give money to my aunt to keep for me. Already she have about 20,000 baht.\n\nSo what do you think about working in a bar?\n\nIt is my job. Better than factory. Factory is so boring. Same every day, every time. Bar is better. Can talk with my friends, customer; sometime customer take me to some new place. It's okay for me.\n\nDid you ever have a customer who wanted to take you away from the bar so that you wouldn't have to work here any more?\n\nI have one man, he from England. He pay bar for me for one month and take me Phuket, Krabi for holiday. Nice man. Then he go back England, pay bar one more month. I don't go to bar, don't go with man. But after one month I tell him he must give me 15,000 baht one month so I can find job, not work in bar. He give me money one month, then tell me cannot again. So I go work in bar again.\n\nWhen was this? Did you ever see him again?\n\nAbout six month ago. I never see him again. I ask him on telephone why he cannot pay for me. He tell me he cannot, not enough salary. So I tell him I go back to bar. He not talk to me.\n\nDid it make you sad?\n\nNo.\n\nNo? Anything else about him?\n\nNo. He is in England. I don't know him any more.\n\nWhat if he came back and wanted to see you?\n\nIf he have money, sure.\n\nAbout how many men do you go with every month?\n\nI don't [know for] sure. Sometime in one week, maybe two times, three times.\n\nHow do you feel about going with these men, about having sex with them?\n\n(Thinks for a minute) Some are very nice man. Funny. Like to enjoy something like drink, go to somewhere. To have sex I don't mind. It is what they want. They pay me to take care, so I want to make them happy about that. Because good for them and good for me.\n\nDo you mean that the sex is good for you?\n\nThe feeling of the sex? (Shrugs) Yes, sometime is good. If they want to make me feel good they can. But many man only want to have good feeling for them. I don't mind, that is my job. But I like to feel good, too.\n\nDo you always have safe sex \u2013 use a condom?\n\nMostly times.\n\nDo you worry about AIDS?\n\nSometime, but I go to clinic every month. I only have sex with no condom if I know customer.\n\nDo you think about your future, or how much longer you will do this for?\n\nIn the future \u2013 don't know, how I can think about future now? I think about today, tonight. How I can pay my room this week.\n\nDo you have anything you want to say to anyone who might read this book? Also, what do you think of a book about the girls who work in the bars?\n\nI never think someone want to make a book about us. Why? We are interesting? Who will read it?\n\nWe don't know, but you can say anything about your life that you want to.\n\nMy life is my life. Sometime good, sometime hard. Sometime lonely. But I think someday I will be happy. \n14\n\nNung: \"I am the mamasan\"\n\nNung is 34 years old, but doesn't look it. She is slim, does not wear make-up, and is dressed in blue Levi's, Nike running shoes and a clean and pressed Harley Davidson t-shirt. She smiles most of the time, and has an infectious laugh. She has worked her way up the ladder in the sex trade industry \u2013 from bar girl to mamasan in a beer bar in one of Bangkok's western-oriented go-go bar plazas. Her English is excellent \u2013 the entire interview was conducted through English.\n\nQ: Hello Nung \u2013 can you tell me about yourself?\n\nNung: I work at the Bar. I am the mamasan. I take care of the girls. Make sure they come to work, and are okay. If they have a problem they can come to me and I try to help them. Most of the girls have a problem with boyfriend. Sometimes have Thai boyfriend; tell them they not make enough money. Or have farang boyfriend want them to not work. I cannot help them with those problems. Only tell them to tell boyfriend to go away (shakes head). If this is your job, then better to not have boyfriend. My bar is nice bar. Men come to sit and drink, talk with girls. If they want to take girl and girl say \"Okay\" then good. Bar fine is 500 baht. Girl get 200, bar get 300. If girl get ten men to take her one month, she get 1,000 baht bonus. Man pay girl whatever she want. Not business of the bar. Short-time, long-time, no problem. Up to girl and customer. Some girls, yes, go short time, come back and work again. No problem. Up to girl.\n\nHow old are you and where are you from?\n\nMe? I am 34 years old. I am from (named province), you know? I live in Bangkok now for 12 year. I have three children, live in (named village) Do they know my job? No (laughing). I tell them I work restaurant. My older sister take care of them. Oldest boy he now 16. Big boy (laughing). He come to see me last week. Grow up very fast. He is good boy. Want to join the army. Good for him. I worry sometimes, because now he can get into trouble \u2013 girls, drugs, drinking. But he is good boy. I have another boy 12 and a girl 10 year old. Girl have farang papa. She will be beautiful. I don't want her to work in bar. I hope she can finish school and get a good job somewhere. She wants to be policeman! Sure, I will like that, no problem with me. Her papa? I never hear from him now. For maybe five year he send some money for her, but now nothing.\n\nDo you have a husband?\n\nNo, my husband leave me many years before. He was not good man \u2013 like to fight, see other women. Leave my son with my mother. So we have divorce. Better that way. My son live with my mother and I live in Bangkok and send money for him.\n\nWhere do you live?\n\nNow I live in a room near the bar. I live with two friends. We pay 4,000 baht a month for the room. No air con, but we have a fan, and a little space outside. I like it okay. Better than to live at the bar, or with five or six girls, like when I first come to Bangkok.\n\nWhen was that? How did you start working in bars?\n\nBefore, first time Bangkok, I work massage. I was 17 years old. I have my son already [and] my husband tell me to get a job. I know a lot of girl come to Bangkok to work, so I come on the bus, first go to Patpong. I meet a man ask me if I can work massage. I say okay, no problem for me. But I not know about special massage (laughing). First time customer take my hand, put here (points to crotch), I say \"Oh, cannot!\" (Laughing harder). But he tell me he give me 500 baht, I say, okay. So I work massage maybe one year, then I work waitress in go-go bar, about one year. Manager ask me if I can be dancing, I say \"Okay, sure\". So I am dancing maybe two years. I make a lot of money. How much? It was a long time ago, and everything different then. But I have a nice apartment and send money to my home. Then farang ask me I want to help him in other bar, I say okay, and I am manager of bar on Soi Cowboy. But he can't pay for everything after about two and a half years, I think. So I work hostess and waitress again, and work mamasan now for about three or four years.\n\nWhat is your salary now?\n\nI have about 11,000 baht a month salary. Customer can buy me drink, I keep half money for lady drink. Can give me tip if I get a girl for them. But I never go with man now. (Starts to laugh) Oh, I lie. I have one man he take me maybe one time in two weeks. He good man, but have wife. He tell me, \"Oh you are beautiful, if I not have wife I marry you\". Lie. But no problem. He is good man. I have another man from Australia. He come two time every year. Stay two or three week. Pay bar for me every night. We go out. He give me money last time for my children, 10,000 baht. Very good heart. I no need to go with man. I have money.\n\nAre you happy?\n\nYes, I am happy. I like to take care of the girls. I go to see my children maybe four or five times one year, they are happy. I can do what I want. I not have to work. If I want to not work for one month, two month, okay, no problem. Last year I go home for three month.\n\nWhat if a man wants to take a girl out of the bar, to stop her working; can he do that?\n\nYes, no problem. Girl want to stop, up to her.\n\nDoes that happen a lot?\n\nSure, but the girl come back in one week, two weeks.\n\nDo relationships between customers and bar girls ever work out?\n\nSure (laughing), every night!\n\nBut for a long time?\n\nIt is not easy for the girl. We have our life \u2013 maybe many people think it is a bad life, but it is what we know. If a girl work a long time here, she never trust any man. And many girl here \u2013 a man is crazy to trust them. Men do not understand \u2013 we take care our family. I know many men (laughing), from outside Thailand. They come here, see a beautiful girl, they think she will make him happy. And for a holiday sure, very happy. But he bring her to Germany or England or Australia \u2013 she have no friends, no job. What can she do? One time I stay in Sweden for three months \u2013 the man does not want me to go to the town without him. I stay home and watch TV I cannot understand? I eat food I do not like to eat? No, Thailand is better for me. Maybe if the man will live in Thailand, speak Thai, understand Thai people. [That is] okay.\n\nWhy have a lot of girls said no when I asked them to talk to me?\n\nSure. Maybe they don't trust you. Maybe they not understand why you do this \u2013 talk to them about their life. Maybe they are, what is the word, guilty, that they work like this.\n\n(While we have been talking almost every other person who passes by \u2013 women, Thai and western men, even policemen \u2013 say hello to Nung)\n\nYou have a lot of friends here...\n\nI have many friends \u2013 girls, men; farang men, Japanese men, Thai men. Japanese men are nice; rich, polite \u2013 unless they are drunk, then they are stupid.\n\nSo is there a difference between Western, Japanese and Thai men?\n\nFarang men go-hok (lie) but Thai men drink too much, take money, beat up wife. But girls, we are all friends. Have to take care [of] each other. If we do not, who will?\n\nWhat do you think of a book being written about the girls' lives?\n\nYes, I think a book about us girls is good idea. Men come here, they want to buy a girl for a night or a week. Sometimes think we are not people. If a man respect me, I can talk with him, maybe be friends. Man talk to girls bad, no; go some other bar, go home. I respect myself now. Before, when I was young, no. But now I know about life. Why should I not respect myself? I know what I do. I do not hurt anyone. I take care of my girls, my children, my family.\n\nWhat do you want for your future?\n\nI want to save money to go back home, buy a house for me, get old and let my children take care of me (laughing).\n\nUPDATE: Just under a year after this interview I ran into Nung at another bar and stopped to see how her life was going.\n\nHi Nung, remember me?\n\nSure, yes. Nice to see you. You see I am at a new bar now.\n\nYes, it's nicer \u2013 and are you still the mamasan?\n\nYes, I am manager. This bar is new, have good owner, have a lot of money. More salary (laughing).\n\nBut more girls and customers, too. Does that mean more problems?\n\nYes, before have about 10 girls, at this bar have about 20. And this bar have more customers. I am very busy in my job now (laughing).\n\nBesides the new job, has anything else happened since I last spoke with you \u2013 are your kids okay?\n\nYes, my son want to be in army, I tell you that, yes? And my daughter is good, too.\n\nSo, no complaints? Any new men in your life?\n\n(Laughing) I not going to tell you \u2013 you put in the book and somebody read about me, maybe I have a problem. But I am happy (laughing) I got someone make me happy. And so I don't want to complain. I am very okay.\n15\n\nJoy: \"We work for money, not for love\"\n\nTonight Joy is going to go out and look for a man to sleep with. She is dressed in skin-tight black designer jeans, high heels, and a bright red, sleeveless blouse. Her shoulder-length black hair shines and her big eyes are accentuated by make-up. Her lipstick matches her blouse. She is tall, about 5'8'' in her heels, and has light skin.\n\nQ: Hi Joy, can you tell me something about you and your life?\n\nJoy: I don't work in a bar \u2013 I did for one year, but I did not like it. I've been working going to discos and sleeping with men for three years. I am 21 year old. In the bar I was hostess \u2013 stand in front and tell men to come inside to meet some girls. What did I not like? Always have the boss tell me to get more men to come in. No it was not a go-go bar \u2013 only have a bar and girls to meet the men. Every night boss ask me \"Why not so many customers?\" What can I do? We are not supposed to touch them outside. But they like me and stay outside and talk with me. Sure, sometimes I go with them. Then one night I quit. I have some friends who only go to disco to meet men. So I quit and now that is what I do. My friends said that they come to disco to meet boyfriends, and it is good way to make money. They speak true about money.\n\nWhere are you from?\n\nI come from the north \u2013 near Chiang Mai. I have been in Bangkok for four years. I went to public school but stop about 17 year old. After I go to school and learn cut hair, but there is not enough business so I go to work in the bar and now do this.\n\nWhere do you live now?\n\nI live in room with four other girls in Bang Kapi, in Bangkok. I live in big building with many room. It very noisy, very hot. If we have open the window, too many mosquito come in. Then we cannot sleep. We pay 2,500 baht a month, 500 baht for month each girl. I wish it was big. I wish to live in a big house, and sometime I will. I try to spend only 50 baht every day for food. I do not smoke, and I only drink sometime. If a man buys me a drink, okay, but I want to save money.\n\nYour English is excellent \u2013 where did you learn it?\n\nYou think? Wai-ing (thank you). I learn in my school and then when I work in the bar I practice with customers. Now I have a book I read and study, and talk to men in disco.\n\nIs there anything you like about this work?\n\nThe only thing I like is money. I have to save 1,500 baht every week. I have to sleep with three men in every week for this. Now it is not so hard \u2013 the tourist come, and I can sleep with man every night if I like. Some week I do. How much do they pay me? Up to them. But more than 1,500 baht for short time and more than 2,500 for all night. Yes, sometimes more (smiling).\n\nSo far I have now almost 100,000 baht in the bank. In one more year I will buy a house, then open hair shop in the house. I will be the owner. No one will tell me what to do again. Who to sleep with or what time to come work. Nothing. That's what I want for my life.\n\nWhat do you not like about this life?\n\nSometimes I have to sleep with men I don't like; I have to do things with them I don't like. I think about disease \u2013 I will not go with man who does not use condom, and I do not care how much money they say they will give, I will never change my mind. Other girl? Some not use condom sometime. Want more money, they do not think about what can happen.\n\nWhat do you think about the men \u2013 the customers?\n\nI do not understand them, the customer. I will not go with a man and another woman. Many farang want that. Why I will not do that? If I want to I will, I don't want to. They want to sleep with different girls. Before I ask \"You have a wife?\" They say yes, and I think \"Why you want to sleep with me?\" But now, never mind, not bother me. I only count money. And I wonder why do they lie? Do you know how many girl think a man will come back for them? They believe different man every night.\n\nWhat do you think of western men?\n\nThey are rich, they have a lot of money, but some are kee-nee-ow (stingy). They want to give the girl small money if they can. They all have a big house in their country. Have I ever been there, to another country? No. But I know because the picture they show to me and from video and movie. Do I hate them? No. Do not think that. Some are okay; they want to have good time on holiday. But you understand sometime they make us feel bad, and why? We only do the best we can; for us, for our families.\n\nWhat makes you happy?\n\nWhen I think about when I will have my house and my shop. My young sister will work with me. She is now 17. And we will take care of our mother. My father, he die about five year ago. He got sick and die. What disease, I don't know, I think from his job. He work in a factory, make paint. He about 45 year old. The company give my mother 10,000 baht. She has a small house now, but [she is] lonely. When I go back to home she will not be so lonely. What does she think I do? I am a hairdresser (smiling).\n\nFor fun, what do you and your friends do?\n\nWe go out \u2013 Thai disco and dance together. We don't want to meet Thai men. For what? They take our money and gamble, drink, go with other women. No, we have fun together. Talk a little about our life, about Thai life.\n\nWhat do you think of a book about the women who work like you \u2013 is there anything you think the book should say?\n\nI hope farang read this book. I want to tell them if they want to meet a Thai lady for a girlfriend or wife, better you go to a nice place and meet different kind of girl. But that other girl maybe do not want sex right now. Wait, tell the girl okay, just for the movie or eating dinner. If only want sex, okay, girl from bar is better. We work for money, not for love. \n16\n\nOi: \"Come with a good heart\"\n\nOi is 24, has dark skin, a round face, with big eyes. She bounces in to meet me at 11:00am in a trendy coffee shop, which she chose as their caf\u00e9 latte shakes are \"the best\". Oi could pass for an American college student: wearing a UCLA t-shirt, blue Levi's, and instead of the usual high-heeled shoes, Nike running shoes. Her hair is tied back in a short pony tail and she isn't wearing make-up.\n\nShe works in a small beer bar in one of Bangkok's large entertainment plazas. She will be heading to work at 1:00pm, where she will stay until 2:00am, unless she gets a customer to take her out earlier. That is her schedule for 28 days out of the month.\n\nQ: Hi Oi, thank you for talking with me. Can you tell me about yourself \u2013 how old are you, where are you from?\n\nOi: My name is Oi. I am 24 years old. I come from Petchaboon. About five hours from Bangkok on the bus. Petchaboon very poor, where I come from. When I am 14 years old, my family can not afford my school anymore, and I not want to work in rice field, or work in garment factory sewing for my life.\n\nSo you came to Bangkok when you were 14?\n\nYes, 14 or 15 years old. I come with my older sister. We not know any people in Bangkok. But we get jobs with families from Hong Kong. I am a maid for about three years. The family is okay. They have three children I take care [of]. The children, they are about eight, ten and maybe 13 years old. I cook, wash clothes, shopping, and clean the house. I get 30 baht for one day, and I sleep in small room in the house. I save all the money to send home to my mother and my father. My father was work in a rice field for a boss, but he get sick and have to stop work. What was he sick with? He get malaria, and he always tired. He cannot work. My mother take care for him and my two young brothers. So my sister and me, we send our money home. My sister work for a different Chinese family, but they are no good. She leave them in about two months. She get a job in a hotel, work maid. She make about 4,000 baht in one month. She stay with some other girls from the hotel. Me, I stay with the family three years. I work very hard, but I am happy. Better than live in Petchaboon and [be] so poor. But I miss my family too much, so I go home for one year. But no job for me. My friend Sa, who go home in Petchaboon and visit, she work in Bangkok, tell me go to Bangkok with her. She tell me I am good for farang men. She tell me, \"you have dark skin, so the farang will like you.\" She say I can meet farang men, maybe find a rich husband. She tell me she sometime make 30,000 or 40,000 baht in one month. My parents make not that much in one year. Sa work in a massage parlour. Thai massage, Oil massage. You know, massage a man, give a special massage, and get good tip. She say sometimes the man can take you to hotel for night to sleep with him and I can make 1,000 or 2,000 baht for one night. I tell her I not understand, just to sleep man pay 1,000 baht? She laugh and say I have to have sex with him. I tell her I can never do (laughs). I never have sex before. I have a Thai boyfriend for short time but I never have sex with him. I think we kiss one or two times. I think sex only for having children after you marry. True. And I am almost 20 years old then! But Sa talk and talk and so I come to Bangkok.\n\nI tell her I cannot work massage, so we get job in beer bar. I work service (waitress) and Sa meet customer when they come in. You know, sit with them, talk with them, and tell them to buy drinks and take her outside. She speak English good for Thai bar girl, but me, before I can say only \"hello\". But at the bar I learn to speak lay-ow lay-ow (quickly). (Laughing again) \"Where you come from? What is your work? How long you stay Bangkok?\" At first I am very shy and cannot talk too much to the customers. But Sa help me, introduce me to customer. But I not go out with them. I think they like me because I am shy and quiet. They say they will give 2,000 or 3,000 baht for me to go with them. But I always say no. Then one time I go with nice man from England. I not tell him I am virgin; I am scared. No, not scared of man, scared because the first time, I don't know what to do. I do not know if he know I am virgin. I not tell him. He know I not know how to do. Sa and the other girls tell me a lot, and I even watch video-x (x-rated video) before. But doing it [is] different. In morning he give me 2,500 baht \u2013 Sa tell the price with him. I am so shy if he not give me I not ask for it. After that first time, I think, \"This is easy\". Now I am here for four years. I have gone with many men. Now it is no problem. If the man has good heart, okay, I have good time. I try to find out about him before we go. Sure, sometime we get to hotel and man is not nice. I hope he quick, then I can go back to bar, or go home. If I am afraid of man, if I think he is bad, I tell him, \"Okay, you go take shower, I wait you.\" Then I leave, go to bar. If he come back want bar fine return, we give him. But I think only happen maybe two times before. I never say I will stay long time (all night), but if he is a good man, have nice hotel, sleeping all night with him is okay.\n\nHave you ever had a boyfriend, or wanted one of the customers to be your boyfriend?\n\n(She thinks for a minute before answering) A boyfriend. No, never have a real boyfriend. Some man I like, but I don't know about that when I was young. Now, I know too much (laughing). Have I ever fall in love? No. I like some customer before, but they are butterflies (someone who is unfaithful). Now I don't think I can fall in love with man who come here.\n\nHow about working with the other girls?\n\nWe (girls) are good together. We care about each girl. No one want another girl to have a problem. I don't drink too much, and I never take drugs. Yes, there are some girls that do, but not here at this bar. You cannot trust them. They might make a problem with the man \u2013 steal from him, or something. Then he come back to bar, and bar have a problem. No one want that. I work in small bar, only have seven girls work there, plus I think four service girls and three bartenders, everyone know everyone.\n\nHow much money do you usually make in one month?\n\nI don't know. Sometime about 20,000 baht one month, sometime more (smiling). What? No, I tell the truth. I get salary 6,000 baht, and if man pay bar I get 300 (out of 650). Last year one man took me to Ko Samuii for one week. He pay bar for one week, and pay me 10,000 baht. It was very nice. He tell me he will come back, but I do not see him again. If he come back, okay. If not, okay, no problem.\n\nDo your parents know what you do? Is your sister still working?\n\nMy parents? No, they do not know what I do. They know I am waitress. But nothing else. My mother always ask when I will come home and get married. I tell her, don't worry mama, I will. But now, really, I am not sure. About getting married. I want to have children, a son. But I don't want to have a son without a father. I do not trust Thai men, and the men here, Farang men; they come here, they cannot speak Thai, they only want sex and drink too much. Why would we like someone like that? My sister she go to Phuket with a man about one year ago, but they have fighting too much. So now she work bar in Phuket. I see her sometime if she come to Bangkok.\n\nHow do you feel about what you do? Are you tired of it?\n\nI don't understand some of the question. I do not feel about it. Sometimes I have mai sabaii jai (sad heart), but I am good person for my family and friend.\n\nDo you wish you could do something else?\n\nMany people wish to do something else, right? Many girl want to be singer. Many boy want to play football. This is my job. I will finish this someday.\n\nWhen is someday? What do you want in the future?\n\nI have money in my bank. I want to stop work here soon. I will go back home to Petchaboon. Or maybe go to Phuket with my friend and sister. We want to open business for tourist. No, not bar. Maybe sell things like Thai craft.\n\nDo you think a book about these girls of Bangkok is a good idea?\n\nI think a book about Thai girls is good idea. Farang know nothing about Thai girl.\n\nIs there anything you want to say to anyone who might read this book?\n\nWe need and want money for the family, and to have good time. Tell them that. Tell them to come here. To Thailand. With a good heart. And money (laughing).\n17\n\nAae: \"My heart is cold when I am working\"\n\nAae works at one of the more infamous \"sex bars\" that exist in the Thailand bar scene. She lives and works in Pattaya, the beach resort town known for its nightlife. At first glance she looks younger than her 20 years, in fact I even have my translator ask to see her ID card. But as the conversation goes on it becomes clear that she is wise beyond her years. Her innocence fades. She is one of approximately 12 girls who regularly work at her bar. The girls greet customers as they walk through the door and try to entice them to go upstairs to a second bar, where the customer can get oral sex from under the bar, or a private room for sex. The price at the bar is 700 baht, of which the girl gets 350 baht; the room is 800 baht and the girls get 400 of that amount. The average tip is 100 baht at the bar, 200 baht if they go to a room. On a good day a girl will have five or six customers. If she's lucky a customer will pay the bar fine and take her out for the night. Of the 600 baht bar fine, the girl gets 250, although this goes up after a certain number of fines are paid for the girl during a given month.\n\nQ: Hello Aae, thank you for talking with me. Can you tell me a little about yourself \u2013 how old you are, where you come from?\n\nAae: I come from Surin, in Isaan. I am now 20 years old.\n\nHow long have you been working in a bar?\n\nI have worked at ---- Bar for about 10 months.\n\nDid you work someplace else before you came to work here?\n\nNo, this is only place I work. For a bar. Before I have a job in Surin. I working in factory, sewing. I make chair for car (car seats), you know? And other things.\n\nHow did you start to work here?\n\nMy friend from Surin tell me to come to the bar and work. She say I can meet a lot of farang men, and make a lot of money. You know, I live in Surin, I live on a farm, not town, and I only see farang not many time before. But I see on TV and video (laughing).\n\nHow about your family?\n\nMy parents, they work on the farm. I have one brother younger, he is 14, he go to school and help on the farm. My young sister has come now to work here in Pattaya. She work at different bar; same kind of bar, but she is only cashier. She not go with men. I hope she stay working a cashier, but she want to do what I do, I understand. She make about 3,000 baht for month for salary, and live in room at the bar.\n\nDo you live with her?\n\nI have room at this bar. I share room and bed with one girl. I stay here free, the room cost nothing.\n\nWhat is it like to work here?\n\nHere at ---- we are special bar. Upstairs men can get suck or fuck. I can do both. When first I start I cry after every time with man. But now, for me it is only work. No, it is not sex. I only think about the money, for parents and brother and my baby.\n\nYou have a baby? Can you tell me about your baby?\n\nYes, I am only 20, I have baby; daughter. She is four years old. Next year she will go to school and I want her to go so she can get good job someday, not same like me (smiling). I need to pay her school; about 1,000 baht every month. I miss everyone at home. My sister and I talk much about our family. Sometime we cry, sometime we laugh. I miss my daughter the most. She stay with my parents. I have book of pictures of her and I look everyday. She is the number one in my life. Everything here I do for her.\n\nSo you are working like this for your family?\n\nYes. I want to work here maybe one more year and save money to go home and take care of my family. My brother he can go to school and learn how to fix motorcycles and cars, but I need to give the money to go. I want to go to school too \u2013 to learn English and maybe computer school. Mamasan is good person. She always tell me to put money in bank, save it, be careful, and not be like some girls and go drink and dance every night and spend money.\n\nHow much money do you make here?\n\nHere I make good money. Sometime 1,000 baht for one day, and if a man pay the bar fine for me, I make more, sure. One time last month I made 7,000 baht. In one day! I remember I tell Mamasan \"Oh, I never have this much money in my life before.\" She laugh.\n\nAnd how much did you make at your job in Surin?\n\nHow much I make for salary? One month I can make 4,000 baht. I work six days in one week, 12 hours in every day. I was 17 years old, I leave my school because I have baby and I try to find job [to] pay for me [so I can] take care of everyone. So I can not make enough to pay everything for my baby and family.\n\nHow many girls work here?\n\nNot sure. Sometimes we have more than ten. Many girls come to work here, but cannot work like this. So they go home, or to work dancing.\n\nWhy don't you work in a go-go bar, or beer bar?\n\n(She thinks for a moment, as if the thought never occurred to her) I cannot be a dancer \u2013 I am too shy. And a beer bar \u2013 I don't know. It is okay here. I like my friends here.\n\nYou mean the other girls?\n\nYes, I like other girls. We take care each other. Some girls have boyfriends \u2013 farang \u2013 but they always lie. Yes, the farang lie. They say \"Oh, I love you, I not want you to work here.\" But do they pay the money so the girl not have to work? Never. They tell girl \"I come back, take you [to] England, or America.\" They maybe come back. But I never see one customer take a girl home. Maybe go to an island, or Phuket for a week, only. But the girl she want to believe them, want to think can leave here sometime. Okay. But I don't listen when a man tell me that. How can I be sure? I have only work here ten months, but I hear stories, and see girls cry when they not get a letter, or get a letter tell them not to write or call some more. Why I want to do that?\n\nSo you do not have a boyfriend?\n\nRight now I do not have boyfriend. Before I had Thai husband, but he hit me a lot. So I had to leave him. I leave him many time, but now I never want to be with him anymore. He come here one time to look for me, but Mamasan and other girls tell him go away or they call police. I think he was afraid of Mamasan more than police. She is bigger than he is (laughing).\n\nWhat do you do for fun?\n\nMany other girls go out to disco every night, drink, dance, have a good time. They can try and forget about what the job here is. But they never have money after. So I stay here at night, just go to sleep in my room. But if a customer take me to hotel, I go there. Many times that is nice. If a big hotel with bathtub and hot water, cable TV and minibar I have a good time. Sometimes I can go swimming the next day. I love the time swimming. I can forget everything in the water. I think about before I was little and happy. Sometimes, when I have customer when I come to work and I get a good tip, I pay bar fine for me, and go to swimming somewhere, relax, then come back for work again.\n\nWhat do you want in the future? Do you think about ten years from now?\n\nTen years? I cannot think about that. I think about now, how much money can I make. Make more money, save more money. Then I can go home to Surin to be with my family.\n\nIs there anything you want to say about yourself for the people who will read this book?\n\nWhat I want to tell people about me? I am girl who like people. I like many of the customer; but they are customer, not boyfriend. Some men they tell me, \"You are beautiful, but you have cold heart.\" No, my heart is cold when I am working. And if I am with a man I am always working. So how can they know my other heart? I have a man who come last week. He want to talk, not go upstairs. He just want to sit and drink, he tip me 200 baht just for talk with him. If all men was like that, okay, I have very good job (laughing). Another man he pay the bar fine, take me to hotel. He do not want to fuck, he only want to talk, and sleep with me. In the morning he give me 2,000 baht. (Smiling) I like man like that. Who can know, maybe one day a man like that will want to be my boyfriend, and will not lie (laughing again). But I don't think so. Why not? Would you want a girl like me for girlfriend? You know what I do for work. I think I go back to Surin. If I go home Surin, maybe I will never have husband. Okay, no problem. I can be happy when I go back and take care of my baby and my family. That is what I want. To be happy. \n18\n\nDa: \"Just a customer\"\n\nDa works in a beer bar in Pattaya. I met her in the early afternoon when she was on her way to work. She has to be at the bar from 3:00pm to 3:00am, with two days off a month. If she needs or wants more time off, she must pay the bar 200 baht per day missed. Da is tall, has a thin dark face and long black hair with a white streak down the side.\n\nQ: Hi Da, thanks for talking to me, Can you tell me about yourself? Where are you from, how old are you?\n\nDa: I come from small town near Korat, in Isaan, northeast Thailand. I am 22 year old. I work at ---- Bar for about six months. Before here I work massage shop over there for about one year.\n\nHow did you come to Pattaya?\n\nI come here because my friend tell me come and make good money and meet foreign man. I come here because my family is poor and I cannot help them in my town. I must come here to make money to give to them.\n\nFriends from your hometown told you this?\n\nYes, some friend of mine come to Pattaya before because other friend work here. My friend tell me easy to make money here and not work too much. Not like work at home. Must work in farm or shop, make little money. Or go to Bangkok work in factory or maid. Same, little money. So I come here.\n\nAnd where do you live \u2013 at the bar or do you have a room somewhere else?\n\nBefore I stay [in] North Pattaya in house with other girl from massage. How many? Five girl together. Have one small house \u2013 two room, cooking room, toilet. Everyone pay 500 baht. But must pay motorcycle to go work, come home. So now I stay big room near bar. Have three girl stay together. Pay about 600 baht every month each girl. But can walk to work at bar, so is okay. And can go shopping or beach if wake up early.\n\nAnd what do you think about the work?\n\nIt is okay. It is my job. I sit and talk with foreign man, ask him to buy me drink and pay bar. I talk with other girl, play card, watch movie on TV.\n\nCan you decide whether to go with a man or not go with a man?\n\n(She gives a quizzical look)...No, I don't think so. If man want to take me, okay I go.\n\nBut what if you don't like the man?\n\nSome I like, some I do not like. But I go. It is my work. If I like the man I want him to take me, I ask him. Sometime say yes, sometime say no.\n\nAnd what do you think about the sex? Does it bother you to have sex with men you don't know?\n\nThe first times, it didn't make me feel good, but it was my job at massage. Man like to have massage and finish. Okay. I can do for tip.\n\nDo you ever like being with the customer?\n\nDo I like to be with customer? For sex? No. But sometime not take a long time, take about 20 minutes. Not so bad. If take more than one hour, I tell man you have to finish or pay more. How much? I want 1,000 baht for short time. 2,000 for long time. I don't like to go long time. Why? Must to have sex two, three times. After do sex I want go home, sleep.\n\nHow much money do you make every month?\n\nFrom bar salary about 7,000 baht if work every day and have customer buy drink.\n\nAnd from going out with customers?\n\nSometime good, maybe 20,000 baht. Sometime small money, maybe 10,000 baht \u2013 low season.\n\nWhat do you think about the customers?\n\nI do not think about them. They do what they do. I understand, he want to have fun. Okay. Have fun. I tell them \"Oh, you handsome. I like you.\" Sure, sometime true \u2013 have a handsome man. And nice man. But is just customer.\n\nDo you ever think you will meet a man here who will take care of you so you don't have to do this anymore?\n\nMaybe. But many girl have problem with foreign man. Go from bar maybe one year, come back to work again. Man is always no good. Have another lady. Tell girl he boring (he's bored). So I think I do this work so I can save money and open shop in one year, two years.\n\nSo what about the future? What would you like to do?\n\nIn the future I will like to open a business about beauty shop. For the lady who work here. Stop going with man, and have the shop to help the lady here. Make-up, hair, nail. Make more money, then go home when I am 30 year old.\n\nIs there anything you want to tell people who will read this book about the bar girls? About your life?\n\nI want to ask why you like the lady here? Many lady here not understand. For sex? For me, for girl here, sex is what we do. Not fun for us. Drink, go out, is fun for us. So bring us to drink and go out, then we can have fun with sex, if enjoy to be with you.\n\nUPDATE: Sadly, I heard that Da was killed in a motorcycle accident about a month after I spoke with her. She was on the back of the motorcycle with two other girls. They were heading home at around 5:00am from an after-work party at a disco, when their bike was hit by a truck. The two other girls were only slightly hurt, but Da did not survive. \n19\n\nDai: \"I think I am happy\"\n\nDai is tall and slim, with long black hair and very light skin. I met up with her in the lobby of a four-star hotel, outside of an upscale pub\/disco. This is where Dai meets her customers, or \"friends\" as she calls them. Impeccably dressed in a designer dress and shoes, with tastefully put on make-up, Dai could be out for a night in New York City or Los Angeles.\n\nQ: Hello Dai, can you tell me about yourself; your family, where you come from?\n\nDai: Sure, I come from Petchburi, south of Bangkok. I have a nice family, they don't know I do this \u2013 come out at night to meet men. I have a job also. In office, I cannot say where. But it is a good job with a good company. No one there know I do this.\n\nWhy do you keep it a secret from your family and friends? Is it so bad?\n\n(Thinking)...Well, I don't think it is a bad thing to do (laughing). But other people do think it is a bad thing. The people [who] work in my office are nice. Have family, go work, go home, go temple. I never hear them talk about going to a bar. Go to restaurant for enjoy, but never some place like this. If I see someone from office here I think I will die. (Laughing) My family cannot understand something like this.\n\nSo why do you do it?\n\nI like to come here to meet someone sometime. And I like to listen to the music and dance and have good time. And sometime meet some nice man. If I like him I will go with him if he like me. Yes, he must give me money. How much? More than 3,000 baht. I ask for 5,000 or 6,000. For one night, yes. I take very good care man. They always want my phone number. (Laughing) I can do anything they want. Want another girl, sure no problem, if I like the girl. But more money. Maybe 7,000 baht for me, other girl I don't care. Sometime it with wife or girlfriend. If they pay I don't care.\n\nSo you do it for the money?\n\nThe money can buy me some things I like. New clothes, dresses, shoe. (Smiling) And I live [in a] very nice condo. Cannot pay for this with salary from job. But (she stops talking for a moment)...I like to go out and I like to have sex with men.\n\nSo why not get a boyfriend?\n\n(Laughing) This is fun more. I am 34 year old. When I am young girl I am told Thai lady should not like sex. Maybe different now, what they say to a Thai lady 20 year old. But I am not polite if I like sex with different man. So I do not tell any friend before. I have some friend here, Thai lady, we can talk about this. But not my family, not people in office. So I can come here and enjoy and if I meet man I can have sex and get money. That's good for me, yes?\n\nSo how often do you come here?\n\nI come this place about two times in a week. Saturday I go [to] a different bar.\n\nAnd how many nights do you meet a man and go with him?\n\nIf I can, every time! If I don't meet someone I like or he don't have money for me, I go [to a] different disco or come back again. I don't worry \u2013 I meet a lot of man.\n\nDo you use a condom? Worry about meeting someone who is dangerous?\n\nThe man go with me always use condom. No condom, no sex. Always. I never have a problem with man. I talk to the man before I go with them. If I think not nice man, I don't go with him.\n\nAre you happy with your life the way it is?\n\n(Thinking)...Yes, I think so. I enjoy. I enjoy my work in office. I enjoy this. I enjoy to spend money. So, I think I am happy.\n\nUPDATE: I called Dai to see how she was doing. She said she had met a man she liked who was going to bring her to Europe, but the plan had hit a snag. Since she was going to have to leave her office job, Dai wanted him to give her a sum of money to keep in the bank in Thailand in case things didn't work out. She said he was not happy with that idea, so it looked like the plan for Europe would not go forward.\n\nI asked Dai if she was upset:\n\nDai: No. If he does not want to give me that money, we would have a problem sometime. If he is cheap now, what will happen in Europe? So I will stay in Thailand. Maybe some day I will meet a more nice man.\n20\n\nEet: \"A guy who like to spend money do not buy a cheap watch\"\n\nI was introduced to Eet by Dai. Eet is short and slim. She has dark skin and has dyed her long hair a dark blonde. Her English is fluent and the entire interview was conducted through English. I met Eet in a coffee shop in an upscale shopping mall, where she says she \"spends a lot of time and money\". She is wearing designer shoes and jeans, and a tight Porsche (\"my last boyfriend had one\") t-shirt. She orders a latte and a chocolate chip cookie.\n\nQ: What can you tell me about yourself Eet; where are you from, how old are you?\n\nEet: Well, I'm 33 years old. I'm from the north of Thailand \u2013 Chiang Mai, but I came to Bangkok when I was 18 to go to university. I went to a big university here for about a year, met a rich Thai guy and quit. We partied for about a year, then I met a guy from France and I left the Thai guy. I have a 10-year-old son from the French guy.\n\nWhere is your son, with the father?\n\nNo, my son is with my older sister in Chiang Mai. Actually I haven't seen him in about seven years. My son I mean. I haven't seen the father in about nine years. I don't even know where he is.\n\nWhy haven't you seen your son in so long?\n\nMy sister is a good mother for him. He's a good boy. He does well in school. I miss him, but my sister is a better mother than me (shrugs). So I am happy for both of them.\n\nWhat happened with the father?\n\nWe broke up. He went back to France.\n\nWhat were you doing when you were with him? Did you ever go back to school?\n\nNo, I never had to go back. I never had to work with either my Thai boyfriend or him. Don't laugh at me please \u2013 but I have never had a job. I had a shop before, but I never work in any place.\n\nHow have you been able to do that?\n\n(Laughing) Rich boyfriends. I have been to France with that boyfriend. After him I met a guy from South Africa. He made jewellery \u2013 gold \u2013 and he was rich. I went to South Africa with him two or three times. I didn't like it though. Then after him I had a German boyfriend. I was with him for four years. He had a business in Germany. I lived there for almost one year with him. We travelled to Austria and Switzerland and Italy. I liked the mountains. The snow.\n\nAnd what happened with him?\n\nHis business was family business. A factory. His father died and he had to work all the time at the factory. It was near Frankfurt. I didn't like it there and wanted to move in Germany or come back to Thailand. He couldn't leave there so I came back to Thailand. But we are still friends. He understood the reason. So he gave me money and I started my business. Then last year I sold it.\n\nWhere did you learn your English? It's excellent.\n\nI started to learn English in high school. I was good at it. And I studied more in uni (university). My French boyfriend spoke good English and I couldn't speak French so I spoke a lot of English with him. And watched movies, TV. The guy from South Africa spoke English, too. The German guy didn't, so I learned to speak German okay when I was there. So I can speak three languages. Good, huh?\n\nVery good. You could probably get a very good job, since you are able to speak Thai, English and German.\n\nSure, I think so. But I don't want to work in office or for hotel. I like coming to meet men.\n\nSo how long have you been coming to the discos and meeting men?\n\nFor a long time. That is how I met my German boyfriend. Of course I stopped when I was with him, but I have been doing it even when I had my shop.\n\nAnd why do you do it \u2013 you go to bars and meet men, and they pay you for sex, right?\n\nYes. I like this life. I go out to party when I want, usually I can choose if I want to go with a man; I can sleep late and go shopping. For me it's a good life.\n\nBut how long can you do this life?\n\nI'm not old. Look at me, I don't think I look old. Do I look like a cheap bar girl? I don't think so. So I think I can do this for maybe five more years. Or maybe I meet another rich guy and I stay with him.\n\nSo what type of men do you look for when you go to the bars?\n\nI like tourist. So if I see a guy I might like, I smile at them. Or if I don't see anyone, if someone smiles at me I go talk to them. Ask them where they are from, what do they do. Look at their clothes, and their watch. A guy who like to spend money do not buy a cheap watch.\n\nSo why tourists?\n\nThey pay more (smiling). Guys who live here don't like to pay so much.\n\nHow much is that?\n\nFive or six thousand baht for one night. Is that a lot? I don't think so. I know what girls get in Europe. And I'm worth it. I can make a guy very happy (laughing).\n\nAnd how much can you make in a month? (The average salary for an office worker is 12,000\u201315,000 baht a month; 20,000 would be a very good salary).\n\nI make 60,000 baht a month, sometimes more. And the guys take me shopping, too. It's more than just money.\n\nDo you ever feel bad about what you do?\n\nWhy? It is what I do. I have a good life. I enjoy going out with my friends, dancing, shopping. I have travelled, I will travel again. Maybe Italy, Brazil, Hawaii. I could not do that working in a mall.\n\nAnd in the future, is that what you see for yourself?\n\nI will be okay. I will open a new business or marry a rich guy. I do not worry (smiling).\n\nUPDATE:\n\nEet: No rich guy yet, but not worried. Some man buy me a gold chain before, cost about 25,000 baht, so I am happy. Very happy.\n21\n\nWan: \"My life is my life\"\n\nWan is thin and tall \u2013 very tall for a Thai woman. At 177 cm (or 5'9''), Wan stands out in a crowd, figuratively and literally. I was put in touch with Wan by a friend of hers who had heard about my project and thought I should hear Wan's story. We met in an upscale mall and sat down to have a coffee with her. Wan has a pretty face and long, straight black hair parted in the middle. She would pass for a bank teller or executive secretary were she to dress in business attire. Instead, she is in a blue Chelsea FC t-shirt, blue jeans and Keds sneakers: making her appear to be in her early 20s, not early 30s. She has big brown eyes, a big smile and an infectious laugh that also draws attention. All this contradicts the story that Wan told me. Wan just started talking and didn't stop until the end.\n\nQ: Hi Wan, can you tell me about yourself? Where you are from, how and why you are talking to me?\n\nWan: Well, a friend of mine told me you were writing a book about women in Thailand and thought my story would be good for you, so here I am. I am 31 years old, I come from a village near the border with Burma, in the western part of Thailand. My village is poor, I had three brothers and two sisters; I am the second youngest, just one sister is younger than me. My parents raised vegetables that they sold in the market \u2013 corn, carrots, tomatoes. We lived in a small house, everyone together, and I was a happy little girl, I remember that. Then when I was 11 or 12, I was told I could not go to school anymore, and that make me very sad. My family did not have enough money for all the children to go to school. My oldest brother just finished high school and was going to a technical school and it was more important for him for that, so I had to stop and work in the farm with my parents. I was very unhappy. I could not see my friends. Well, I could see them, they went to school everyday while I worked in the farm. But it was how it was \u2013 I had to work to help the family (smiles). I am not angry now, but I was then.\n\nWhen I was about 13 years old I was raped. By a friend of my brother. He told me he would hurt me if I told anyone, so I didn't. But I was never the same from after that happened. I was very sad but I couldn't tell anyone and no one knew what was wrong with me. My father would yell at me for being sad. So when I was 14 years old I went to Rachaburi, which is a big city a little far from my village and a little far from Bangkok. I got a job selling things in the market and met a boy who was 16. I wanted to be grown up so we decided to get married. I went back home with this boy when I became 15 and we were married in my village. He got a job in Bangkok as [a] construction [worker] and I went to Bangkok with him. We got a room and he worked construction and I helped people in our street. I iron clothes for the laundry woman and wash dishes for the food cart woman and sew something for another woman. I thought that my life would be okay.\n\nThen the police take my husband one day, put him in the jail. They said he selling drugs to the people he working with. I don't know. He tell me [he did] not, and we don't have money. But he go to jail for a long time. Five years. I go back to my village but I cannot stay there. I cannot work on the farm again. So I go back to Bangkok, I know a girl \u2013 she work in a karaoke bar. I get a job for service \u2013 waitress. I am 15 year old.\n\nOne day the owner tell me I cannot work anymore, too young. I say what will I do? One girl there she tell me \"Come on, we go to Pattaya.\" I say, \"I don't think so, what will I do?\" She tell me she will take care [of] me. So I go. Oh, and I get divorce from husband. Is easy to do because I am young and he in prison, so my father, he pay in my village and I divorce.\n\nSo I am [a] 15-year-old and in Pattaya. I get job cleaning in hotel. My friend she go to work in body massage. She make good money, I do not. One day I tell her I want to work in massage. I have to get paper say that I am 19 year old, it no problem and I start work in massage. I make a lot of money (smiles). I am tall and with make-up I look like older.\n\nThen one day I meet a guy come in for massage. He from America \u2013 about 22 year old \u2013 from Florida. He take good care of me \u2013 give me money for family, when he go home he give me money to live and I don't have to work massage anymore. When he come back to Thailand I am 18 year old and we get married. He take me back to Florida. At first I like. He live in a big house. His family really love me. I stay there two year. But after two year I am sad. I miss Thailand. I cannot speak good English. I don't know any Thai people. I am very young. He was a good man, I still talk to him today and many time I am very sorry to hurt him. I ask him is okay for me to go back to Thailand to see my family and he say yes. But I don't tell him I will not come back to Florida. He come to Thailand to try and have me come back, but I cannot. He cry, I cry, but I know I cannot go back to stay there anymore. So again I get divorce. I am 22 year old and I am marry and divorce two time already! (Laughs quickly)\n\nSo now what can I do? I go to work in bar in Bangkok and Pattaya. I go with many men, I send money to family to help them. I have my oldest brother he has a good job, but two other brother no good. Lazy. Just drink and do nothing. And my sisters, one is okay and the other one is lazy like my brothers. My father and mother get older and cannot work farm anymore. My lazy brothers and sister don't do anything and the farm just gone. So my good brother and me we pay and pay so my parent can keep house. I must work bar in Bangkok and Pattaya, many year I work. You know how many man I go with? So many I will never know. Then one time I meet a guy from Canada and he really like me, I think he is good man, and he take me to Canada. So now I have been Canada for more than three year. We marry in Canada. Sometime it is good, sometime I miss Thailand. In Canada I learn about jewellery business and I have good job to clean jewellery. I make good salary, I have some Thai friend there.\n\nMy husband is good man. I come back about one month ago because my oldest brother he die in accident. His truck have accident and I don't know, he die. So I come back but will go back Canada next month. I love my parent. My brothers no good, my one sister not good. I take care their kids for them when I am here. What happen when I go, I don't know. I always send money to family, my husband not understand, he say \"They don't help you before, why you do for them?\" I say \"Because they are my family.\" He is not Thai, he don't understand. Am I happy now in Canada with my life? I think so. I want to have baby, but my husband don't want. He have a son already 16 from before. I think I will be a good mother, I want to have a daughter that I can take care and give a good life to. Then I will be happy.\n\nSo, when you look at your life, how do you see yourself? How do you feel about the men you have met, the way your life has turned out?\n\nMy life is my life. It has happened. I cannot change it, I have been with many men and now I have one. He is a good man, he is more than 20 year older than me. I will take care of him.\n\nOne more question: do you regret anything, would you have done anything different in your life if you could?\n\nSometimes I wish I tell my brothers about the boy who rape me. I see him in my village when I go home. I hate him. I had many dream when I was young about my brothers kill him, and in the dream I was very happy. But now...(shrugs her shoulders) I think now maybe I should ask my husband before if we can have a baby. Yeah, this husband, ask before we marry. That is what I want. My baby to take care of, to make sure she is happy and go to school and have a good mother that she will tell she loves very much.\n\nUPDATE: Wan contacted me by email from Canada. She has decided she will leave her husband and return to Thailand. She said that her husband told her again that he does not want to have another child. She said that she has admitted to herself that she is not happy in Canada. She does not want to go through another Canadian winter and misses Thailand, her family, her friends and Thai food. Wan does not know what she will do for work when she comes back to Thailand. \n22\n\nFim and Sweet: \"Come on and party\"\n\nI found Fim and Sweet drinking together at a large dance club in Pattaya. I introduced myself and asked if they would be willing to talk to me. We agreed to meet the following day at 3:00pm. They showed up just after 4:00pm.\n\nQ: Hi Fim and Sweet, thanks for coming out to talk with me. I explained a little about what I am doing \u2013 the book \u2013 last night, do you have any questions?\n\nFim: No, you want to know about our life.\n\nSweet: And you pay us for our talk?\n\nYes, I want to know about your life, and yes, I will pay you. Can you tell me about yourselves? How old are you, where you are from?\n\nSweet: I am 22 year old, we both come from Mukdahan. Have you heard of that place?\n\nIt is a small city in Isaan, across the Mekong River from Laos, right?\n\nFim: Oh, very good! Yes, that is right. We come from there. And I am also 22 year old.\n\nSweet, how did you get your nickname? It's not Thai.\n\nSweet: I have another friend name \"Wan\" \u2013 and that is mean \"sweet\" in Thai. So I am also Sweet, but now we have different name.\n\nOkay, that's a good idea. Can you tell me what you are doing in Pattaya? Do you work in a bar?\n\nFim: No, when we come here we not old enough to work bar, we are only 19. So we go to beach or to disco to meet customer.\n\nSo you don't work for anyone, you stand along the beach or go to clubs?\n\nSweet: We don't go to beach now. Those lady on the beach are ee-gaa-lee (this is the most derogatory form of the Thai word for prostitute, the closest equivalent to \"street whore\").\n\nFim: Yes, we go to the disco and dance and drink and meet a man, not sell on street.\n\nInteresting. In English we say we \"look down on\" someone. Do you look down on the women on the beach?\n\nFim: Yes. They cannot work in bar, cannot dance, not have money for disco, must stay on the beach and go with any man.\n\nSweet: We do not do that.\n\nBut you said you did that when you got here \u2013 how long did you work on the beach?\n\nFim: Not long time. Maybe two, three week. We get card say we are 20 year old so we can go to disco.\n\nOkay, and when you came here three years ago from Mukdahan, what was your plan? To work selling sex?\n\nFim: Yes. And to have a party.\n\nSweet: Yes. Mukdahan have nothing to do, we are boring (bored) so we come to Pattaya to have fun and meet men and make money.\n\nDid you work or go to school in Mukdahan? And what about your families, do they know what you are doing here?\n\nFim: No, my family think I work in restaurant in Chonburi (Chonburi is the capital city of the province where Pattaya is located). In Mukdahan I work restaurant my aunt. My salary is so low, maybe 3,000 baht in one month. What can I do with that?\n\nSweet: I don't work in Mukdahan. I learn about beauty shop before. Cut hair, paint nail, face massage. But no have work. So I tell my family I work beauty shop in Chonburi.\n\nWhat are your families like? What would they think if they found out what you were really doing?\n\nSweet: I have my mother and father and one sister, she is 16 year old. And uncle, aunt and grandparents.\n\nFim: I have mother and father and three brother. I am the baby (laughing). I think they would be sad if they know I work like this.\n\nAnd Sweet, what would your family think?\n\nSweet: The same. Sad.\n\nSo you came to Pattaya and knew that this is what you would be doing? If your families would be sad, what does that make you feel about it?\n\nSweet: It is my life. I cannot stay in Mukdahan. When I am 18 years old I want to come Pattaya and enjoy.\n\nFim: The same. We come here to have a good time and make a lot of money (laughing).\n\nWhere do you live?\n\nFim: We stay in a room near the Soi Buakaew Market.\n\nYou stay together? And what is the room like, how much is it every month?\n\nSweet: Yes, we stay together. The room is a room, small. Have shower and toilet. Rent we pay 2,500 baht for one month.\n\nCan you tell me what your average day is like? What time do you wake up and what do you do during the day?\n\nFim: We wake up two o'clock or three o'clock in afternoon. Take shower, go out for eating.\n\nSweet: Maybe go to mall, maybe we meet some man.\n\nYou go to the mall to try and meet customers?\n\nSweet: Yes, why not? Sometime we meet, sometime no.\n\nFim: If no we can go eat more or maybe go to movie if have money.\n\nSweet: Or go home, sleep, watch TV. Go out to disco 11 o'clock.\n\nAnd at the mall, how do you meet customers there?\n\nSweet: We wait outside or inside, sit and smile at man. If they smile we say hello, where you go?\n\nFim: We talk to them, ask if want to go to room. Easy to find customer there.\n\nYou keep saying \"we\". Do you both go or just one of you?\n\nFim: Up to man. Can take both if want, no problem.\n\nSweet: Yes, no problem for me.\n\nAnd how much do you charge to go with a man from the mall?\n\nFim: (Shrugging) Up to man. More than 700 baht. Maybe 1,000.\n\nFor each of you?\n\nSweet: (Looking shocked) Of course!\n\nHow long will you stay with a man for that much?\n\nFim: Until he finish. Maybe one hour, maybe 20 minute.\n\nHow many times a week do you go to the mall and how many of those times do you think you find a man?\n\nSweet: (Thinking) We go about three time one week. And I think every time we can find a man.\n\nFim: If like now, tourist season. If low season maybe not so many foreigner.\n\nWhat do you do with the money, do you save it?\n\nSweet: (Laughing) Shopping! Buy make-up, maybe some shoe or jeans.\n\nFim: Keep for evening, so can buy one drink at disco.\n\nAnd do you charge the men the same at the disco?\n\nFim: No, at disco have to pay 1,500 short time and 2,500 long time.\n\nWhat is the difference between finding a customer at the mall and finding one at a disco?\n\nSweet: At mall is short time, and we are not beautiful like at disco. (Laughing)\n\nOkay so you arrive at the disco at 11:00pm \u2013 do you want to find customers right away?\n\nFim: No, like to dance, customer buy us drink. We want to have fun and party.\n\nSweet: But if want to go short time, can. But must come back to disco. We don't want to go home, we want to stay out and have a party.\n\nSo you stay out at the disco, sounds like you like to drink?\n\nFim: Yes, sure. And smoke ganja. (Laughing)\n\nAny other drugs?\n\nSweet: No, no good. But if someone give ecstasy, can do. (Fim nods in agreement)\n\nDo you like the sex with the customers?\n\nFim: Sometime. If feeling good, yes.\n\nSweet: If he is fun man, sure.\n\nDo you mean if he is in a good mood?\n\nSweet: Yes, if he buy us drink, have good time, laughing. Sex is party, too.\n\nFim: Yes, if have good heart, not kee-nee-aow (cheap).\n\nSo it doesn't bother you to sell sex? You don't want boyfriends or husbands, children?\n\nSweet: No, if want to do that can stay Mudkahan.\n\nFim: For me it is no problem to sell sex. Can get money, maybe go shopping with man for phone, clothes. I cannot get these things if I stay home.\n\nAnd what about your future? How long do you think you will do this?\n\nFim: I don't know, I think maybe two, three year more. Then maybe I will be tired and go home.\n\nSweet: Or maybe meet some nice man and get married, have children.\n\nSo you both want a normal life someday? You don't think living like this will spoil that for you?\n\nSweet: No, why? This is me now, I am young. I want to have fun. Later I will be serious. (Fim is nodding next to her).\n\nAnd what about HIV\/AIDS or other disease? Do you use condoms?\n\nFim: Yes, every time.\n\nSweet: But for some customer I know, no have to use condom.\n\nIs that the same for you, Fim? If you know the man do you trust him?\n\nFim: No, I use condom every time. (Sweet shrugs)\n\nHow much do you make in one month?\n\nFim: Sometime make 25,000 baht one month, sometime 30,000, If very slow, maybe 15,000, but not less.\n\nSweet: Yes, about the same. And I have more than my friend in Mukdahan.\n\nOkay, is there anything else either of you would like to say? We hope a lot of people will read the book.\n\nFim: (Laughing) Come on and party in Pattaya!\n\nSweet: Yes, we want to meet some man more! (Laughing) We have a good party here.\n\nUPDATE: A few weeks after the interview, my translator informed us that she was at the mall and ran into Fim, walking alone. She asked where Sweet was and Fim told her that a customer had reported Sweet to the police for stealing his ATM card, cash and mobile phone, so Sweet had gone back to Mukdahan to stay for awhile. When asked if the report of the theft was true, Fim shrugged her shoulders and replied \"Maybe. Sometime that happen,\" and then walked away, saying that she didn't want to say anything more.\n23\n\nSine: \"I hope I am happy again\"\n\nI met Sine at a street-side restaurant near Soi Cowboy, a one block strip of go-go and beer bars in downtown Bangkok. Sine is a \"hostess\" at one of Soi Cowboy's go-go bars, and was introduced to me by one of the bar's dancers whom I had interviewed. She is tall and thin, with shoulder-length hair. She has yet to change into her uniform for work, a low-cut evening gown. Her English was excellent, my translator was only needed twice during the interview.\n\nQ: Hello Sine, nice to meet you, thank you for talking with me. I'm talking to many women who work in the bars; I want to find out about their lives, so thank you for helping me. Can you tell me a little about yourself? Where do you come from, how old you are, where you live?\n\nSine: Nice to meet you, too. My name is Sine, but that is my name only from when I was nine year old, before name Pui. I am now 31 years old, and now I live in Bangkok.\n\nAre you from Bangkok?\n\nNo. I grow up in Isaan, near city of Buriram, but not in the city. In a village abut 20 kilometre from there.\n\nCan you tell me about growing up there, and how you got to Bangkok?\n\nI not remember being happy. Maybe sometime I was happy, but in my house was not good. When I was little I was fat. I know now I am not, but when I was small I was. My nickname was Pui \u2013 that is for poom pui \u2013 \"fat\" in Thai language. So my father and my brother don't like me. They lawr len (tease) me. And my father and brother call me stupid. They hit me, kick me. My brother tell me I am like dog.\n\nThat is shocking. What about your mother? Or other people, didn't anyone try to help you?\n\nMy mother go away when I was very young, maybe two year old. Where did she go? I not know. Now I not know what happen, I think I will never know. Not have anyone to help me. I have to do everything from when I am so small, maybe five year old. Clean, cook food, wash the clothes. I don't go to school. And everyday my father and brother they hit me if I am not good. And call me the name \u2013 fat, stupid. I cry every day and every night.\n\n(Sine is very calm and matter-of-fact as she is telling her story, so I ask her about that) Sine, does it upset you to remember, or to talk about this?\n\nI am okay. This was a long time ago, many things happen after this time. When I am about nine year old my friend who live in the village say she will go to Bangkok to live with her mother. I cry and tell her \"Please take me with you\". This is another girl, same age as me. One night my brother and father are drinking and my friend come and say, \"Come on\". I go with her and her mother take me with them on a bus. I take nothing from my house, but I am excited and scared, too. They tell me I will live in Bangkok. I am so happy to be away, not stay with my father and brother. Before I not know what happen, but now I know. My friend mother, she call to my father and say \"Pui stay with me now,\" and my father say he don't care.\n\nYou were lucky to have a good friend and her mother \u2013 but isn't what they did like kidnapping?\n\nBut my father he say he don't care. He even send the paper for me to go to school in Bangkok. So I start my new life. I tried to go to school but I was not smart like other students because I didn't go to school in the village. I like school because I have friend there, but I cannot read and write so good, other students not so nice for me. But one teacher is very nice for me, she help me to learn to read and write and in maybe one year more I am the same as other student. And she want me to change nickname to Sine, so I can forget Pui.\n\nAnd so you stayed with your friend and her mother until you finished school?\n\nYes. I stay with them, go to school. I finish in high school. Oh, and when I am about 15 year old I change. I get tall (laughing). Before I was short and fat, then I get tall. And I play sport; basketball and volleyball, so not fat no more! After high school I am 172 centimetre, now I am 174 (approximately 5'7'').\n\nDid you ever talk to or see your father during this time? Tell him how well you were doing?\n\nNo. I not want to see him. I am afraid he will make me come back. And my new mother she take care [of] me, she is better for me.\n\nShe really changed your life \u2013 do you still see her or your friend?\n\nThey move to America. My new mother she meet American man and he take them there. I cannot go because cannot have visa \u2013 I am not her daughter. When they go I miss [them] too much. I can talk to them still now, but what can I tell them, that I am bar lady? I don't want to say that, so we talk now not so much.\n\nIt sounds like your life was going well. You finished high school, and even though your friend went to the U.S., you had a new life, right?\n\nBut I have no money to go university. I have to work. So I get job in department store. I make salary okay, have a quiet life. I think I will meet someone some day and marry and have family.\n\nWhat happened?\n\nWhen I am about 20 year old, I continue work in department store. I meet a man from Australia, he come in store. He like me, I like him. He is first one to tell me I am beautiful and I believe because he take care [of] me. He 22 year old. He stay in Thailand sometime, maybe one month, two month, go and work in Australia, send me money, tell me to study English. After maybe two year he come to live in Thailand. He work about writing for magazine. We live together eight year. We have one son, now he is six year old. Maybe I am stupid because I never go to school to learn something more. My boyfriend he tell me he can pay for school, more English or computer. But I don't go, I want to take care [of] my son. Then about two year ago my boyfriend he go away, home to Australia he said. I miss him very much. He send money sometime, but then he say he cannot anymore. Who can take care [of] my son? I must work something. I work department store again, but money is not enough. I know about Soi Cowboy from my boyfriend and his friend. I see before. Foreigner like to come here, look at the lady in bar. One night I come to here and talk to lady outside, ask how much salary, what about foreign man? Salary is more. Can have sex with man for money, can get 20,000, 30,000 baht every month.\n\nBut there must be other things you can do? You have excellent English. You have been through a lot and I'm not judging you, but it seems like you gave up quickly.\n\n(Sine thinks for a moment, then shrugs her shoulders) I need to take care [of] my son. Where is boyfriend? He leave us, so now I do this. Sometime I see his friend, they see me here. Now he know this is what happen when leave mother and son alone.\n\nOkay, so what do you do exactly? What is your job?\n\nI am hostess. I stand outside the bar, go-go bar, and tell customer to come inside. Maybe ask them to buy drink for me.\n\nAnd sometimes you go out with the customers?\n\nYes, of course. If it is nice man, I think no problem. We can go short time. Have room here on soi.\n\nAnd what do you ask the man to pay?\n\nHe must pay bar 600 baht. And for me 2,000 baht. I stay with him two hour, maybe three if nice man.\n\nNever more than that? You never spend the night?\n\nNo. Cannot. Have to go and see my son before he go to school.\n\nAnd what do you think about what you do?\n\n(Again, Sine shrugs as she answers) I not think anything. It is my job. I go with a man, he have sex, he pay.\n\nYou just said, \"he has sex.\" Obviously you do too, but do you not see it that way?\n\nFor me, okay, it is sex, too. But it is my job to do that, I don't think about it.\n\nAnd do you have safe sex all the time?\n\nYes, no condom, no sex. If man just want with the hand okay, but for suck and sex, must have condom.\n\nDo you think you are taking good care of your son now?\n\nYes, I see him in the morning when go to school. Then I sleep. Then I meet him at school and I go to work.\n\nWho takes care of him while you work?\n\nHave a old woman live on soi (street), she take care of some children because mother have to work. Have maybe eight or nine or ten children stay her home. It is good for my son I think, he have some friend, can play, watch TV.\n\nAnd what about the future? How long do you think you will do this?\n\nI know in the future I will not do this. I save some money, maybe I start a shop somewhere. Maybe I meet some man who take care of me again. If happen again I know I will go to some school and get smart. I hope someone will love me again, I am lonely and sad many times. But I love my son and will do everything for him. I want him to have a good life. So this is what I must do.\n\nWell, thanks Sine, is there anything else you want to say?\n\nTalk about what?\n\nAnything; about you, your life, something to say to anyone who will read the book?\n\nMake sure you take care [of] your children. This is not a life I want. But it is life I have. I have happy two times in my life. I hope I am happy again. \n24\n\nAer: \"I am okay; sometime lonely, sometime sad, sometime happy\"\n\nAer has long dark hair that frames her thin face. She is wearing sandals, denim shorts and an oversized, bright orange t-shirt that says \"Chicago Yankees\" over a picture of an American football. She's asked me to meet her in a fast food restaurant in a shopping mall not far from the bar she works in. She is a waitress in a go-go bar on Soi Cowboy, and heard about me through her friend Sine.\n\nQ: Hi Aer, how are you? Thank you for talking with me. I think you know I would like to ask you some questions about your life. Can you tell me where you are from, how old you are, about your family?\n\nAer: Yes, I come from Surat Thani, I am 35 year old. I have one daughter 14 year old, but she stay with my mother in Surat Thani. (Surat Thani is a city of 130,000, approximately 330 miles south of Bangkok).\n\nHow long have you been in Bangkok?\n\nThis time I have been Bangkok about three year. First time I come I am 22 year old.\n\nAnd why did you come to Bangkok the first time?\n\nI come to work in the bar. I need money for my daughter and mother.\n\nWhat were you doing in Surat Thani that you didn't make enough money to support them?\n\nI work in small mini-store shop. Cashier. My friend work in Bangkok and she tell me I can come to there and make money more.\n\nWhat was your salary at the shop?\n\nMy salary about 150 baht every day, I work about ten hour, 11 hour every day. My friend tell me I can make 1,000 baht and more in Bangkok every day.\n\nDid you know what you would be doing and did that bother you at all?\n\nYes, a little. I know I will work in a bar. I think maybe I will have sex with customer \u2013 foreigner. But I think I will not do for so long. Maybe six month or one year.\n\nSo you came to Bangkok with your friend, and what happened?\n\nShe work waitress at go-go bar in Patpong. Was different then. Now is big market, have many many bars. I work waitress with my friend. Have salary 4,000 baht every month but can get money from drink if customer buy for me. And if go with customer can get bar fine money and money from customer.\n\nSo how much did you start to make?\n\nAt first I don't go with customer. I'm a little shy. But one guy have a friend want to take my friend, and he want to take me. So I go with him. I think bar fine about 400 baht, and he give me 1,500 baht. We stay all night with them in nice hotel.\n\nWhat did you think after, about going with someone who paid for sex with you?\n\n(Thinking, then shrugs) Was okay. Hard to remember now. I was different girl then.\n\nHow is that?\n\nI think I only have to do for one year. I think everyone will be nice like that man. But I scare about the sex.\n\nAnd now, what's different?\n\n(Laughing) Many thing. I have been working like this for 13 year. I know everyone not so nice (laughing again). And I not scare about sex.\n\nWhat do you think about the sex?\n\nI like it. I like sex. For me it is good. Not every time, but I like to do sex. So this is good job for me, true? (Laughing)\n\nBetter than not liking it. I've talked to many women who say they don't like it, they say they just do it for the money.\n\n(Laughing) I not do for free. But I enjoy to be with a man. I only go with man I think I like. But that is now, before I go with many man I don't like.\n\nOkay, so how many men did you go with when you started? And how much money do you think you were making?\n\nOh, long time ago. I go with maybe two or three customer in one week. I think money I make is about 20,000 baht for when I start. I am very happy.\n\nSo you thought you had made the right decision?\n\nYes, I thought working in the bar was good idea. Money is good, people are fun.\n\nDid you go back to see your daughter and mother?\n\nSometime. On the holiday. Songkran, Mother Day, Loy Kratong. And [the] birthday [of] my daughter. 22 February.\n\nThen what happened in your life? Did you start to dance or work in other kinds of bars?\n\nI stay bar in Patpong about one year, always waitress. Then I go bar in Nana Plaza, work waitress there. Then I work bar beer in Pattaya, two or three year, come back to Bangkok. But I also go to Europe three time.\n\nTell me about going to Europe. Was it with a customer you met?\n\nFirst time I work in Patpong bar some man ask me to come Austria, but I cannot. I have my daughter [and she] is only one year old. And I not know where Austria is. So I say no. But I meet a man at bar in Pattaya. I know him one week, I ask him can I come to Holland, he say \"Okay\". I am shock, but I go. We get passport and ticket and visa and I go Holland. I stay about three month.\n\nWhat did you think of Holland?\n\nOh, very nice. People are nice. It is summer the first time, so weather is nice. I go back again to see this man around New Year and weather very cold. I only stay one month (laughing).\n\nSo was this guy your boyfriend? How long did your relationship with him last and what happened in the end?\n\nYes, he boyfriend almost five year. I go Holland three time, one time is for more than one year. He come [to] Thailand. He send money for me so I don't work bar. I work bar but not go with customer. I think maybe someday we get marry. But he meet some Holland lady and leave me. I am very sad for long time.\n\nSo you went back to work?\n\nYes, what can I do?\n\nHave you had any other boyfriends since that time?\n\n(Thinking) No, not like that man. Have many regular customer, no boyfriend.\n\nWhat makes someone a boyfriend and not a customer?\n\nThey take care [of the girl]. Give money for family and the girl not have to work in bar, maybe give money to have shop or go to school.\n\nNot love?\n\nThat is love. If pay for everything, then that show love.\n\nSo after you split up with your Dutch boyfriend, what happened?\n\nI work more in bar. I go Singapore and work.\n\nDo you mean that you worked in bars in Singapore? For how long?\n\nYes, in the disco and hotel. I go three times. Stay two weeks, one week and one time more than six month. But that time was last time and I overstay visa and have to come back on bus. I very happy to see Thailand again.\n\nWhy did you go to Singapore? Do you make more money there?\n\nOh yes, can make a lot of money there. But a little bit dangerous. How? Police try to catch Thai lady work at disco and hotel.\n\nSo how do Thai girls get to work there?\n\nWe can go to Singapore, get tourist visa. But immigration ask many question. \"Why you come here? How long you stay? Where you stay? Where is your money?\" If cannot show money and hotel, have to go back [to] Thailand.\n\nSo you get a tourist visa?\n\nYes, can get one-week or two-week visa. Then go to Geylang Street. Find many Thai girl, many Chinese girl, some Vietnam girl. And many customer. But many police, too. If police catch they take [you] to jail. And if not have aeroplane ticket to go home, you must stay jail maybe one week or two week, try have friend send money for ticket. If cannot, [you will] have problem. Police in the jail cut hair, sometime the tom (closest translation would be \"butch\") police lady slap the girl. Sometime take money. So not good to have police catch.\n\nAnd you never got caught by the police?\n\nNo, never. But many time have to run away. Go to top of hotel and climb to next building, like a monkey (laughing). One time I am running away from police lady with my friend and police lady grab her hair. But my friend have, what do you call, wig? Yes, she have wig and policeman pull her hair and hair come off. We run away. Very funny. We go to disco and bar Orchard Tower, everyone know that place. If in disco must find someone to say \"this my girlfriend\" if police come in. Same shopping, better to go with some foreigner.\n\nSo to take that chance you must be able to make a lot of money.\n\nYes. Money can make a lot. For sex sometime can get 300 Singapore dollar (equal to approximately 250USD or 7,500 Thai baht). For short time can get 150 or 200 Singapore dollar. Sometime have two customer, three customer one night. And in daytime can get five or six customer one day. But can get only 50 Singapore dollar. One day I have ten customer. Yes, can make good money.\n\nYou had sex with that many men in one day?\n\nYes. You think is a bad thing, yes? But I don't think that. I take care of my mother and my daughter and I take care myself. Sex is what I do. Maybe I cannot explain to someone. But I am a good person, I think. I do not hurt other people. I don't do something wrong with my money. No drugs, no gamble, no alcohol.\n\nSo you returned to Thailand and have been working in the sex business for how long now?\n\n13 year.\n\nAnd now? You're happy working in the bar?\n\nIt is okay. I am waitress. I can make money very good. I meet many people. I have friend like Sine. I have many customer.\n\nWhat do you think about it all now \u2013 do you wish you had done something different with your life or are you okay with it?\n\nMany time I think about if I don't start to work in a bar. What would my life be like today? Maybe I will find out in my next life (smiling). I have choose to do this life. I am okay; sometime lonely, sometime sad, sometime happy.\n\nAnd what about the future? What do you want to do?\n\n(Thinking) Not sure. Now I work the bar, meet more customer. I hope my dream come true, that my daughter have a good life and is happy. And maybe my man in Holland come back to me.\n\nUPDATE: I ran into Aer and Sine having dinner a few months after the interviews and asked them how things were going:\n\nAer: Yes, good. I have good man take care [of] me for two week. Pay bar, we go to see my daughter and mother together.\n\nSine (smiling): Handsome man!\n\nSo, is this going to be a new boyfriend?\n\nAer: (frowning) I don't think so. Before I think so but now he go home to Europe already more than two week, he never call me. So I think no.\n\nThat's too bad. Did you like him?\n\nAer: Sure, he take care of me and daughter and mother. We have good time together. But now maybe finish. Mai phen rai (This is a popular expression in Thai culture, here meaning \"it doesn't matter\" or \"no big deal\").\n\nAnd Sine, how about you, any news from your old boyfriend?\n\nSine: No, (shrugs) I think maybe he never come to me again. Maybe I find new man to make me happy again.\n\nAer: We find together. One man for you and one man for me (smiling and touching Sine's shoulder).\n\nSine: I don't think so. But I don't want to think like that. I want to think like you, and we find love.\n\nAer: Sorry, we must go work. Good luck to you.\n\nThanks, and good luck to both of you!\n\nSine: Thank you! I hope so. \n25\n\nFa and Eve: \"Maybe next life I will be famous and rich\"\n\nSukhumvit Road in Bangkok begins underneath an elevated toll-way. It runs southeast through the city, and is home to two of the three major adult entertainment areas for tourists. Sitting on Sukhumvit Road, approximately one kilometre from its beginning, is an underground \"coffee shop\" well known to ex-pats and tourists. The girls can sit for free, they aren't required to buy a drink, as they are the draw for the drink buying customers, who come from Europe, North and South America and Asia. I met Fa and Eve at an upstairs bar, where they were getting ready to head down to \"work\". They had heard about the book project from a friend, who passed on word that they were interested in talking to us, in exchange for drinks while they talked. They were both in make-up and dresses you might see at a high school prom in the U.S.. Fa's was red, Eve's a dark blue. Fa has long black hair, Eve's is short and dyed a reddish brown.\n\nQ: Hi Fa and Eve, thanks for talking to me. You know why I want to speak with you, right?\n\nFa: Yes, our friends tell us you write the book about girls who work at the bar.\n\nEve: Yes.\n\nGood, can you tell me where you are from and how old you are?\n\nFa: I am 22 year old. I come from ----, that is a small village very near to Cambodia. When I was little girl we walk and ride bicycle to village in Cambodia. Everyone very friendly. Today is different, because have a problem with temple and land. Have some soldier in my village and also in Cambodia.\n\nEve: Me, I am also 22 year old. I am also from Isaan, and near Cambodia, about 20 kilometre.\n\nWhat about your families \u2013 do you have brothers and sisters? What do your parents do?\n\nEve: In my family there are me and three children more. I have three brothers, older. My family have a small restaurant, sell rice and chicken and pork, some fish.\n\nFa: My family have only me now. I have one brother, he was soldier before, but he go to the south of Thailand and he die.\n\nI'm very sorry to hear that. Did he die in the fighting that is happening in the south? (Note: in the four southern-most provinces there has been an ongoing clash between the government and groups who have been described as Muslim separatists, with bombings and shootings. Since 2004 there have been over 4,000 deaths. It is reported there are over 30,000 government troops in the area).\n\nFa: He have accident. About maybe two year ago. They tell my father and mother about a bomb. My father and mother still sad too much. My mother she cry everyday for long time. We are luk faet (twins). So now is only me.\n\nWell, again, very sorry to hear that. Were you still at home when it happened or where you in Bangkok?\n\nFa: I am in Sa Kaeo, is town near my home. I work there on farm for melon.\n\nAnd how did you come to do that?\n\nFa: I go there when I am 18. There is no work in my village, only to sell something to people from Cambodia. We have no tourist there. So [a] friend [of] my father tell him I can work farm and earn salary about 3,000 baht to plant and pick up the melon. So I go.\n\nAnd how was the work?\n\nFa: Oh, very, very hard. Have to work in big field, check the melon to see if finish, then put in bag. Work all day, have only one day off every month. I live with many worker together. (Laughs) I get strong, but no like too much. When my brother die I come home and then come to Bangkok for work.\n\nAnd what did you do in Bangkok then?\n\nFa: (looking surprised) I do this. Work bar.\n\nYou came to Bangkok knowing you would be working like this? Were you afraid? What did you think about it?\n\nFa: (shrugs her shoulders) I think it will be better than to work on a farm. I have sex before with boys from Sa Kaeo. Only two. But every girl in Issan know about come to Bangkok or Pattaya and be bar girl. Money is good for us.\n\nBut you didn't think there was anything else you could do? Even in Bangkok, like be a maid or work in a restaurant?\n\nFa: (thinks for a moment, then shrugs) No. Why work at job like that? Can make only salary a little, same as work on farm. I have to take care my mother and father, they have no son now.\n\nDo you think that if your brother had not died you would not be doing this?\n\n(Fa looks at Eve and they whisper back and forth)\n\nFa: No, I would do this I think if my brother not dead. This life is not so bad.\n\nEve, do you feel the same way, that this life is not so bad? And how did you end up working?\n\nEve: (shrugs her shoulders) Yes, this life is okay for me. I have my friend Fa, we have more friends. We do this together. I also come about two year ago. I come and work Thai massage, but work is too hard and salary is not enough.\n\nDid you work massage here in Bangkok? And what was your salary?\n\nEve: Yes, I work massage in Bangkok, near to here. My salary is about 4,000 baht for month, must work everyday. Start ten o'clock in morning, finish midnight. If do massage get small tip, maybe 50 baht. Yes, was Thai massage only, no sex. I learn in massage school in Korat (large city in northeast Thailand).\n\nAnd now how much do you make in one month?\n\nFa: If have many customer come, can make 25,000 baht one month, sometime more. But in low season, no customer, maybe only 10,000 baht.\n\nEve: (nodding her head) Yes, some night have good customer, or two customer, can make 2,000 or 3,000 baht. Sometime not have customer three or four day.\n\nSo sometimes you have more than one customer in a night?\n\nEve: (giving a quizzical look) Yes, why not? We have to make money.\n\nFa: (nodding) Yes, if some man want me and then another want me I can go. Because some night have no customer.\n\nHow much do you charge a customer?\n\nFa: For short time, about 1,500 baht. I do not go with customer for long time.\n\nEve: Same for short time. I will go for long time if pay me 3,000 baht.\n\nFa, why won't you go for the whole night?\n\nFa: Don't like. Customer want sex too much, or maybe in morning not want to pay or have some problem like that. Better go home in night.\n\nAnd what do you think about selling sex? Does it ever make you feel bad, what you do?\n\nFa: (thinks for a moment) If the man is nice and friendly, no, no problem for me. I feel I can do for the customer and then he pay and we finish.\n\nYou mean you forget about the sex after it is over?\n\nFa: Yes. For me it is job. Better than work farm. Why you don't understand?\n\nWell, many people would say you are selling yourself, that it is not a good thing to be doing.\n\nEve: I work massage, work very hard, I go to my room after and my finger hurt and hand and arm, everything. I tired too much, and then go work again next time. Same everyday. Is that good? Now, I work bar I can go nine o'clock, ten o'clock at night. Have customer one hour, can go home or find more customer. Can go disco or eat with friend, relax. I don't mind this work.\n\nNeither of you has talked about children, do you have any?\n\nEve: No.\n\nFa: No.\n\nDo you think about the future? About getting married, having children?\n\nEve: Yes, I will do this maybe two or three years more. Then I will open massage school in my village or in Korat. I have certificate. And I will give money to my parents. For me, I don't want to get married now. Maybe later. And have a family. That would make my parents happy. But now I am still young. So I can do this and then I have a new life.\n\nFa, what about you?\n\nFa: Yes, I would like to have two children, one boy and one girl. And I can take care [of] them and they will go to school and be very happy. But for husband I don't know. I want good man, but where to find? Men always butterfly, you know, playboy. And Thai man drink too much and many are no good to wife. So I don't know. Maybe can find good foreign man for husband. Can buy house and I can take care [of] him and children and house.\n\nSo Fa, how much longer do you think you will work like this?\n\nFa: Not sure. I am young, same [as] Eve. I want to have money for me. So I don't know. Maybe three year, five year?\n\nWhat do you think about the customers? Do you like any of them? Would you marry one or have one for a boyfriend if they asked you not to work?\n\nEve: Marry customer? I don't think so, but I know some girl have foreign husband, so maybe. I don't think about that. Customer is customer. You see the person work 7-Eleven shop? What they think about the customer there? Nothing. I think the same [as] them.\n\nFa: If the customer is friendly and happy, I like to go with them. They make me laugh, buy drink, I think they are good person. Yes, if some man tell me \"now you don't work like this, I give you money for family and room and food,\" sure, okay, I stop for him. But who do that? I know some girl stop for man maybe one month, two month, then man don't want no more. Girl have broken heart, and seea nah (lose face), have to come back bar, everybody say \"Oh, what happen you boyfriend?\" It okay if have gold or can show money in bank, but if cannot, then no good for girl. But if I can find a good man with good heart who want to take care [of] me, okay I can stay with him.\n\nWhat about when you have sex with customers, do you worry about HIV, do you always use a condom?\n\nFa: Yes, always or no sex. I will not do sex without condom. I not want to be sick and die. No money, no honey (laughing). But no condom, no sex.\n\nEve: I am same. Sometime lady not use condom, have some problem, or get pregnant. I don't want.\n\nWell, that's good to hear. Anything else you want to say? What do you think about a book about you and your friends, your lives? Both of you seem like you don't think that this life is hard.\n\nEve: Sometime I am lonely, I know my family not know what I do. This life is not so easy, but it is not so hard like before and for some other girl I know in my village. So my life is okay, I like some thing, I don't like some thing. Maybe next life I will be famous and rich, and have very good life. (Laughs)\n\nFa: Book is English book? The book good for foreign man. They can know about Thai lady. Some guy should be careful. We know about man come here, drink too much, give lady money too much, want to marry, have a big problem. Maybe this man can find me and give me money (laughing). We want man to be happy, but we want to be happy, too.\n26\n\nDto and Dak: \"I dream a good man will want to marry me\"\n\nDto and Dak are Vietnamese women who work the nightclubs and bars of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. They worked their way out of the infamous K-11 brothels, and now live together in Phnom Penh.\n\nQ: Hello Dak and Dto. Thank you for talking with me. I just want to find out about your lives and what you think about your work. Please tell me about yourselves \u2013 how old are you, where do you come from?\n\nDto: I am 24 years old. I come from Vietnam. My mama and poppa, they live in Vietnam, near the border with Cambodia. They stay in a village there with many other families. The village [is] very poor. That is where we come from. Everyone there try to be a farmer but sometime it is not so good and very hard to make enough money for everyone to eat. So my friend Dak and me, we came to Phnom Penh to live and earn money to send home to our families.\n\nDak: I come here to Phnom Penh with my friend Dak about almost three years ago. Now I am 20 years old. My family live in Vietnam. They also are very poor. I have no father. I have my mother, two sister and two brother.\n\nDid your families want you to come here?\n\nDto: My mother cry when we leave. My father not home when we leave. He working. But is better to help my family. They have not enough to eat and my parents are old.\n\nDak: My family cry too. My sister are young. They do not understand why I have to go.\n\nDid your families know what you came here to do, how you would earn your money?\n\nDak: Yes, my mother know. But not my sister or brother. Sometimes I am scared and feel alone, but I know this what is best for me, to send money home to my father and my brothers. My father die about eight year ago. He riding on the motorcycle, and have accident with bus. I was in school. It was very hard for family. We all very sad. I have to leave school and work in small shop, clean fish, but I cannot make enough money for family. I miss my father very much. Sometime I think if he did not die, he would not have let his daughter have life like I have. But now I can only do what I know is best for my family.\n\nDto: Yes, my mother know, and my father. My mother talk to me, tell me to not be afraid. What I will do I will do so my family can have a better life. Then I can come back someday and it will be okay. My father he does not talk to me before I leave.\n\nWhat were your lives like in Vietnam? You say you were poor \u2013 did you go to school? Did you have enough to eat?\n\nDak: My house at home has one room for everyone. Toilet is outside. When I was little girl we don't have light, but now we do. But we are poor \u2013 have food but nothing more. One bicycle. Motorcycle? No, not after my father die. Always wear old clothes, when I was little I don't have shoe. I go to school sometimes, but have to work more.\n\nDto: I have nothing. I try to go to Ho Chi Minh City to work, but many people try to work there, and it dangerous. I don't learn so much in school. I can read and write, but our school never have computer.\n\nOkay, I am asking this because it might be hard for people who don't know to understand how working here \u2013 selling your body \u2013 is better than being poor on the farm in Vietnam, or working in a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City.\n\nDto: If I work farm my life will never be better. If I work in restaurant it is a very hard life. And still work for little money.\n\nDak: Yes, we cannot get job in city, we are country girl \u2013 people treat us bad.\n\nBut if you could, would you leave this life here in Cambodia?\n\nDak: I want to go home every day, but we must do what we must do.\n\nDto: I pray that will happen \u2013 to leave this place.\n\nWhat can you tell us about your lives now?\n\nDto: Now I live in a room not too far from here, with my friend Dak. It is small room; we have only one bed, we sleep together. Sometime it is noisy, because some other people in the house get drunk. And there are also many dogs around. For our room we pay $2 every day. I have to send money home to my mama and papa. When we come to Cambodia first time, we work in house (K-11) because we have friends [there] who came to Phnom Penh to work. Our friends in Phnom Penh met many men from Japan and America and Europe and send money home and help their family. Sure we know what the job is to be, but we want to come so our families can eat. We come three years ago. First we have to work in the house, because the mamasan let us live there and earn money. But sometime it was very bad. At first I did not like it and cry all the time with Dak. We had to have sex with any man who come to the house. If he like the girl, the girl cannot say no. Sometime they not give girl tip, sometime girl get $1 or $5. Sometime I had to go with three or four or five men one day. We stay there for more than one year. But then we pay [the] mamasan and now we live here, and go to some bars in town. I like to meet the men, some are very nice, but I have problem because I can only speak a little English and they cannot speak Vietnamese. But now we try to go with men we like. Sometime if I need money I will go with men I do not like, even if they are drunk, but I try not to do that. Sometimes they get mad because they cannot make love.\n\nSo are you sad about your life?\n\nDak: Sometimes sad. Many Khmer (Cambodian) girls here do not like us because men like the Vietnam girl more. They say we are more beautiful. So I am sad because we have not too many friends sometimes.\n\nDto: I am not sad. I know I will have a happy life someday. Maybe sometime I will meet a man who has a big house in America and he will marry me. I look at books and movies about America and think I would like to live there. I think I can make good wife for a man in America. I would like a man who can take care of me and send money to my family. I want to have children, maybe many if my husband is a good man. I want to learn about computers and then I can get a good job to take care of my children and father and mother.\n\nWhat do you think about the men you meet?\n\nDto: I like to meet men at the discos. When they are nice and buy me drinks and dance with me. Sometime I like to make love, but not if the man tells me to go home when he finish. Sometime I go with a man to beautiful room at hotel and want to stay, be in big bed and watch TV.\n\nDak: Many men are nice, many are not so nice. Now I try to know the man before I go with him.\n\nHave either of you had a customer be your boyfriend?\n\nDto: I do not have a boyfriend. Before, I met a man who stay about three weeks and I stay with him. He say he will find me when he come back. Some very nice men I remember. I have one man from Europe who wrote me a letter once, but I could not understand it, I hope he said he remember me and love me. I want to see him again if he come back to Cambodia.\n\nDak: No, I waiting (laughs). Maybe sometime I will have a boyfriend, and a husband, but now I have no one like that.\n\nDo you ever get to go home and see your families?\n\nDak: No. I have not seen my family now for three years. They write me a letter sometime, and sometime some friend bring a picture to me.\n\nDto: Same as my friend. I never go to see them. I will see them when I go home to live.\n\nDo you get lonely, miss your families?\n\nDak: I think we get lonely and miss our families very much. But we cannot go home because they are too poor and we have to help them by working here.\n\nDto: I miss my family. Everyday. But I know what I must do. Later I want to buy a house for my parents and live in the country with them.\n\nSo even though you have to work like you do, is it better here or in Vietnam?\n\nDto: Yes, it is better here than Vietnam. Here I can make $40 or $50 in one night, sometimes more if I have some good luck. The man I stayed with for three week, he pay me more than $500! I did not have to go out to work. He buy me food, clothes, he let Dak come with us to eat and shop.\n\nWhat about the future \u2013 how long do you think you will be here?\n\nDak: I want to go back soon, but I do not know. When I go back, maybe with a husband. I want to have two children with good father. In maybe one or two years that is what I want.\n\nWe are talking to you so we can write what you say in a book. What do you want to say about your life to people who will read the book?\n\nDto: I like to talk about my life for the book; maybe a good man will read about me and want to marry me (smiling).\n\nDak: I think it is a good thing if many people learn about what my life is like. Sometime my life is good, and I am happy. Sometimes it is not good, but what can I do. This is my life here.\n27\n\nEd, the bar owner: \"Don't mistake your fun for reality\"\n\nThe city of Pattaya is located on the Gulf of Thailand approximately 150 kilometres southeast of Bangkok. It is estimated that in high season (November through April) Pattaya's population peaks at around 105,000 Thai and foreign residents, with that number dropping to as low as 70,000 during the low season, as tourists and Thai workers head home.\n\nIn April 1961 the first of what would eventually be thousands of American servicemen landed in the town for a bit of rest and relaxation before shipping off to Vietnam. Pattaya changed from a small fishing village to one of the most famous getaways on the planet.\n\n\"Ed\" is the owner of a beer bar in Pattaya. He first came to Pattaya in 1965 and has lived there since 1985. He provided me with his insights on the city and ownership of a bar in Thailand.\n\nQ: Ed, thanks for meeting with me. You're a bar owner here; there seems to be no shortage of foreigners willing to invest in the bar scene. What's your feeling on that?\n\nEd: In one word? Don't. We have a saying here: the surest way to end up with a million dollars in Thailand is to start with three. I ended up with this place by accident. I suppose it's all been worthwhile, but there's easier ways to make a living, for sure.\n\nDo you want to explain \"the accident\" that got you into this?\n\nIt's a long story, it involves several decades.\n\nThat's no problem. Can you start with your introduction to Thailand?\n\nYeah, that's way back. I was an 18 year old gung-ho U.S. Marine. I had wanted to leave home in Texas and joining the Marines was a sure way to do that. We were training the South Vietnamese Army, mostly in crowd control, but in other things too, and they (the U.S. Army) had been flying guys over to Thailand for a couple of years for \"R&R\". Then I guess someone got the idea to truck the guys from the air bases out in the country, down to the beach. A little town called Pattaya. My first trip was from Bangkok in the back of a big green truck; there were probably eight or 12 of us bouncing around, trying to drink cans of beer. We couldn't see the road, but it couldn't have been paved. It took three hours (note: that same trip today takes an hour and a half). When we got out and looked around we said \"What the hell?\" There was nothing but a couple of green huts on the beach. The streets were dirt paths, there were no streetlights. You could see stars and hear the waves washing up on shore. I remember that. It reminded me of a desert island. But there were girls waiting for us. Literally lined up. Country girls down to make money. We were just dropped off and they told us \"See you in five days\". There were no MP's to watch over us like today. There was nothing to do though. Well, sit on the beach, drink and have sex with the girls. The USO (United Service Organization) or someone tried to put together a couple of cultural shows \u2013 singing and dancing, but there wasn't much interest (laughing). We got around by hiring what were called samlors \u2013 bicycles; well, tricycles really, and two people could sit on the back while an old Thai guy pedaled away.\n\nYou said the girls were lined up, what was their attitude towards you? We've heard that the reason guys preferred R&R in Thailand to Hong Kong was that the women were friendlier.\n\nOh yeah. The women in Hong Kong were notorious for being expensive and cold. You knew they only wanted money, and as much as they could get. Pretty much the same in Vietnam, and of course the Catholics had been into Vietnam and told them all they'd burn in hell for having sex. But Thailand was different. They had that Thai sanook (fun) attitude. Thais in general had a very relaxed attitude towards sex \u2013 more puritan views came in, I think anyway, as a reaction to what happened.\n\nAnd what happened?\n\nWell, as soon as word got out that girls were making 500 baht a night, there were bus-loads of girls arriving from the provinces. Some Thai entrepreneurs opened up beer bars, then go-go bars and then the sex shows.\n\nWasn't that going on in Bangkok? What was the scene there?\n\nNot in the beginning. Soi Cowboy (a street full of go-go and beer bars in downtown Bangkok) only had one or two bars on it. The first one was opened by a black guy from Houston, he was retired Air Force \u2013 \"Cowboy\" \u2013 that's who the street is named after. There was the Lone Star Bar across and down the road, which was a big hang-out for, well, let's just say guys who were into \"classified\" stuff. If you weren't recognized no one would say much to you. But as the numbers of Americans grew, so did the bar scene. Chiang Mai (the largest city in northern Thailand) was a village, it had only one bar, the Blue Moon. That's long gone now.\n\nWere there a lot of Americans in Bangkok at that time?\n\nUnless you were around the embassy or JUSMAG (military headquarters) you stood out. By '68 and '69 things had picked up. There were an incredible number of people behind the scenes of the war. Do you know that for every grunt on the front lines there were something like 20 people sitting in offices connected with the war? And a whole lot of them were in Thailand. \"REMFs\" we called them \"Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers\".\n\nSo you saw the whole scene grow?\n\nYeah, but the feeling was very different. It wasn't a bunch of folks on holiday. We were into some serious business in Vietnam and this was a place to come and get rid of a load of pressure, so it was fun, yeah, but it wasn't exactly what you think of as a holiday. But by '72 I had gone back to the states. I came in and out over the next few years, but only on short assignments. I did manage to meet my wife on one of those assignments though. By '84 I'd put my 20 years in, I was stationed in Hawaii, and it just seemed like the right time to retire. Only thing was I wasn't sure what the hell to do. Then a buddy of mine said, \"Let's buy a little hotel in Thailand, rent out a few rooms and live for free.\" Now I knew it wasn't going to be that easy, but I figured, \"What the hell,\" so we went 50\/50 on this small guest house. Six months later my buddy goes home to Easton, Pennsylvania \u2013 where the fighter Larry Holmes is from \u2013 gets religion, and tells me keep the whole thing, he's done with a life of sin. So, here I am. I put in a little restaurant, catered mostly to service related people. I did pretty well, there was no bar attached, but as time went on it became apparent that I'd have to have a bit more to draw in the customers, that's just the way it was. So my wife \u2013 we've been together on and off, mostly on, for 30 years \u2013 put out the word that we were looking for a few \"hostesses\" and I had more applying than I knew what to do with. Just like in the beginning with the guest house it was mostly customers we knew, but as time goes on, you know, things change. It became a business, a break-even business. You can't live on what the bar takes in. If you're any kind of a person you have to pay the girls a decent salary. What do I pay them? More than most, let's say. Anyone abroad would probably be shocked, but it's a decent wage for the girls here. And they get 50 baht for every drink bought for them and half the bar fine if they want to go with a customer.\n\nDo the girls have a choice in whether to go with a customer or not?\n\nOh yeah, we wouldn't force anyone to do anything. The bar fine is 500 baht before midnight, 300 after. Whatever the girls work out with their friend is up to them. What do they get? I would guess most of them between 1,500 \u2013 2,000 baht for all night.\n\nDo you require the girls to get medical check-ups for HIV and STDs?\n\nYes. No exceptions. Every month. I pay for it, too. And we give the girls condoms. It's for the protection of them and the customer.\n\nSo what's not to love about the business?\n\nHA! Where to start? There's payoffs. To who? Who do you think? Do you know that for police officers, being assigned here is one of the most sought after posts? They have to buy their assignment here. And they make that back through collecting, shall we say, dues. For what? Liquor license, check to make sure you don't have unlicensed music on your system, not open too late or serving liquor on holidays. They might stop by every so often just to say hello, make sure everything is okay. If I'm lucky I can get off handing out a bottle of whiskey. There's always something. Then you've got the girls. We try to be careful about who we hire \u2013 no druggies, nobody who gets out of hand drunk. But it happens. And the girls will fight at the drop of a hat. We had a little jackpot between our girls and the ones from down the street. They said our girls were talking bad about their bar. Turns out it was customers doing the talking, but we had two full blown fist-fights out in the street here in a week. No one wanted to get in the middle of it. One even had the cops come by. Two of them on a scooter. They looked at what was going on, it was three or four girls going at it, and the cops just drove slowly around them and kept on going down the street, didn't even get off the scooter. And you've watched the Thai soap operas? Seems like the girls need their lives to be just as dramatic, if not more, than what's on television. Don't get me wrong, most of them have good hearts, but many of them aren't well educated. A rumour starts and it's impossible to convince them it might not be true. Like what? You can or can't get HIV from doing this or that. Last year it was a ghost was dragging girls into the water at the beach south of here. So there's that. There's dealing with the customers \u2013 they fall in love, or what they think is love with the girls. You can share your experiences with them, but they insist, \"This one is different.\" There are so many problems \u2013 most of these girls are, like I said, not very worldly. Their life experience is a village in the north or northeast of Thailand and the bars of Pattaya or Bangkok. Many of them have been abused as kids, taken out of school at eight, nine or ten years old. Their English is limited. I tell them \"Take her to a buffet at one of these big hotels, see how it goes.\" They won't eat food they aren't familiar with. Give them a choice of spicy papaya salad and a fillet and they'll go for the good old Som Tom every time. If the temperature here drops to 60 degrees (Fahrenheit) they put on hats and gloves and sweaters. You're going to bring a girl like that to Chicago or Sweden? Good luck. But they think you're trying to break them apart, keep the girl at the bar. Man, I'm trying to save them both from a lot of grief.\n\nI've talked to a few girls who have gone through that \u2013 going abroad and then learning they miss Thailand and their families.\n\nRight, and the families. When you hook up with one of these girls, you're getting the whole family in the deal. Mother, father, siblings, grandma and grandpa. And their kids, if they have them. Some of them still have husbands back in the village. The girls are under tremendous pressure to support the family, and believe me, the family will always come first. Let's say a couple have a house or condo here in town. The family will come for a visit. Some of them will go home in a week or two, but then the guy finds there's a brother or cousin who stayed behind and suddenly has a job down the street. What are you going to do, throw the kid out? You can't. The girl will lose face. And there's been more than once when the poor guy finds out the cousin isn't a cousin \u2013 he's the husband from the village. So can you trust any of them? It's the same with any profession, right? Lawyers, salesmen, whatever. Some are honest, some just aren't. The last thing I'll say about that is, if you do get involved, make sure you are worth more alive than dead. Do a little internet search. More than a few farang husbands have ended up dead in fairly mysterious circumstances. Their big mistake? \"Yes honey, don't worry. If anything happens to me, you get the house and pick-up truck and X amount of baht.\" I guess this all sounds pretty depressing, but it's the realistic side of things. Are there \"happily ever after\" couples out there? Probably. But there's far more tales of woe.\n\nWhat about you and your wife \u2013 you said you'd been together 30 years. Any words of wisdom from your own experience?\n\nI knew when we got together I was in it for the long haul. She, and I know you hear this all the time, but I swear its true; and you know what's coming, right? She was not a bar girl. She was in teacher's college, her family is from Chonburi, just up the road. I was respectable, too. She finished college, taught elementary school, then when I ended up with the place on my own she asked if she could help. I couldn't have done it without her, as it turns out. Anyways, her parents weren't thrilled, but I had been an officer and I was impressive in my uniform. Her father's friends were impressed, anyway. So that won him over in the beginning. And later on I said, \"Don't worry I will always make sure she is taken care of.\" That's really what he wanted to hear. Not \"I'll make her happy, I'll never cheat on her, I'll love her each and every hour of every day.\" He wanted to hear \"I'll take care of her\". See, at least to her generation and before, that's what \"love\" is all about. I don't know what they're thinking today, maybe western movies and Thai television have changed things, but for many years here love has been about providing. Probably about what it was like in the states in the 1800's. So you have to learn to adapt. There's books written about this culture stuff. When they say it's difficult, it's nothing to laugh at. Be patient, be cool. Thais don't respond well to public displays of anger. Do not, do not, make someone \"lose face\" \u2013 lose respect, especially in front of others. Don't expect them to plan a lot of things out carefully in advance. It's pay as you go. If you're good at taking things in your stride, you're fine. If you're not, stay in New York or Frankfurt or wherever.\n\nThat's a big part of why I'm talking to you. There is the realistic side that people don't or won't see. You said your wife comes from a nice family, who are not in the bar business, and now she helps you out. Isn't that unusual? Don't most \"good families\" want nothing to do with the business?\n\nWell, that has a lot to do with the on and off of the relationship. At first she left when we talked about adding a bar. But then she thought she'd be better off being a partner and keeping an eye on me than walking away from it all. Thais know this place (Pattaya) exists. Hell, as big as the scene in Pattaya is, it's nothing compared to the business that caters to the Thais and Chinese, and the Koreans and Japanese. You go out in parts of Bangkok and you'll think you've wandered into Las Vegas it's so lit up. All big massage parlours; 400, 500 girls. And if you ain't Asian, chances are you ain't getting in. So in answer to your question, she thinks it's better if she takes care of the girls and keeps tabs on me and the bar.\n\nBack to the bar \u2013 what's the economic reality?\n\nAh, the money (laughing). I break even. Maybe make a little during high season, but run at a loss in low season. I try not to lay any of the girls off. Some of [them] go home for the Songkran holiday (Thai New Year in mid-April) and don't come back until October. But if I didn't have the pension coming in, I'd be broke. Truth is I've been trying to sell the place for awhile, but apparently there aren't that many people out there wanting to start a new lucrative life (laughing). Actually I get a few calls, but maybe I'm too honest about what's involved. I don't want anyone getting into something they have no idea about.\n\nI'll tell you a story; it didn't happen here, happened in a town on the other side of the gulf, but someone here ended up with the bar. Young kid from England bought a small place \u2013 just a bar and a few tables, nothing fancy. Paid a million baht upfront for the rent, license, the liquor, chairs, tables. Opened up, put in a small sound system. Police come by. \"Music fee\" is 30,000 baht. He had bought a TV and a few DVD's. They pulled the DVD's \u2013 copies. 20,000 baht \"fine\". He couldn't get beer or liquor or even soda on credit. His wife hired the girls, but she had no experience, so the girls were a disaster. Got drunk, got advances on their salaries and never came back. It took just under a year, know what he sold for? 100,000 baht. I heard he bought a ticket back home with the money. That's what you don't want to happen.\n\nSo what is your personal feeling about the girls, their lives \u2013 do you feel sorry for them?\n\nHuh. I guess in a way I do. Very few do this out of really free choice. Like I said, there's a lot of pressure to support the family. They come from poverty most westerners can't imagine. There's very little hope of going to high school or university, of getting a decent job. Work in a leather factory or a bar. There's more money in the bar job, and in the end, who's to say which is better for them?\n\nSo what's the answer?\n\nFor the whole deal? There isn't one. This, prostitution in Thailand, was going on long before we white folks arrived. And if we all disappeared tomorrow it would go on some more. But for individual girls? Sure, education, if you could find some way to pay for it. They may not be worldly, but they aren't stupid by any means. But then you'd have to get them to go. Send them to a computer or English or beauty school, if they could be motivated they'd do well. But then you've got some that like what they do, hard as that might be for folks to take in.\n\nDo you ever feel like what you are doing isn't quite, ah, respectable?\n\nYeah, I guess if I told folks back in Cleveland, [or] Texas, \"Hey, I run a bar in Thailand where you can buy a girl for an hour or a night,\" well, it doesn't sound too nice does it? But this is a different world here, different values. So no, in the circumstance of life here, I'm good with it. Unless of course someone makes me a decent offer. Then I'd be done with it.\n\nAll right, thanks for your time and insight, Ed, anything else you'd like to add?\n\nYou know, a lot of these girls have gotten a bad deal in life and are just trying to make it better for them and their families. You can have some fun, a lot of fun. I will say this, treat the girls decent and chances are they'll do the same. But don't mistake your fun for reality. And always remember, they got more experience at this game than you do.\nGlossary\n\n(*= Thai word in English)\n\nAb Nuat*: \"Bath massage\". A massage parlour where the massage includes a bath or shower with the masseuse. They are not the same as \"Thai Massage\" which are legitimate massage businesses and do not offer sex.\n\nBaht*: Thai currency. Approximately 30 baht to 1 USD; 48 baht to one British Pound; 41 baht to one Euro.\n\nBar beer: Also called \"beer bar\". An indoor or outdoor bar which, of course, sells beer. Usually, but not always, the main attraction of a \"bar beer\" is the availability of working girls.\n\nBar fine: An amount that the customer must pay the bar in order to take a worker, waitress or dancer outside. It can vary from 100 baht to 800 baht or more, depending on the bar and time of day or night, and whether for a short time or long time. The term usually used by the women is to ask the customer to \"pay bar\".\n\nButterfly: A playboy, someone who has many women in their life.\n\nChiang Mai: The largest city in Northern Thailand.\n\nChock wow*: Thai for masturbate (males); the term for women is \"took baet\".\n\nFarang*: The Thai word for \"foreigner\", it is generally used now to refer to western foreigners.\n\nGo-hok*: A lie or a liar.\n\nIsaan*: The northeast area of Thailand. The area is a rural farming area, and is the poorest area in Thailand. The majority of bar girls come from Isaan.\n\nKee-nee-ow*: A person who is cheap, a cheapskate.\n\nLong time: When a woman goes with a customer overnight.\n\nMamasan: The female manager of a bar. Her duties include everything from scheduling and paying to counseling the women and handling customers. Many of the women call the mamasan \"Maeh\", the Thai word for \"mother\".\n\nNong Kai: A fairly large town in northern Thailand, on the border with Laos.\n\nPatpong: An area of Bangkok famous for its go-go bars and sex shows, it has now been reduced to a very few bars, almost no shows and a few discos. The draw now are stalls which sell copies of designer watches, jeans, bags, etc.\n\nPattaya: A city approximately 150 kilometers southeast of Bangkok. It has been called the \"world's biggest brothel\" and the number of working women has been estimated at anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 (out of a population which has been estimated at between 75,000-100,000, depending on the area defined as \"Pattaya proper\"). For example, Jomtien is a small enclave south of Pattaya, but usually included when referring to Pattaya. There has been an effort to clean up the image of Pattaya since 2005, although still if you mention you are going to Pattaya you will get a knowing nod and a wink.\n\nPew cow*: Literally \"white skin\". In Thailand, as in much of Asia, white skin is desirable, darker skin is a sign of \"farmers\"; for which the Thai word is \"pew dahm\". Skin color is a dividing line between the classes in Thailand.\n\nPhuket: A province in southern Thailand that is an island, although connected to the mainland by bridge. It is a popular tourist destination and has a sizeable bar scene.\n\nSoi Cowboy: A one block stretch of go-go and beer bars in Bangkok.\n\nSom Tom*: Papaya salad. Very popular with people from Isaan.\n\nShort time: When a woman goes with a customer only for sex.\n\nTee-lok* (or Tee-rok): Sweetheart, lover.\n\nYaba*: Literally \"crazy drug\". It is methamphetamine sold in pill form. Manufactured in clandestine laboratories in Burma, it is widely used by Thais.\nAcknowledgements\n\nThe author would like to acknowledge the help of friends who offered encouragement and advice, including Gillian in Hoboken who told me I \"had\" to do this after hearing the idea. To Rob for his invaluable help in getting the project going, and BG, without whom it would never have been finished. I could never have been able to do this without the dedication of my translator Phapawee, who bridged many cultural gaps as well as translating. Also my brother Robert for his moral support, and the two Mikes in Pattaya. Finally, a big thanks to Maverick House for giving me a chance and to Fiona Lacey for her guidance and patience.\nPublished by Maverick House Publishers.\n\nMaverick House, Office 19, Dunboyne Business Park, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland.\n\nhttp:\/\/www.maverickhouse.com\n\ninfo@maverickhouse.com\n\nCopyright for text \u00a9 2005 G.T.Gray\n\nCopyright for typesetting, editing, layout, design\n\n\u00a9 Maverick House Publishers\n\nThe moral rights of the author have been asserted.\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nBy payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Maverick House e-books.\n\nE-book edition ISBN: 978-1-908518-12-5\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**The World Crisis**  \nPart III  \n1916\u20131918\n\nWinston S. Churchill\nCopyright\n\nThe World Crisis  \nPart III 1916\u20131918  \nFirst published 1923-31. \u00a9 Estate of Winston S. Churchill  \nCover art to the electronic edition copyright \u00a9 2013 by RosettaBooks, LLC.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.\n\nImage of Winston Churchill watching the March Past of the 47th Division at Lille, 1918 reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of The Broadwater Collection, an archive of photographs owned by the Churchill family and held at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.\n\nElectronic edition published 2013 by RosettaBooks, LLC, New York.  \nISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795331497\nTo  \nAll Who Endured\n\n# Contents\n\nI. The High Command\n\nII. The Blood Test\n\nIII. Falkenhayn's Choice\n\nIV. Verdun\n\nV. Jutland: The Preliminaries\n\nVI. Jutland: The Encounter\n\nVII. The Battle of the Somme\n\nVIII. The Roumanian Disaster\n\nIX. The Intervention of the United States\n\nX. A Political Interlude\n\nXI. General Nivelle's Experiment\n\nXII. At the Ministry of Munitions\n\nXIII. The Munitions Budget\n\nXIV. The Autumn Struggle\n\nXV. Britain Conquers the U-Boats\n\nXVI. The German Concentration in the West\n\nXVII. The Twenty-First of March\n\nXVIII. The Climax\n\nXIX. The Surprise of the Chemin des Dames\n\nXX. The Unfought Campaign\n\nXXI. The Turn of the Tide\n\nXXII. The Teutonic Collapse\n\nXXIII. Victory\n\nAppendix\n\nJ British, French and German Casualty Returns\n\nK Ally and German Battleship Strength, 1917\n\nL Ministry of Munitions Council, 1917\u201318\n\nM Munition Minutes, 1917\n\nN Mechanical Power in the Offensive\n\nO Tank Minutes\n\n# _PART III_\n# 1916\u20131918  \nCHAPTER I\n\n# THE HIGH COMMAND\n\nEurope Gripped in the Vice\u2014General Michel's Report of 1911\u2014His Dismissal\u2014Joffre Succeeds\u2014His Stability and Impartiality\u2014His Miscalculations\u2014The First Disasters\u2014Galli\u00e9ni and the Marne\u2014Victory and Reproach\u2014Galli\u00e9ni and Joffre\u2014Galli\u00e9ni, Minister of War\u2014France and the Joffre Legend\u2014Sir John French recalled\u2014The new Commander-in-Chief\u2014His Credentials\u2014Decline in Lord Kitchener's Authority\u2014His Just Fame.\n\nThe New Year's light of 1916 rising upon a frantic and miserable world revealed in its full extent the immense battlefield to which Europe was reduced and on which the noblest nations of Christendom mingled in murderous confusion. It was now certain that the struggle would be prolonged to an annihilating conclusion. The enormous forces on either side were so well matched that the injuries they must suffer and inflict in their struggles were immeasurable. There was no escape. All the combatants in both combinations were gripped in a vice from which no single State could extricate itself.\n\nThe northern Provinces of France, invaded and in German occupation, inspired the French people with a commanding impulse to drive the enemy from their soil. The trench lines on which the armies were in deadlock ran\u2014not along the frontiers, where perhaps parley would not have been impossible\u2014but through the heart of France. The appeal to clear the national territory from foreign oppression went home to every cottage and steeled every heart. Germany on the other hand, while her armies stood almost everywhere on conquered territory, could not in the full flush of her strength yield what she had gained with so much blood, nor pay forfeit for her original miscalculations, nor make reparation for the wrong she had done. Any German Dynasty or Government which had proposed so wise and righteous a course would have been torn to pieces. The French losses and the German conquests of territory thus equally compelled a continuance of the struggle by both nations. A similar incentive operated upon Russia; and in addition the belief that defeat meant revolution hardened all governing resolves. In Britain obligations of honour to her suffering Allies, and particularly to Belgium, forbade the slightest suggestion of slackening or withdrawal. And behind this decisive claim of honour there welled up from the heart of the island race a fierce suppressed passion and resolve for victory at all costs and at all risks, latent since the downfall of Napoleon.\n\nNot less peremptory were the forces dominating the other parties to the struggle. Italy had newly entered the war upon promises which offered her a dazzling reward. These promises were embodied in the Pact of London. They involved conditions to which Austria-Hungary could never submit without final ruin as a great Power. The acceptance by Britain and France of the Russian claim to Constantinople condemned Turkey to a similar fate. Failure meant therefore to both the Austrian and the Turkish Empires not only defeat but dissolution. As for Bulgaria, she could only expect from the victory of the Allies the dire measure she had meted to Serbia.\n\nThus in every quarter the stakes were desperate or even mortal; and each of the vast confederacies was riveted together within itself and each part chained to its respective foe by bonds which only the furnace of war could fuse or blast away. Wealth, science, civilization, patriotism, steam transport and world credit enabled the whole strength of every belligerent to be continually applied to the war. The entire populations fought and laboured, women and men alike, to the utmost of their physical destructiveness. National industry was in every country converted to the production of war material. Tens of millions of soldiers, scores of thousands of cannon hurled death across battle lines, themselves measured in thousands of miles. Havoc on such a scale had never even been dreamed of in the past, and had never proceeded at such a speed in all human history. To carry this process to the final limit was the dearest effort of every nation, and of nearly all that was best and noblest in every nation.\n\nBut at the same time that Europe had been fastened into this frightful bondage, the art of war had fallen into an almost similar helplessness. No means of procuring a swift decision presented itself to the strategy of the commanders, or existed on the battlefields of the armies. The chains which held the warring nations to their task were not destined to be severed by military genius; no sufficient preponderance of force was at the disposal of either side; no practical method of a decisive offensive had been discovered; and the ill-directed fires of war, leaving the fetters unbroken, preyed through fatal years upon the flesh of the captive nations.\n\nIn August, 1914, the name 'Joffre' broke for the first time on British ears. Nothing was known of him then except that he was the proclaimed and accepted Chief of the Armies of France in that hour of her mortal peril which we had determined to share. Seeing that the existence of France was at stake, and trusting in the historic war science of the French Army, the British Government and people gave their confidence frankly and fully to this massive new personage who emerged so suddenly from the recesses of the French War Office and strode forward calmly towards the advancing storm.\n\nWho was he and how did he come to be there at the summit in the supreme hour? What qualities had he shown, what deeds had he done, what forces did he combine or compel, through what chances and trials had he passed, on his road to almost the greatest responsibility in the realm of violent action which ever enveloped one man? To answer such questions it is necessary to retrace the steps of history for some distance.\n\nEarly in 1911 General Michel, Vice-President of the Superior Council of War and Commander-in-Chief designate of the French Army in the event of war, drew up a report upon the plan of campaign. He declared that Germany would certainly attack France through Belgium; that her turning movement would not be limited to the southern side of the Belgian Meuse but would extend far beyond it, comprising Brussels and Antwerp in its scope. He affirmed that the German General Staff would use immediately not only their twenty-one active army corps but in addition the greater part of the twenty-one reserve corps which it was known they intended to form on general mobilization. France should therefore be prepared to meet an immense turning movement through Belgium and a hostile army which would comprise _at the outset_ the greater part of forty-two army corps. To confront this invasion he proposed that the French should organize and use a large proportion of their own reserve from the very beginning. For this purpose he desired to create a reserve formation at the side of each active formation, and to make both units take the field together under the officer commanding the active unit. By this means the strength of the French Army on mobilization would be raised from 1,300,000 to 2,000,000, and the German invading army would be confronted with at least equal numbers. Many of the French corps would be raised to 70,000 men and most of the regiments would become brigades of six battalions.\n\nThese forces General Michel next proceeded to distribute. He proposed to place his greatest mass, nearly 500,000 strong, between Lille and Avesnes to counter the main strength of the German turning movement. He placed a second mass of 300,000 men on the right of the first between Hirson and Rethel; he assigned 220,000 men for the garrison of Paris, which was also to act as the general reserve. His remaining troops were disposed along the Eastern frontier. Such was the plan in 1911 of the leading soldier of France.\n\nThese ideas ran directly counter to the main stream of French military thought. The General Staff did not believe that Germany would make a turning movement through Belgium, certainly not through Northern Belgium. They did not believe that the Germans would use their reserve formations in the opening battles. They did not believe that reserve formations could possibly be made capable of taking part in the struggle until after a prolonged period of training. They held, on the contrary, that the Germans, using only their active army, would attack with extreme rapidity and must be met and forestalled by a French counter-thrust across the Eastern frontier. For this purpose the French should be organized with as large a proportion of soldiers actually serving and as few reservists as possible, and with this end in view they demanded the institution of the Three Years Service Law which would ensure the presence of at least two complete contingents of young soldiers. The dominant spirits in the French Staff, apart from their Chief, belonged to the Offensive school, of whom the most active apostle was Colonel de Grandmaison, and believed ardently that victory could be compelled from the first moment by a vehement and furious rush upon the foe.\n\nThis collision of opinion was fatal to General Michel. It may be that his personality and temperament were not equal to the profound and penetrating justice of his ideas. Such discrepancies have often marred true policies. An overwhelming combination was formed against him by his colleagues on the Council of War. During the tension of Agadir the issue reached a head. The new Minister of War, Colonel Messimy, insisted upon a discussion of the Michel scheme in full Council. The Vice-President found himself alone; almost every other General declared his direct disagreement. In consequence of this he was a few days later informed by the War Minister that he did not possess the confidence of the French Army, and on July 23 he resigned the position of Vice-President of the War Council.\n\nIt had been intended by the Government that Michel should be succeeded either by Galli\u00e9ni or Pau; but Pau made claims to the appointing of General Officers which the Minister would not accept. His nomination was not proceeded with, ostensibly on the score of his age, and this pretext once given was still more valid against Galli\u00e9ni, who was older. It was in these circumstances that the choice fell upon General Joffre.\n\nJoffre was an engineer officer who, after various employments in Madagascar under Galli\u00e9ni and in Morocco, had gained a reputation as a well-balanced, silent, solid man, and who in 1911 occupied a seat on the Superior Council of War. It would have been difficult to find any figure more unlike the British idea of a Frenchman than this bull-headed broad-shouldered, slow-thinking, phlegmatic, bucolic personage. Nor would it have been easy to find a type which at the first view would have seemed less suited to weave or unravel the profound and gigantic webs of modern war. He was the junior member of the War Council. He had never commanded an army nor directed great man\u0153uvres even in a War Game. In such exercises he had played the part of Inspector-General of the Lines of Communication, and to this post he was at that time assigned on mobilization.\n\nJoffre received the proposal for his tremendous appointment with misgiving and embarrassment which were both natural and creditable. His reluctances were overcome by the assurance that General de Castelnau, who was deeply versed in the plans and theories of the French Staff and in the great operations of war, would be at his special disposal. Joffre therefore assumed power as the nominee of the dominant elements in the French Staff and as the exponent of their doctrines. To this conception he remained constantly loyal, and the immense disasters which France was destined to suffer three years later became from that moment almost inevitable.\n\nGeneral Joffre's qualities however fitted him to render most useful service to the various fleeting French Administrations which preceded the conflict. He represented and embodied 'Stability' in a world of change, and 'Impartiality' in a world of faction. He was a 'good Republican' with a definite political view, without being a political soldier, or one who dealt in intrigue. No one could suspect him of religion, but neither on the other hand could anyone accuse him of favouring Atheist generals at the expense of Catholics. Here at any rate was something for France, with her politicians chattering, fuming and frothing along to Armageddon, to rest her hand upon. For nearly three years and under successive Governments Joffre continued to hold his post, and we are assured that his advice on technical matters was almost always taken by the various Ministers who flitted across the darkening scene. He served under Caillaux and Messimy; he served under Poincar\u00e9 and Millerand; he served under Briand and \u00c9tienne; he was still serving under Viviani and Messimy again when the explosion came.\n\nReference has already been made in the first Volume to the immense miscalculations and almost fatal errors made by General Joffre or in his name in the first great collision of the war. The withering winds of French criticism have pitilessly exposed the deformities of Plan XVII. The Germans, as General Michel had predicted, made their vast turning movement through Belgium. They brought into action almost immediately thirty-four army corps of which thirteen, or their equivalent, were reserve formations. Of the 2,000,000 men who marched to invade France and Belgium 700,000 only were serving conscripts and 1,300,000 were reservists. Against these General Joffre could muster only 1,300,000, of whom also 700,000 were serving conscripts but only 600,000 reservists. 1,200,000 additional French reservists responded immediately to the national call, encumbering the depots, without equipment, without arms, without cadres, without officers. In consequence the Germans outnumbered the French at the outbreak by _three to two_ along the whole line of battle, and as they economized their forces on their left, they were able to deliver the turning movement on their right in overwhelming strength. At Charleroi they were _three to one._\n\nThe strategic aspect of General Joffre's policy was not less stultified than the administrative. The easterly and north-easterly attacks into which his four Armies of the Right and Centre were impetuously launched, were immediately stopped and hurled back with a slaughter so frightful that it has never yet been comprehended by the world. His left army, the Fifth, and a group of three Reserve Divisions, sent at the last moment to its aid, together with the British Army, were simultaneously forced back and turned. They only escaped complete envelopment and destruction by the timely retreat which General Lanrezac and Sir John French executed each independently on his own initiative, and also by the most stubborn resistance and effective rifle fire of the highly trained professional British Infantry. To General Lanrezac, for his complete grasp of the situation and courageous order of retreat, the gratitude of France is due.\n\nIt was for the tactical sphere that General Joffre and his school of 'Young Turks,' as they came to be called in France, had reserved their crowning mistakes. The French Infantry marched into battle conspicuous on the landscape in their red breeches and blue coats; their Artillery Officers in black and gold were even more sharply defined targets. The doctrine of the Offensive, raised to the height of a religious frenzy, animated all ranks, and in no rank was restrained by any foreknowledge of the power of magazine rifles and machine guns. A cruel shock lay before them. The Third French Army marching towards Arlon blundered into the Germans in the morning mist of August 22, four or five of its divisions having their heads shorn away while they were still close to their camping grounds. Everywhere along the battle front, whenever Germans were seen, the signal was given to charge. 'Vive la France!' 'A la ba\u00efonnette,' 'En Avant'\u2014and the brave troops, nobly led by their regimental officers, who sacrificed themselves in even greater proportion, responded in all the magnificent fighting fury for which the French nation has been traditionally renowned. Sometimes these hopeless onslaughts were delivered to the strains of the Marseillaise, six, seven or even eight hundred yards from the German positions. Though the Germans invaded, it was more often the French who attacked. Long swathes of red and blue corpses littered the stubble fields. The collision was general along the whole battle front, and there was a universal recoil. In the mighty battle of the Frontiers, the magnitude and terror of which is scarcely now known to British consciousness, more than 300,000 Frenchmen were killed, wounded or made prisoners.\n\nHowever, General Joffre preserved his sangfroid amid these disastrous surprises to an extent which critics have declared almost indistinguishable from insensibility. Unperturbed by his own responsibility he dismissed incompetent or even competent subordinates in all quarters. He issued orders for a general retreat of the French armies which contemplated their withdrawal, before resuming the offensive, not merely behind the Marne but behind the Seine, and comprised the isolation or abandonment both of Paris and of Verdun. While these plans were in progress there occurred the much-debated intervention of General Galli\u00e9ni, the newly constituted Governor of Paris. A whole library of French literature is extant on this famous episode. The partisans of Galli\u00e9ni seek to prove their case by letters, telegrams, telephonic conversations, orders and established facts. The champions of Joffre minimize these assertions, and rest themselves on the solid declaration that nothing can divert the credit of the victory from the bearer of the prime responsibility.\n\nFrom these claims it is possible to draw a reasonable conclusion. The overriding responsibility of the supreme commander remains unassailable. It cannot be more convincingly expressed than in words attributed to Joffre himself. Indiscreetly asked 'Who won the battle of the Marne?' he is said to have replied, 'That, Madame, is a difficult question: but I know who would have lost it, supposing it had been lost.' Joffre and the French Headquarters were withdrawing their armies with the avowed intention of turning on their pursuers and fighting a decisive battle at an early date. Exactly when or where they would fight they had not determined. All the armies were in constant contact, and everything was in flux. But certainly they contemplated making their supreme effort at some moment when the five pursuing German armies were between the horns of Paris and Verdun.\n\nGalli\u00e9ni's intervention decided this moment and decided it gloriously. He it was who had insisted on the defence of the Capital when Joffre had advocated declaring it an open town. He had inspired the Government to order Joffre to place a field army at his disposal for its defence. When the endless columns of the right-hand German army skirting Paris turned south-east, he decided instantly to strike at their exposed flank with his whole force. He set all his troops in motion towards the east; he convinced Joffre that the moment had come to strike; and he persuaded him that the flanking thrust should be made to the north rather than to the south of the Marne, as Joffre had purposed. Finally, he struck his blow with all the sureness and spontaneity of military genius; and the blow heralded the battle whose results saved Europe.\n\nWhen a Commander-in-Chief in a crisis of war has been demonstrably persuaded to alter his plans by a subordinate of the highest rank, his senior in service, almost his equal in authority, and when this alteration has been followed by a victory of supreme importance, it is evident that the materials of controversy will not be lacking. After the Marne there was a breathing space, and immediately the voice of criticism was raised against the strategy and conduct of General Joffre. To the failure of his war plans and to the dispute about the credit of the Marne was added the charge of defective preparation for war. No other Frenchman had sat in one great position for the three years before the war; no other man had his responsibility for the condition of the French military resources. The scarcity of machine guns, the want of heavy artillery, the absence even of field-service uniforms could all be laid at his door rather than at any other\u2014not that it follows that anyone else would have done better. Thus while to the world-public and before the enemy and, it must be added, in the eyes of the rank and file of the French armies, Joffre towered up as a grand figure triumphing over the tempest and the victor of the greatest and most decisive battle of history, there flowed all the time a strong subterranean current of well-informed mistrust and opposition.\n\nJoffre, if not a heaven-born general, was unquestionably an impressive personality. His position had become firmly established in relation to the grand scale of events. His sense of proportion had from the outset been extended to the limits of the whole battlefield. No other living man had had the advantages of his standpoint or environment. He was accustomed to think only in terms of armies and groups of armies; all the other frenzied and frightful detail was definitely beneath his consciousness, as it was beneath his sphere of duty. Allied to this supreme outlook, which necessarily only a few men in any country can enjoy, Joffre had the physique and temperament exactly suited to the kind of strains he had to bear and the scale of the decisions he had to take. On these solid foundations the splendid position which he occupied and the tremendous events over which he presided soon built up a vast prestige. The censorship, for reasons which certainly had weight, discouraged or forbade both in France and England the 'writing up' of any generals except the Commander-in-Chief in each country. Thus the population of the allied countries knew only Joffre, and even in France it was to Joffre, and Joffre above all others, that the trusting faith of the multitude was month by month and year by year deliberately and mechanically directed.\n\nNevertheless, as the weary months of trench warfare in 1915 passed away, diversified only by the costly failures of the French offensive in Artois in the spring and in Champagne in the autumn, the currents of hostility gathered continually in volume and intensity. The great popularity of Millerand, who became Minister for War in the early days of the struggle, was slowly sapped through his unswerving loyalty to Joffre, and upon the reconstitution of the French Government under Briand at the end of October, 1915, Millerand disappeared from the scene. He was succeeded as Minister of War by none other than Galli\u00e9ni.\n\nThe relations between Joffre and the new Minister were remarkable. Only age had prevented Galli\u00e9ni from occupying the supreme post at the outbreak of the war. Joffre had actually served under his orders in a minor capacity in Madagascar. On the declaration of war Galli\u00e9ni had received a letter from the Minister, approved by Joffre, appointing him Joffre's successor should the command of the French armies fall vacant. The extraordinary part played by Galli\u00e9ni in the crisis of the Marne has been briefly indicated here, and Joffre was certainly not unconscious of the claims that might arise from it. No sooner was the victory won, than he withdrew the Sixth Army from the control of Galli\u00e9ni, leaving him again simply Governor of Paris. When in December, 1915, the French armies were formed into two groups, Galli\u00e9ni was anxious to be called to the command of one of them. But Joffre's choice fell elsewhere. Some months later, when the command of the Sixth Army fell vacant, it was offered to Galli\u00e9ni. But seeing that this command was only a fraction of what he had directed in the Battle of the Marne, Galli\u00e9ni put the proposal on one side. Finally, on October 1, 1915, Joffre wishing to place on record once for all his view of Galli\u00e9ni's contribution to the great victory, had caused to be published in the _Gazette_ a citation which gave widespread offence. Galli\u00e9ni's comment is said to have been: 'I could never serve again under the orders of Joffre.'\n\nBut in October, 1915, the r\u00f4les are swiftly reversed, and it is Galli\u00e9ni who holds the superior position, not only as Minister of War, but as a greater soldier, and, in the eyes of many, a greater hero. In the brief portion of Galli\u00e9ni's life which was lived on the world-stage, no feature bears the sign of true greatness more than his treatment of Joffre. Convinced by Briand that Joffre, whatever his shortcomings, was at that time necessary to the national defence, he supported him in every conceivable manner in the field, and defended him in the Chamber on numerous occasions with loyal comradeship. But while thus to the confusion of his own friends and admirers he paralysed for the time being the hostile movement against Joffre, Galli\u00e9ni did not fail as a Minister to press for a reform of the many abuses and usurpations of power which had grown up in the Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral at Chantilly. Such was the situation in the French High Command at the period at which this volume begins, when Kitchener was feverishly seeking to defend Egypt and Falkenhayn was writing a memorandum about Verdun.\n\nEvery great nation in times of crisis has its own way of doing things. The Germans looked to their Kaiser\u2014the All-Highest\u2014whose word was law\u2014but they also looked after him. In some way or other the changing group of dominating personalities at the head of the German Empire worked the Imperial Oracle. We too in England have our own methods, more difficult to explain to foreigners perhaps than any others\u2014and on the whole more inchoate, more crude, more clumsy. Still\u2014they work. And there is also the French method. Studying French war-politics, one is struck first of all by their extreme complexity. The number of persons involved, the intricacy of their relations, the swiftness and yet the smoothness with which their whole arrangement is continually changed, all baffle the stranger during the event, and weary him afterwards in the tale. The prevailing impression is that of a swarm of bees\u2014all buzzing together, and yet each bee\u2014or nearly every bee\u2014with a perfectly clear idea of what has got to be done in the practical interests of the hive.\n\nAt the end of 1915 there were two very definite convictions established in the wide secret circles of France\u2014Ministers, Lobbies, Army, Press, Society\u2014which were actually concerned in the national defence. The first was that Joffre was not Napoleon; the second that his name and fame constituted an invaluable asset to France. 'Unity of Command' was not yet within the bounds of possibility, 'unity of front'\u2014all the fronts in one relation\u2014was already a watchword. If this was to be achieved, and if France was to gain or keep control of the strategy of the allied Powers in all the Conferences and joint decisions that were necessary to coherent military action, what martial figure-head could she produce comparable to Joffre? France\u2014the France that was conducting the war and fighting for life and honour\u2014believed that the name Joffre and the presence of Joffre would impress and dominate the inexperienced but on the whole well-meaning English and carry weight with the remote colossus of Russia. But they did not like the idea of his leading their remaining armies into further offensives. How then to combine the two desirables? On this basis and with this object a prolonged series of delicate, subtle processes, man\u00e9uvres and devices were elaborated. Joffre was to be made a General of Generals, established in Paris out of contact with any particular army, his eye ranging over all, presiding over every inter-allied military conference, brought forward by the French Government to pronounce with commanding authority to allied Cabinets or Statesmen, while the actual conduct of the French armies against Germany would be entrusted to someone else. To this end, and as a first step, Joffre was appointed in November, 1915, to the command of all the French armies, whether in France or in the Orient, and Castelnau was made Major-General at headquarters, an appointment which was intended to carry with it in the highest possible sense the attributes of Chief of the Staff with an implied reversion of the supreme command in France.\n\nThe end of the year brought also a change in the Command of the British Armies in France. We have seen in what circumstances and with what misgivings Sir John French had allowed himself to be involved in the previous September at Loos in the unwisdom of the great French offensive in Champagne. He had conformed with loyalty and ultimately even with ardour to the wishes of Lord Kitchener and to the acquiescence of the British Cabinet. But all this stood him in no stead on the morrow of failure. Those who had not the conviction or resolution to arrest the forlorn attack became easily censorious of its conduct after the inevitable failure. During the course of December proceedings were set on foot by which, at the end of the year, Sir John French was transferred from the Command of the British Army in France to that of the forces at home, and succeeded in that high situation by the Commander of his First Army, Sir Douglas Haig.\n\nThese chapters will recount the fall from dazzling situation of many eminent men; and it is perhaps worth while at this point to place the reader on his guard against unworthy or uncharitable judgments. The Great War wore out or justly or unjustly cast aside leaders in every sphere as lavishly as it squandered the lives of private soldiers\u2014French, Kitchener, Joffre, Nivelle, Cadorna, Jellicoe, Asquith, Briand, Painlev\u00e9, and many others, even in the victorious states. All made their contribution and fell. Whatever the pain at the moment to individuals, there are no circumstances of humiliation in such supersessions. Only those who succeeded, who lived through the convulsion and emerged prosperously at the end, know by what obscure twists and turns of chance they escaped a similar lot. 'Those two impostors,' Triumph and Disaster, never played their pranks more shamelessly than in the Great War. When men have done their duty and done their best, have shirked no labour and flinched from no decision that it was their task to take, there is no disgrace in eventual personal failure. They are but good comrades who fall in the earlier stages of an assault, which others, profiting by their efforts and experiences, ultimately carry to victory.\n\nAlike in personal efficiency and professional credentials, Sir Douglas Haig was the first officer of the British Army. He had obtained every qualification, gained every experience and served in every appointment requisite for the General Command. He was a Cavalry Officer of social distinction and independent means, whose whole life had been devoted to military study and practice. He had been Adjutant of his regiment; he had played in its polo team; he had passed through the Staff College; he had been Chief Staff Officer to the Cavalry Division in the South African war; he had earned a Brevet and decorations in the field; he had commanded a Column; he had held a command in India; he had served at the War Office; he had commanded at Aldershot the two divisions which formed the only organized British army corps, and from this position he had led the First British army corps to France. He had borne the principal fighting part in every battle during Sir John French's command. At the desperate crisis of the first Battle of Ypres, British battalions and batteries, wearied, outnumbered and retreating, had been inspirited by the spectacle of the Corps Commander riding slowly forward at the head of his whole staff along the shell-swept Menin Road into close contact with the actual fighting line.\n\nIt was impossible to assemble around any other officer a series of appointments and qualifications in any way comparable in their cumulative effects with these. He had fulfilled with exceptional credit every requirement to which the pre-war British military hierarchy attached importance. For many years, and at every stage in his career, he had been looked upon alike by superiors and equals as a man certain to rise, if he survived, to the summit of the British Army. Colonel Henderson, the biographer of Stonewall Jackson, Professor at the Staff College during Haig's graduation, had predicted this event. His conduct in the first year of the war had vindicated every hope. His appointment as Commander-in-Chief on the departure of Sir John French created no surprise, aroused no heart-burnings, excited no jealousy. The military profession reposed in him a confidence which the varied fortunes, disappointments and miscalculations attendant upon three years of war on the greatest scale left absolutely unshaken.\n\nThe esteem of his military colleagues found a healthy counterpart in his own self-confidence. He knew the place was his by merit and by right. He knew he had no rivals, and that he owed his place neither to favour nor usurpation. This attitude of mind was invaluable. Allied to a resolute and equable temperament it enabled him to sustain with composure, not only the shocks of defeat and disaster at the hands of the enemy, but those more complex and not less wearing anxieties arising from his relations with French allies and British Cabinets. He was as sure of himself at the head of the British Army as a country gentleman on the soil which his ancestors had trod for generations, and to whose cultivation he had devoted his life. But the Great War owned no Master; no one was equal to its vast and novel issues; no human hand controlled its hurricanes; no eye could pierce its whirlwind dust-clouds. In the course of this narrative it is necessary in the interests of the future to seek and set forth in all sincerity what are believed to be the true facts and values. But when this process is complete, the fact remains that no other subject of the King could have endured the ordeal which was his lot with the phlegm, the temper and the fortitude of Sir Douglas Haig.\n\nThe failure of the Dardanelles Expedition was fatal to Lord Kitchener. During the whole of 1915 he had been in sole and plenary charge of the British military operations, and until November on every important point his will had been obeyed. The new Cabinet, like the leading members of the old, had now in their turn lost confidence in his war direction. The conduct of the Gallipoli campaign showed only too plainly the limitations of this great figure at this period of his life and in this tremendous situation both as an organizer and a man of action. His advocacy of the offensive in France which had failed so conspicuously at Loos and in Champagne was upon record. Under the agony of the Gallipoli evacuation his will-power had plainly crumpled, and the long series of contradictory resolves which had marked his treatment of this terrible question was obvious to all who knew the facts.\n\nAlready, in November, had come direct rebuff. His plan for a fresh landing in the Gulf of Alexandretta, though devised by him in the actual theatre of operations, had been decisively vetoed by the new War Committee of the Cabinet and by the Allies in conference. In a series of telegrams the inclination of which could scarcely be obscure, he was encouraged to transform his definite mission at the Dardanelles into a general and extensive tour of inspection in the East. His prompt return to London showed that he was not himself unaware of the change in his position. The disposition of the British forces in the East which he made after the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac was certainly not such as to retrieve a waning prestige. It was natural that Egypt should loom disproportionately large in his mind. Almost his whole life had been spent and his fame won there. He now saw this beloved country menaced, as he believed, by an imminent. Turkish invasion on a large scale. In an endeavour to ward off the imaginary peril he crowded division after division into Egypt, and evidently contemplated desperate struggles for the defence of the Suez Canal at no distant date. In the early days, at the end of 1914 and beginning of 1915, it had been worth while for a score of thousand Turks to threaten the Canal and create as much disturbance as possible in order to delay the movement of troops from India, Australia and New Zealand to the European battlefield. But both the usefulness and feasibility of such an operation were destroyed by the great increase in the scale of the war in the eastern Mediterranean theatre which had been in progress during the whole year. The German and Turkish staffs were well content to rely upon threats and boasting, and to make the proclamation of their intention a substitute for the diversion of armies. 'Egypt,' exclaimed Enver Pasha in December, 'is our objective'; and following this simple deception the British concentration in Egypt was vehemently pursued.\n\nOn the top of this came the reverse in Mesopotamia, for which Lord Kitchener had no direct responsibility. General Townshend had marched on Baghdad, and the War Committee was led to believe that he was himself the mainspring of the enterprise. General Nixon, the Commander-in-Chief in Mesopotamia, had not informed them that his audacious and hitherto brilliantly successful subordinate had in writing recorded his misgivings about the operation. In the event Townshend's force of about 20,000 men was on November 25 forced to retreat after a well-contested action at Ctesiphon and only escaped by a swift and disastrous retreat to a temporary refuge at Kut.\n\nOn December 3 the War Committee determined to re-create the Imperial General Staff at the War Office in an effective form. The decision was drastic. The experiment of making a Field-Marshal Secretary of State for War had run its full course. Lord Kitchener might still hold the Seals of Office, but his power, hitherto so overwhelming that it had absorbed and embodied the authority alike of the ministerial and the professional Chiefs, was now to be confined within limits which few politicians would accept in a Secretaryship of State. Sir William Robertson, Chief of the General Staff in France, was brought to Whitehall, and an Order in Council was issued establishing his rights and responsibility in terms both strict and wide. Lord Kitchener acquiesced in the abrogation, not only of the exceptional personal powers which he had enjoyed, but of those which have always been inherent in the office which he retained.\n\nThe end of his great story is approaching: the long life full of action, lighted by hard-won achievement, crowned by power such as a British subject had rarely wielded and all the regard and honour that Britain and her Empire can bestow, was now declining through the shadows. The sudden onrush of the night, the deep waters of the North, were destined to preserve him and his renown from the shallows.\n\n\"Better to sink beneath the shock,  \nThan moulder piecemeal on the rock.\"\n\nThe solemn days when he stood forth as Constable of Britain beneath whose arm her untrained people braced themselves for war, were ended. His life of duty could only reach its consummation in a warrior's death. His record in the Great War as strategist, administrator and leader, will be judged by the eyes of other generations than our own. Let us hope they will also remember the comfort his character and personality gave to his countrymen in their hours of hardest trial.\n\n# CHAPTER II\n\n# THE BLOOD TEST\n\nA General Survey\u2014The First Shock\u2014The Five Great Allied Assaults\u2014Battles and the Time Factor\u2014The Great Battle Days\u2014The Battle Weeks\u2014Colonel Boraston's Contentions\u2014Sir William Robertson's Policy\u2014His Reasonings\u2014His Admissions\u2014The Blood Test\u2014British, French and German Losses\u2014The Price of the Offensive\u2014The Casualty Tables\u2014'Killing Germans'\u2014Wearing down the Germans\u2014The Balance of Attrition\u2014The German Intake\u2014Ludendorff's Contribution\u2014The Moral Factor\u2014The General Conclusion\u2014Man\u0153uvre and Surprise\u2014The 'Side Shows'\u2014The Limits of Responsibility.\n\nIt is necessary in this chapter to ask the reader, before the campaign of 1916 begins, to take a somewhat statistical view of the whole war in the West, and to examine its main episodes in their character, proportion and relation.\n\nThe events divide themselves naturally into three time-periods: the first, 1914; the second, 1915, 1916 and 1917; and the third, 1918: the First Shock; the Deadlock; and the Final Convulsion. The first period is at once the simplest and the most intense. The trained armies of Germany and France rushed upon each other, grappled furiously, broke apart for a brief space, endeavoured vainly to outflank each other, closed again in desperate conflict, broke apart once more, and then from the Alps to the sea lay gasping and glaring at each other not knowing what to do. Neither was strong enough to overcome the other, neither possessed the superior means or method required for the successful offensive. In this condition both sides continued for more than three years unable to fight a general battle, still less to make a strategic advance. It was not until 1918 that the main force of the armies on both sides was simultaneously engaged as in 1914 in a decisive struggle. In short, the war in the West resolved itself into two periods of supreme battle, divided from each other by a three-years' siege.\n\nThe scale and intensity of the First Shock in 1914 has not been fully realized even by the well-instructed French public, and is not at all understood in England. At the beginning all totals of casualties were suppressed in every combatant country by a vigorous censorship. Later on in the war when more was known, no one had time to look back in the midst of new perils to the early days; and since the war no true impression has ever reached the public. British eyes have been fixed upon the vivid pictures of Li\u00e9ge, Mons and Le Cateau, that part of the Battle of the Marne which occurred near Paris, and the desperate struggle round Ypres. The rest lies in a dark background, which it is now possible to illuminate.\n\nIn the first three months of actual fighting from the last week in August to the end of November, when the German drive against the Channel ports had come to an end and the first great invasion was definitely arrested, the French lost in killed, prisoners and wounded 854,000 men. In the same period the small British army, about one-seventh of the French fighting strength, lost 85,000 men, making a total Allied loss of 939,000. Against this, in the same period, the Germans lost 677,000. The fact that the Germans, although invading and presumably attacking, inflicted greater slaughter than they suffered, is due to the grave errors in doctrine, training and tactics of the French army described in the previous chapter, and to the unsound strategic dispositions of General Joffre. But more than four-fifths of the French losses were sustained in the First Shock. In the fighting from August 21, when the main collision occurred, down to September 12, when the victory of the Marne was definitely accomplished (a period of scarcely three weeks), the French armies lost nearly 330,000 men killed or prisoners, or more than one-sixth of their total loss in killed or prisoners during the whole fifty-two months of the war. To these permanent losses should be added about 280,000 wounded, making a total for this brief period of over 600,000 casualties to the French armies alone; and of this terrific total three-fourths of the loss was inflicted from August 21 to 24, and from September 5 to 9, that is to say, in a period of less than eight days.\n\nNothing comparable to this concentrated slaughter was sustained by any combatant in so short a time, not even excluding the first Russian disasters, nor the final phase on the Western Front in 1918. That the French army should have survived this frightful butchery, the glaring miscalculations which caused it, and the long and harassed retreats by which it was attended, and yet should have retained the fighting qualities which rendered a sublime recovery possible, is the greatest proof of their martial fortitude and devotion which History will record. Had this heroic army been handled in the First Shock with prudence, on a wise strategic scheme, and with practical knowledge of the effects of modern firearms and the use of barbed wire and entrenchments, there is no reason to doubt that the German invasion could have been brought to a standstill after suffering enormous losses within from thirty to fifty kilometres of the French frontiers. Instead, as events were cast, the French army in the first few weeks of the war received wounds which were nearly fatal, and never curable.\n\nOf these the gravest was the loss of regular regimental officers, who sacrificed themselves with unbounded devotion. In many battalions only two or three officers survived the opening battles. The cadres of the whole French Army were seriously injured by the wholesale destruction of the trained professional element. The losses which the French suffered in the years which followed were undoubtedly aggravated by this impoverishment of military knowledge in the fighting units. Although the Germans are accustomed to bewail their own heavy losses of officers in the opening battles, their injury was not so deep, and until after the Ludendorff offensives they always possessed the necessary professional staff to teach and handle successive intakes of recruits.\n\nAfter the situation was stabilized at the end of November, the long period of Siege warfare on the Western Front began. The Germans fortified themselves on French and Belgian soil, along a line chosen for its superior railway network, and the Allies for more than three years endeavoured, with unvarying failure, to break their front and force them to retreat.\n\nIn all, five great Allied assaults were made.\n\n(i) By the French in Champagne and Artois in the spring and early summer of 1915.\n\n(ii) By the French in Champagne during the late autumn and winter of 1915, and by the British simultaneously at Loos.\n\n(iii) By the British and French on the Somme from July to October, 1916.\n\n(iv) By the British at Arras and by the French on the Aisne, from April to July, 1917, and\n\n(v) By the British virtually alone at Passchendaele in the autumn and winter of 1917.\n\nIn these siege-offensives which occupied the years 1915, 1916 and 1917 the French and British Armies consumed themselves in vain, and suffered as will be seen nearly double the casualties inflicted on the Germans. In this same period the Germans made only one great counter-offensive stroke: Falkenhayn's prolonged attack on Verdun in the spring of 1916. The special features which this operation presented will be related in their place.\n\nThese sanguinary prodigious struggles, extending over many months, are often loosely described as 'Battles.' Judging by the number of men who took their turn in the fighting at different times, by the immense quantities of guns and shells employed, and by the hideous casualty totals, they certainly rank, taken each as a whole, among the largest events of military history. But we must not be misled by terminology. If to call them 'battles' were merely a method of presenting a general view of an otherwise confusing picture, it might well pass unchallenged. But an attempt has been made by military Commanders and by a whole school of writers to represent these prolonged operations, as events comparable to the decisive battles of the past, only larger and more important. To yield to this specious argument is to be drawn into a wholly wrong impression, both of military science and of what actually took place in the Great War.\n\nWhat is a battle? I wrote on March 5, 1918: 'War between equals in power... should be a succession of climaxes on which everything is staked, toward which everything tends and from which permanent decisions are obtained. These climaxes have usually been called battles. A battle means that the whole of the resources on either side that can be brought to bear are, during the course of a single episode, concentrated upon the enemy.' The scale of a battle must bear due proportion to the whole fighting strength of the armies. Five divisions engaged out of an army of seven may fight a battle. But the same operation in an army of seventy divisions, although the suffering and slaughter are equal, sinks to the rank of a petty combat. A succession of such combats augments the losses without raising the scale of events.\n\nMoreover, a battle cannot, properly speaking, be considered apart from the time factor. By overwhelming the enemy's right we place ourselves in a position to attack the exposed flank or rear of his centre; or by piercing his centre we gain the possibility of rolling up his flanks; or by capturing a certain hill we command his lines of communication. But none of these consequential advantages will be gained if the time taken in the preliminary operation is so long that the enemy can make new dispositions\u2014if, for instance, he can bend back his lines on each side of the rupture and fortify them, or if he can withdraw his army before the hill is taken which would command his communications. If he has time to take such measures effectively, the first battle is over; and the second stage involves a second battle. Now the amount of time required by the enemy is not indefinite. One night is enough to enable a new position to be entrenched and organized. In forty-eight hours the railways can bring large reinforcements of men and guns to any threatened point. The attacker is confronted with a new situation, a different problem, a separate battle. It is a misnomer to describe the resumption of an attack in these different circumstances as a part of the original battle, or to describe a series of such disconnected efforts as one prolonged battle. Operations consisting of detached episodes extending over months and divided by intervals during which a series of entirely new situations are created, however great their scale, cannot be compared\u2014to take some modern instances\u2014with Blenheim, Rossbach, Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Sedan, the Marne, or Tannenberg.\n\nThe real Battle crises of the Great War stand out from the long series of partial, though costly, operations, not only by the casualties but by the number of divisions simultaneously engaged on both sides. In 1914, during the four days from August 21 to 24 inclusive, 80 German divisions were engaged with 62 French, 4 British and 6 Belgian divisions. The four decisive days of the Marne, September 6 to 9 inclusive, involved approximately the same numbers. Practically all the reserves were thrown in on both sides, and the whole strength of the armies utilized to the utmost. The operations in Artois in the spring of 1915, which lasted three months and cost the French 450,000 men, never presented a single occasion where more than 15 divisions were simultaneously engaged on either side. The Battle of Loos-Champagne, beginning on September 25, 1915, comprised an attack by 44 French and 15 British divisions (total 59) upon approximately 30 German divisions. But within three days the decisive battle-period may be said to have passed, and the numbers engaged on the Anglo-French side were reduced rapidly. 1916 was occupied by Verdun and the Somme. In this year of almost continuous fighting, in which more than two and a half million British, French and German soldiers were killed or wounded, there is only one single day, July 1, on the Somme, where as many as 22 Allied divisions were engaged simultaneously. The rest of the Somme with all its slaughter contained no operations involving more than 18 Allied divisions, and in most cases the time was occupied by combats between 3 or 4 British or French divisions with less than half that number of the enemy. In the whole of the so-called 'Battle of Verdun' there were never engaged on any single day more than 14 French and German divisions, and the really critical opening attack by which the fate of the Fortress was so nearly sealed was conducted by not more than 6 German divisions against 2 or 3 French. In 1917, with the accession of General Nivelle to the French command, an attempt was made to launch a decisive operation, and the French engaged in a single day, though with disastrous results, as many as 28 divisions. Thereafter the operations dwindled again into sanguinary insignificance. The Autumn fighting in Flanders by the British Army produced a long succession of attacks delivered only by from 5 to 15 British divisions.\n\nI wrote in October, 1917 (the reader will come to it in its proper place): 'Success will only be achieved by the _scale and intensity_ of our offensive effort within a limited period. We are seeking to conquer the enemy's army and not his position.... A policy of pure attrition between armies so evenly balanced cannot lead to a decision. It is not a question of wearing down the enemy's reserves, but of wearing them down so rapidly that recovery and replacement of shattered divisions is impossible.... Unless this problem can be solved satisfactorily, we shall simply be wearing each other out on a gigantic scale and with fearful sacrifices without ever reaping the reward.'\n\nIt was not until March 21, 1918, when the third and final phase of the war began, that Ludendorff reintroduced the great battle period. The mass of artillery, which the Germans had by then accumulated in the West, was sufficient to enable three or four great offensives to be mounted simultaneously against the Allies, and the power to release any one of these at will imparted the element of Surprise to Ludendorff's operations. The great reserves of which he disposed and which he used, after four years of carnage, with all the ruthlessness of the first invasion, carried the struggle leap by leap along the whole Western Front, until the entire structure of the opposing armies and all their organizations of attack and defence were strained to the utmost. The climax of the German effort was reached in July. Ludendorff had worn out his army in the grand manner, but thoroughly, and the Allied offensive, supported by an equally numerous artillery, then began. As this developed all the armies became involved in constantly moving battles, and nearly 90 Allied divisions were on numerous days simultaneously engaged with 70 or 80 German. Thus at last a decision was reached.\n\nThe fundamental proportion of events which the foregoing facts and figures reveal, is more apparent if weeks instead of days are taken as the test. Let us therefore multiply the number of divisions by the number of days in which they were actively engaged in any given week. The 'Battle of the Frontiers' shows from August 21 to 28 about 600 division-battle days. The week of the Marne, September 5 to 12, shows a total of nearly 500. The week of Loos-Champagne in 1915, September 25 to October 2, produces a total of approximately 100. The continuous battle intensity of the first week of Verdun is only 72 divisions and never again attained that level. The opening week of the Somme, also the most important, is 46. General Nivelle's attack in April, 1917, engaged in a week 135. Passchendaele never rose above 85 division-battle days in a single week. With Ludendorff in 1918 we reach the figure of 328 between March 21 and 28. All through the summer of 1918 the weeks repeatedly show 300 entries by divisions of all the armies into battle: and finally, Foch's general advance, August, September and October, attained the maximum intensity of 554 divisional engagements a week and maintained an average weekly intensity in the fiercest month of over 400.\n\nI conceive myself entitled to repeat, now that the results are known, the opinions which I put on record before all these battles were fought. I wrote to the Prime Minister on December 29, 1914, as follows: 'I think it quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other's lines in the Western theatre... Without attempting to take a final view, my impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change.' And in June, 1915: 'It is a fair general conclusion that the deadlock in the West will continue for some time and the side which risks most to pierce the lines of the other will put itself at a disadvantage.'\n\nWhen the Comte de S\u00e9gur wrote his captivating account of Napoleon's Russian campaign, the defence of the Emperor was undertaken by General Gourgaud, a highly placed officer of his staff, which defence produced a far less favourable impression of Napoleon than had resulted from the original criticism. In 1922 a book entitled _Sir Douglas Haig's Command 1915\u20131918_ was published by a member of his staff, Lieut-Colonel J. H. Boraston. This gentleman was employed during the greater part of the period concerned in drafting and preparing the official communiqu\u00e9s. He thus had access to many forms of confidential information, and he watched the great events of the war in relationship to a chief who had gained his whole-hearted admiration. His work is aggressive to a degree that sometimes ceases to be good-natured. It is marred by small recriminations, by an air of soreness, by a series of literary sniffs and snorts, which combine to produce an unpleasant impression on the mind of the general reader.\n\nFor the views expressed in this book Sir Douglas Haig is in no way responsible. But the point of view which it discloses is nevertheless of interest. With all its faults, indeed to some extent because of them, _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ is a document of real value. It represents and embodies more effectively the collective view of the British Headquarters upon the different phases of the struggle than any other work which has yet appeared. There are none of those reticences and suave phrasings with which the successful actors on the world-stage are often contented when they condescend to tell their tale. Here we have the record of actual feelings unadorned. We have also a wealth of secret information for the first time placed at the disposal of the public in a responsible and authentic form. The public are therefore under an obligation to Colonel Boraston, and if from time to time in these pages his views are treated somewhat controversially, that should in no way obscure the service he has rendered to every one except his Chief.\n\nThis Staff Officer is throughout concerned to sustain the theme of Sir Douglas Haig's final despatch. The Western Front was at all times, according to this view, the decisive theatre of the war, and all the available forces should continually have been concentrated there. The only method of waging war on the Western Front was by wearing down the enemy by 'killing Germans in a war of attrition.' This we are assured was always Sir Douglas Haig's scheme; he pursued it unswervingly throughout his whole Command. Whether encouraged or impeded by the Cabinet, his policy was always the same: 'Gather together every man and gun and wear down the enemy by constant and if possible by ceaseless attacks.' This in the main, it is contended, he succeeded in doing, with the result, it is claimed, that in August, 1918, the enemy, at last worn down, lost heart, crumpled, and finally sued for peace. Viewing the events in retrospect, Colonel Boraston invites us to see, not only each of the various prolonged offensives as an integral operation, but the whole four years, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918, as if they were one single enormous battle every part of which was a necessary factor in the final victory. We wore the enemy down, we are told, upon the Somme in 1916, we wore him down at Arras in the spring, we continued to wear him down at Passchendaele in the winter of 1917. If the army had been properly reinforced by the politicians we should have persisted in wearing him down in the spring of 1918. Finally, as the fruits of all this process of attrition and 'killing Germans' by offensive operations, the enemy's spirit was quelled, his man power was exhausted, and the war was won. Thus a great design, measured, foreseen and consciously prepared, reached its supreme accomplishment. Such is the theory.\n\nThese views are supported in the two important volumes published by Sir William Robertson. This officer was Chief of the Imperial General Staff with unprecedented powers during the whole of 1916 and 1917. Robertson's doctrines were clear and consistent. He believed in concentrating all the efforts of the British and French armies upon offensive action in France and Flanders, and that we should stand on the defensive everywhere else. He advocated and pressed every offensive in which the British armies were engaged, and did his utmost to procure the compliance of the Cabinet in every operation. In an illuminating sentence he complained that 'certain Ministers still held fast to the belief that victory could never be won\u2014or only at prohibitive cost\u2014by _straightforward action on the Western Front_ , and that it must be sought through lines of indirect attack elsewhere.' 'Straightforward action on the Western Front,' in 1915 (when Robertson was Chief of the Staff in France) and in 1916 and 1917 (when he was C.I.G.S.), meant, and could only mean, frontal assaults upon fortified positions defended by wire and machine guns without the necessary superiority of numbers, or an adequate artillery, or any novel offensive method. He succeeded in enforcing this policy against the better judgment of successive Cabinets or War Councils, with the result that when he left the War Office in February, 1918, the British and French armies were at their weakest point in strength and fighting power, and the Germans for the first time since the original invasion had gathered so great a superiority of reserves as to be able to launch a gigantic attack.\n\nRobertson's explanations of the costly failures of the successive offensives for which he was so largely responsible are worth quoting. Of the disastrous battles of Loos and Champagne which cost the French 350,000 casualties and the British 95,000 in September and October, 1915, he writes:\n\n'Although the operations were unproductive of decisive success, and were attended by tactical miscalculations which would have to be corrected before the enemy's lines could be breached, they nevertheless rendered valuable aid to an ally in distress, and furnished useful experience in the handling of new troops and in the methods to be employed in the attack on continuous lines of field fortifications. They were, in fact, necessary stages in the preparation for the great battles that were subsequently fought.'\n\nTo obtain 'useful experience in the handling of new troops' and educational preparation for future battles may be deemed an inadequate result for 95,000 British casualties.\n\nDuring the battle of the Somme he wrote, on July 29, to Haig as follows:\n\n'The powers that be are beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation. The casualties are mounting up, and Ministers are wondering whether we are likely to get a proper return for them. I do my best to keep the general situation to the front, and to explain what may be the effect of our efforts, and to ask what alternative could be adopted. I also try to make them think in German of the present situation. But they will persist in asking me whether _I_ think a loss of, say, 300,000 men will lead to really great results, because if not we ought to be content with something less than what we are now doing, and they constantly inquire why we are fighting and the French are not... In general, what is bothering them is the probability that we may soon have to face a bill of between 200,000 and 300,000 casualties with no very great gains additional to the present. It is thought that the primary object\u2014the relief of Verdun\u2014has to some extent been achieved.'\n\nAnd three days later:\n\n'L.G. is all right provided I can say that _I_ am satisfied, and to enable me to say this it is necessary you should keep me acquainted with your views.... If I have to depend almost entirely upon Press communiqu\u00e9s my opinion is not much more valuable than that of anyone else.'\n\nBut his was the opinion that overbore all others; and that it should have depended upon these and similar jejune reflections and on such defective information excites, even after the lapse of years, a painful emotion.\n\nWhen on October 5, 1917, the Passchendaele offensive was sinking into the mire, and the Cabinet sought to bring it to a conclusion, Robertson was compelled to rest himself upon 'the unsatisfactory state of the French armies and of the general political situation in France, which was still far from reassuring'; and again: 'The original object of the campaign\u2014the clearance of the Belgian coast\u2014was seen to be doubtful of attainment long before the operations terminated, owing to the bad weather experienced and to the delay in starting caused by the change of plan earlier in the year. But, as already explained, there were strong reasons why activity had to be maintained. We must give the French armies time to recover their strength and morale, make every effort to keep Russia in the field in some form or other, and try to draw enemy troops to Flanders which might otherwise be sent against Italy, especially after her defeat at Caporetto. All these purposes of distraction were achieved, and in addition heavy losses were inflicted upon the German armies.'\n\nFor these 'purposes of distraction' the killing, maiming or capture of over 400,000 British soldiers was apparently considered a reasonable price to pay.\n\nIt appears however that although Robertson drove the Cabinet remorselessly forward, he had convinced himself that none of the British attacks for which he bore responsibility in 1915 and in 1916 had had any chance of decisive success. 'With respect to the alleged error of always attacking where the enemy was strongest,' he writes, 'I could not refrain from saying that the greatest of all errors was that of not providing before the war an army adequate to enforce the policy adopted.... _Until this year we have not had the means to attack with the hope of getting a decision_ , and therefore we have had no choice in the point of attack.' He used these words on his own avowal on June 21, 1917; so that the highest expert authority responsible for procuring the support of the Cabinet to two years of offensive operations had already convinced himself that up till 1917 the British Army 'had not the means to attack with the hope of getting a decision.' Undeterred however by this slowly-gained revelation, he proceeded to drive the unfortunate Ministers to authorize the prolongation into the depths of winter of the Passchendaele offensive.\n\nDuring the war it was the custom of the British and French staffs to declare that in their offensives they were inflicting far heavier losses on the Germans than they themselves suffered. Similar claims were advanced by the enemy. Ludendorff shared the professional outlook of the British and French High Commands. Even after the war was over, with all the facts in his mind or at his disposal had he cared to seek them, we find him writing, 'Of the two [policies], the offensive makes less demands on the men and gives no higher losses.' Let us subject these assertions and theories of the military schools of the three great belligerents to a blood test as pitiless as that to which they all in turn doomed their valiant soldiers.\n\nSince the Armistice the facts are known; but before proceeding to detailed figures it will be well to take a general survey.\n\nThe Germans, out of a population of under 70 millions, mobilized during the war for military service 13\u00bc million persons. Of these, according to the latest German official figures for all fronts including the Russian, over 7 millions suffered death, wounds or captivity, of whom nearly 2 millions perished. France, with a population of 38 millions, mobilized a little over 8 million persons. This however includes a substantial proportion of African troops outside the French population basis. Of these approximately 5 millions became casualties, of whom 1\u00bd millions lost their lives. The British Empire, out of a white population of 60 millions, mobilized nearly 9\u00bd million persons and sustained over 3 million casualties including nearly a million deaths.\n\nThe British totals are not directly comparable with those of France and Germany. The proportion of coloured troops is greater. The numbers who fell in theatres other than the western, and those employed on naval service, are both much larger.\n\nThe French and German figures are however capable of very close comparison. Both the French and German armies fought with their whole strength from the beginning to the end of the war. Each nation made the utmost possible demand upon its population. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the official French and German figures tally with considerable exactness. The Germans mobilized 19 per cent. of their entire population, and the French, with their important African additions, 21 per cent. Making allowance for the African factor, it would appear that in the life-and-death struggle both countries put an equal strain upon their manhood. If this basis is sound\u2014and it certainly appears reasonable\u2014the proportion of French and German casualties to persons mobilized displays an even more remarkable concordance. The proportion of German casualties to total mobilized is 10 out of every 19, and that of the French 10 out of every 16. The ratios of deaths to woundings in Germany and France are almost exactly equal, viz. 2 to 5. Finally these figures yield a division of German losses between the western and all other fronts of approximately 3 to 1 both in deaths and casualties. All the calculations which follow are upon the basis of the tables which yield these authoritative and harmonious general proportions.\n\nThe British War Office published in March, 1922, its _Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War._ A section of this massive compilation records the comparative figures of British and German casualties on the British sector of the Western Front from February, 1915, to October, 1918, inclusive. The British figures are compiled from the official records of the War Office. The German figures have been obtained from the Federal Archives Office at Potsdam. The result of the calculation is summed up as follows: The total number of British 'Officer' casualties was 115,741 and of German 'Officer' casualties 47,256. The total number of British 'Other Ranks' casualties was 2,325,932 and of German 'Other Ranks' casualties 1,633,140. The casualties among British 'Officers' compared to German were therefore about 5 to 2, and of British 'Other Ranks' compared to German about 3 to 2.\n\nComparative tables are given in the same work which show the losses of both sides in the various offensive periods.\n\n The German commissioned officers were less numerous per unit than in the British Service.\n\nThere is no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of these authoritative and official calculations, nor the truth of the picture they present. But since 1918 supplementary casualty returns have been presented both in Germany and Britain which must be brought into the account. They do not materially alter the picture. The two tables printed _after this page_ show in their simplest form the respective total casualties suffered and inflicted according to the latest information by all the three main combatants on the Western Front. It would not be right to claim for any elaborate set of figures built up under such varying circumstances an exact and meticulous accuracy; nor is such exactness necessary for the use to which the figures are put in this account. The authority for every set of figures is given. All the modifications which are required have been made, and in the result I believe it to be a sound and correct presentation of fact.\n\nLet us now proceed to draw the conclusions which emerge from the figures. They do not appear to have been at all appreciated even in the most expert circles. I state them in their simplest form.\n\nDuring the whole war the Germans never lost in any phase of the fighting more than the French whom they fought, and frequently inflicted double casualties upon them. In no one of the periods into which the fighting has been divided by the French authorities, did the French come off best in killed, prisoners and wounded. Whether they were on the defensive or were the attackers the result was the same. Whether in the original rush of the invasion, or in the German offensive at Verdun, or in the great French assaults on the German line, or even in the long periods of wastage on the trench warfare front, it always took the blood of 1\u00bd to 2 Frenchmen to inflict a corresponding injury upon a German.\n\nThe second fact which presents itself from the tables is that in all the British offensives the British casualties were never less than 3 to 2, and often nearly double the corresponding German losses.\n\nHowever, comparing the French and British efforts against the Germans on the Western Front, the French suffered in all the periods concerned irrespective of the kind of operation heavier losses than those they inflicted on the enemy: whereas while the British suffered heavier losses in all offensives, they exacted more than their own losses when attacked by the Germans.\n\nIn the series of great offensive pressures which Joffre delivered during the whole of the spring and autumn of 1915, the French suffered nearly 1,300,000 casualties. They inflicted upon the Germans in the same period and the same operations 506,000 casualties. They gained no territory worth mentioning, and no strategic advantages of any kind. This was the worst year of the Joffre r\u00e9gime. Gross as were the mistakes of the Battle of the Frontiers, glaring as had been the errors of the First Shock, they were eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or man\u0153uvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine guns served with cold skill. The responsibilities of this lamentable phase must be shared in a subordinate degree by Foch, who under Joffre's orders, but as an ardent believer, conducted the prolonged Spring offensive in Artois, the most sterile and prodigal of all.\n\nDuring the Somme in 1916, where the brunt of the slaughter was borne by the British, the French and German losses were much less unequal. But, on the other hand, their rigid method of defence at Verdun, which will be presently described, led the French to suffer in a far greater degree even than the attacking Germans.\n\nIn the face of the official figures now published and set out in the tables, what becomes of the argument of the 'battle of attrition'? If we lose three or four times as many officers and nearly twice as many men in our attack as the enemy in his defence, how are we wearing him down? The result of every one of these offensives was to leave us relatively weaker\u2014and in some cases terribly weaker\u2014than the enemy. The aggregate result of all of them from 1915 to 1917 (after deducting the losses on both sides in the German attack on Verdun) was a French and British casualty list of 4,123,000 compared to a German total of 2,166,000. Not only is this true of numbers, but also of the quality of the troops. In the attack it is the bravest who fall. The loss is heaviest among the finest and most audacious fighters. In defence the casualties are spread evenly throughout the total number exposed to the fire. The process of attrition was at work; but it was on our own side that its ravages fell, and not on the German.\n\nIt may be contended that if one side is much more numerous than the other it may 'wear down' the enemy, as Grant sought vainly to wear down the Confederates before Richmond in 1864, even at a cost of two to one. But this argument cannot be applied to the struggle on the Western Front. First, the Allies never had the superiority to afford such an uneven sacrifice of life. Secondly, the German annual intake of recruits was large enough to repair the whole of their permanent loss in any year.\n\nLet us here examine the total German losses on the Western Front.\n\nCasualties inflicted on the Germans  \nby  \n---  \n|  | _British._ | _French._ | _Total_.  \n1914 | (say) | 100,000 | 748,000 | 848,000  \n1915 |  | 116,000 | 536,000 | 652,000  \n1916 |  | 291,000 | 673,000 | 964,000  \n1917 |  | 448,000 | 436,000 | 884,000  \n1918 |  | 818,000 | 680,000 | 1,498,000  \n_Total_ |  | 1,773,000 | 3,072,000 | 4,846,000\n\nFrom the tables of killed, missing, prisoners and wounded it is necessary to extract the permanent loss to the Army, i.e. men rendered incapable of taking any further part in the war. For this purpose we include all the killed, missing and prisoners and one-third only of the wounded. On this basis the total permanent German loss in the West during the three years of siege warfare was as follows:\u2014\n\n1915 | 337,000  \n---|---  \n1916 | 549,000  \n1917 | 510,000  \n_Total_ | 1,396,000\n\nThus in the three years of siege conditions the losses of the Germans on the Western Front averaged 465,000 a year. Their annual intake of recruits through young men growing up was over 800,000. But, in their hard need, and often through the ardour of their young men, they heavily anticipated their annual harvests. From May, the normal conscription month, to the end of 1915, they drew 1,070,000 men to the Colours. In the similar period of 1916 they overdrew no less than 1,443,000 men. Thus, in 1917 they could call up only 622,000. Nevertheless, the least of these figures far exceeded the attrition value of the Allied offensives. It was not until 1918 that the intake of available Germans fell to 405,000. It would probably, if the national resistance had not collapsed, have risen in 1919, for the ample crops of German youth were steadily coming forward at 800,000 a year. The figures of German loss and intake for the three Siege years are therefore as follows:\u2014\n\n| Loss in the  \nWest. | Total  \nIntake. | Balance for  \nall Fronts.  \n---|---|---|---  \n1915 | 337,000 | 1,070,000 | 733,000  \n1916 | 549,000 | 1,443,000 | 891,000  \n1917 | 510,000 | 622,000 | 112,000  \n_Totals_ | 1,396,000 | 3,135,000 | 1,739,000\n\nWhere then in mere attrition was the end to be discerned? On the terms of 1915, 1916, and 1917 the German man power was sufficient to last indefinitely. In fact in the three years of the Allied offensives on the Western front they gained actually to the extent of 1,739,000 men more than their losses. We were in fact, as I wrote early in March, 1918, 'merely exchanging lives upon a scale at once more frightful than anything that has been witnessed before in the world, and too modest to produce a decision.'\n\nIt was not until 1918 that the change fatal for Germany occurred. There was one period in the warfare between the British and Germans in which the relative losses are strikingly reversed. That period is not, as the casual reader might expect, when our troops were gaining ground, storming trench lines, pulverizing fortified villages, gathering prisoners and the grisly spoils of battle, and when our propaganda, domestic and external, was eagerly proclaiming that the tide of victory flowed. It was during the period which probably in most people's minds represents the most agonizing and alarming phase of the war on the Western Front, the days of the greatest German victories and the most grievous British reverses. For the first time in Ludendorff's tremendous offensive of 1918, in the battles following the twenty-first of March and in the battles of the Lys, the German losses in men and officers, in killed and wounded, especially killed, and above all in officers killed, towered up above those of the troops whom they thought they were defeating, and whom we knew they were driving back.\n\nIt was their own offensive, not ours, that consummated their ruin. They were worn down not by Joffre, Nivelle and Haig, but by Ludendorff. See again the remorseless figures from March 21, 1918, to the end of June. In barely three months the Germans suffered against the British alone 16,000 officer casualties and 419,000 casualties among the other ranks. They lost in almost the same period against the British alone, 3,860 officers killed compared with 3,878 officers killed by the British in the whole preceding two years. Against the French in the same three months, but mainly in the last five weeks, the Germans lost 253,000 officers and men. Their total casualties in only thirteen weeks amounted to 688,000, very few of whom in the short time that was left ever returned to the front. In this period their intake was reduced to 405,000 for the nine months of the year that the war lasted. Therefore they consumed nearly 700,000 men in a time when their corresponding intake did not exceed 150,000. Here then was the wearing down which, coming at the moment when the German national spirit was enfeebled by its exertions during four years and by the cumulative effects of the blockade, led to the German retreat on the Western Front; to the failure to make an effective withdrawal to the Antwerp-Meuse line with all the bargaining possibilities that this afforded, and to the sudden final collapse of German resistance in November, 1918.\n\nBut, it will be said, numerical attrition is not the only test, there is moral attrition which wears down the will power of an enemy who is constantly being attacked. He has to yield ground; he loses prisoners, guns, and trophies; he sees the strongest defences stormed; his battle line is constantly receding. It is this experience which wears him out in spite of the fact that he is killing two or often three assailants for each of his own men slain. It may be conceded that the ordeal of the defending troops in modern warfare is no less trying than that of the attacker. But after all there is no greater stimulus to the soldier in his agony than the knowledge of the loss he is inflicting on his foe. Crouched by his machine gun amid the awful bombardment he sees long lines mowed down, wave after wave, in hundreds and in thousands. He knows how few and far between are the defenders, he sees how many are their targets. With every attack repulsed he gains fresh confidence, and when at last he is overwhelmed there are others behind him who know what is happening and which side is suffering most.\n\nBut let us test the theory of moral attrition also by the facts. Can it be disputed that the confidence of the German armies was increased as well as their relative numerical strength by the repulse of the British and French at Loos and Champagne in 1915? Did these battles induce them to weaken in any way their pressure upon Russia? Was it not during these very battles that German divisions conquered Serbia and overran the Balkans? Was not the German High Command at the height of the Somme offensive able to withdraw more than a dozen divisions from the various fronts to strike down Roumania? Which army exulted over the great Nivelle offensive in 1917? Who emerged with the greatest confidence from the prolonged fighting which followed the Battle of Arras? What were the relative positions of the British and German Armies at the end of Passchendaele\u2014the British exhausted, shot to pieces, every division having to be reduced from thirteen to ten battalions; the Germans training, resting, gathering their reinforcements from Russia for a greater effort than any they had yet made?\n\nIt is certain, surveying the war as a whole, that the Germans were strengthened relatively by every Allied offensive\u2014British or French\u2014launched against them, until the summer of 1918. Had they not squandered their strength in Ludendorff's supreme offensive in 1918, there was no reason why they should not have maintained their front in France practically unaltered during the whole of the year, and retreated at their leisure during the winter no farther than the Meuse.\n\nBut, it will be said, if the conditions over a prolonged period are such that all offensives are equally injurious to the attacker, how then is war to be waged? Are both sides to sit down with enormous armies year after year looking at each other, each convinced that whoever attacks will be the loser? Is this the sterile conclusion to which the argument tends? What positive courses should have been adopted? No one need go so far as to say that every Allied offensive could have been avoided. Indeed, there were at least five examples of short sudden 'set piece' attacks\u2014the opening of the battle of Arras, the capture of the Messines Ridge, the French recaptures of Fort Douaumont and of Malmaison, and the first day's battle of Cambrai\u2014which in themselves were brilliant events. All of these, if they had ended with the fruits of the initial surprise, would have been more costly in men as well as in repute to the Germans than to the Allies. It is indeed by such episodes that the prestige of an 'active defensive' might have been maintained. But the question is whether it was wise policy to seek and pursue prolonged offensives on the largest scale in order to wear down the enemy by attrition; whether instead of seeking the offensive ourselves in France, both British and French ought not consistently on all occasions to have endeavoured to compel the enemy to attack. If our whole strategy and tactics had been directed to that end, would not the final victory have been sooner won?\n\nOnce the enemy was committed to the attack we could have exacted a cruel forfeit. It would have been his part, not ours, to crunch the barbed wire and gorge machine guns with the noblest sacrifices of youth. And need the tale have ended there? The use of force for the waging of war is not to be regulated simply by firm character and text-book maxims. Craft, foresight, deep comprehension of the verities, not only local but general; stratagems, devices, man\u00e9uvres, all of these on the grand scale are demanded from the chiefs of great armies.\n\nSuppose we\u2014both French and British\u2014have trained our armies behind the trench line to a high standard of flexible man\u00e9uvring efficiency; suppose we have permanently fortified with concrete and every modern device those portions of the front where we cannot retreat; suppose we have long selected and shrewdly weakened those portions where we could afford to give 20 or 30 kilometres of ground; suppose we lure the enemy to attack there and make great pockets and bulges in a thin and yielding front, and then, just as he thinks himself pressing on to final victory, strike with independent counter-offensive on the largest scale and with deeply planned railways, not at his fortified trench line, but at the flanks of a moving, quivering line of battle! Are there not combinations here which at every stage would sell ground only subject to the full blood tax, and finally offer to brave, fresh, well-trained troops the opportunities of sudden and glorious victory?\n\nAnd why should the view be limited to the theatre in which the best and largest armies happen to face each other? Sea power, railway communications, foreign policy, present the means of finding new flanks outside the area of deadlock. Mechanical science offers on the ground, in the air, on every coast, from the forge or from the laboratory, boundless possibilities of novelty and surprise. Suppose for instance the war power represented by the 450,000 French and British casualties in the Champagne-Loos battle of 1915 had been used to force the Dardanelles or to combine the Balkan States!\n\nLet us, to cultivate a sense of proportion, digress for a moment from the Western Front to the 'side-shows' of the war\u2014many of them in themselves ill-judged\u2014in order to measure the distribution of our total war power. A calculation has been made by the War Office and published in _The Military Effort_ on the basis, not of course of casualties, but of the men employed in any theatre multiplied by the number of days so employed. From this the following proportions are derived, taking the effort at the Dardanelles as the unit.\n\nMAN-DAYS  \n( _Officers Excluded_ )\n\nDardanelles | 1.00  \n---|---  \nSalonica | 6.40  \nNorth Russia | .08  \nPalestine | 12.20  \nMesopotamia | 11.80  \nEast Africa | 8.20  \nFrance | 73.00\n\nAnd is there not also a virtue in 'saving up'? We never gave ourselves the chance. We had to improvise our armies in face of the enemy. The flower of the nation, its manhood, its enterprise, its brains were all freely given. But there never was found the time to train and organize these elements before they were consumed. From the priceless metal successive half-sharpened, half-tempered weapons were made, were used and broken as soon as they were fashioned, and then replaced by others similarly unperfected. The front had to be defended, the war had to be waged, but there was surely no policy in eagerly _seeking_ offensives with immature formations or during periods when no answer to the machine gun existed. Suppose that the British Army sacrificed upon the Somme, the finest we ever had, had been preserved, trained and developed to its full strength till the summer of 1917, till perhaps 3,000 tanks were ready, till an overwhelming artillery was prepared, till a scientific method of continuous advance had been devised, till the apparatus was complete, might not a decisive result have been achieved at one supreme stroke?\n\nIt will be said\u2014What of the Allies\u2014what of Russia\u2014what of Italy, would they have endured so long, while France and Britain perfected their plans and accumulated their power? But if direct aid had come to Russia through the destruction of Turkey, and to Italy through the marshalling of the Balkans against Austria, might not both these states have been spared the disasters to which they were in fact exposed? And is there any use in fighting a prolonged offensive in which the attacker suffers without strategic gain nearly double the loss of the defenders? How does the doing of an unwise, costly and weakening act help an Ally? Is not any temporary relief to him of pressure at the moment paid for by him with compound interest in the long run? What is the sense of attacking only to be defeated: or of 'wearing down the enemy' by being worn down more than twice as fast oneself? The uncontrollable momentum of war, the inadequacy of unity and leadership among Allies, the tides of national passion, nearly always _force_ improvident action upon Governments or Commanders. Allowance must be made for the limits of their knowledge and power. The British commanders were throughout deeply influenced by the French mood and situation. But do not let us obscure the truth. Do not found conclusions upon error. Do not proclaim its melancholy consequences as the perfect model of the art of war or as the triumphant consummation of a great design.\n\n# CHAPTER III\n\n# FALKENHAYN'S CHOICE\n\nFalkenhayn's Position\u2014Attack the Strong or the Weak\u2014Falkenhayn's Achievement in 1915\u2014The Rejected Remedy of the Allies\u2014The Initiative Returns to Germany\u2014The Politics of Roumania\u2014Roumania at the Outbreak of War\u2014Roumanian Policy in 1915\u2014Her Isolation at Christmas\u2014The Salonica Expedition\u2014Influence of Lloyd George and Briand\u2014Still not too late\u2014Power of the Unexpected\u2014Falkenhayn's Memorandum\u2014East or West\u2014His Decision\u2014Examination of his Policy\u2014Need to win Roumania\u2014Breaking the Blockade by Land\u2014Roumania or Verdun.\n\nThe opening scene of the year 1916 lies in the Cabinet of the German Main Headquarters, and the principal figure is General von Falkenhayn, the virtual Commander-in-Chief of the Central Empires. On the evening of September 14, 1914, Falkenhayn, then Minister of War, had been appointed by the Emperor Chief of the German General Staff. From this post General von Moltke, who, when the decision of the Marne had become unmistakable, had said to the Emperor: 'Your Majesty, we have lost the war,' had retired, broken in health and heart. The new Director of the German Army also retained for a time his position as Minister of War; and when early in the New Year he ceded this latter post, it was to a nominee of his own. Falkenhayn was therefore armed with the fullest powers, and during a period of almost exactly two years he continued to wield them undisputed. He had succeeded to a stricken inheritance. The great stake had been played and lost by his predecessor. The rush on Paris, trampling down Belgium, and with it all hope of ending the war by one blow, had failed. It had cost Germany her good name before the world, it had brought into the field against her the sea power, the wealth and the ever-growing military strength of the British Empire. In the East the defeat of the Austrians in the Battle of Lemberg had balanced the victories of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the rulers of Germany, their armies at a standstill, their territories blockaded, their sea-borne commerce arrested, must prepare for a prolonged struggle against a combination of States of at least twice their population and wealth, commanding through sea power the resources of the whole world and possessed at this juncture of the choice where to strike the next blow.\n\nThe Truths of War are absolute, but the principles governing their application have to be deduced on each occasion from the circumstances, which are always different; and in consequence no rules are any guide to action. Study of the past is invaluable as a means of training and storing the mind, but it is no help without selective discernment of the particular facts and of their emphasis, relation and proportion.\n\nGerman, like British military policy, oscillated throughout the Great War between two opposed conceptions of strategy. Reduced to the simplest terms the contrasted theories may be expressed as follows: To attack the strong, or to attack the weak. Once all attempts against the Dardanelles were finally excluded from consideration, little was left to Britain but to attack the strong. The Balkans were lost, and the scale of the armies required to produce decisive results in the Balkan Peninsula or in Turkey had by this time outrun the limits of available sea power. The prizes had disappeared or dwindled; the efforts required to gain them had been multiplied beyond all reason. But to Germany, with her central position and excellent railway system, both alternative policies were constantly open, and her leaders, in their torment of perplexity, were drawn now in one direction and now in the other.\n\nTo contend that either of these theories was wholly and invariably right and the other wrong would be to press argument beyond the bounds of common sense. Obviously if you can beat your strongest opponent in the hostile combination you should do so. But if you cannot beat your strongest opponent in the main theatre, nor he beat you; or if it is very unlikely that you can do so, and if the cost of failure will be very great, then surely it is time to consider whether the downfall of your strongest foe cannot be accomplished through the ruin of his weakest ally, or one of his weaker allies; and in this connection a host of political, economic and geographical advantages may arise and play their part in the argument. Every case must be judged upon its merits and in relation to the whole of the circumstances of the occasion. The issue is not one for rigid or absolute decision in general terms; but a strong inclination in theory, based upon profound reflection, is a good guide amid the conflict and confusion of facts.\n\nThese volumes will leave the reader in no doubt about the opinion of their author. From first to last it is contended that once the main armies were in deadlock in France the true strategy for both sides was to attack the weaker partners in the opposite combination with the utmost speed and ample force. According to this view, Germany was unwise to attack France in August, 1914, and especially unwise to invade Belgium for that purpose. She should instead have struck down Russia and left France to break her teeth against the German fortress and trench lines. Acting thus she would probably have avoided war with the British Empire, at any rate during the opening, and for her most important, phase of the struggle. The first German decision to attack the strongest led to her defeat at the Marne and the Yser, and left her baffled and arrested with the ever-growing might of an implacable British Empire on her hands. Thus 1914 ended.\n\nBut in 1915 Germany turned to the second alternative, and her decision was attended by great success. Leaving the British and French to shatter their armies against her trench lines in France, Germany marched and led her allies against Russia, with the result that by the autumn enormous territories had been conquered from Russia; all the Russian system of fortresses and strategic railways was in German hands, while the Russian armies were to a large extent destroyed and the Russian State grievously injured.\n\nThe only method by which the Allies could rescue Russia was by forcing the Dardanelles. This was the only counter-stroke that could be effective. If it had succeeded it would have established direct and permanent contact between Russia and her Western allies, it would have driven Turkey, or at the least Turkey in Europe, out of the war, and might well have united the whole of the Balkan States, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Roumania, against Austria and Germany. Russia would thus have received direct succour, and in addition would have experienced an enormous relief through the pressure which the combined Balkan States would instantly have applied to Austria-Hungary. However, the narrow and local views of British Admirals and Generals and of the French Headquarters had obstructed this indispensable man\u00e9uvre. Instead of a clear strategic conception being clothed and armed with all that the science of staffs and the authority of Commanders could suggest, it had been resisted, hampered, starved and left to languish. The time gained by this mismanagement and the situation created by the Russian defeats enabled Germany in September to carry the policy of attacking the weaker a step further. Falkenhayn organized an attack upon Serbia. Bulgaria was gained to the German side, Serbia was conquered, and direct contact was established between the Central Empires and Turkey. The failure and final abandonment of the Dardanelles campaign thus sealed the fate not only of the Balkan States but also of Russia. The defeat of the French and British armies in the disastrous battles of Champagne and Loos proved the German front unbreakable in the West. The direct contact between Germany and Turkey established through the accession of Bulgaria gripped Turkey and threw open the road to the East. The year 1915 was therefore one of great success for Germany, and Falkenhayn could claim with justice that by the mistakes of her enemies and by her own adoption of the policy of attacking the weaker she had retrieved in its course the disastrous situation in which she had been left at the end of 1914. Opportunity and initiative had returned to Germany: the next move lay with her, and 1916 dawned in breathless expectation of what it would be.\n\nNowhere was the choice of Germany awaited with more strained attention than in Roumania. The policy of a small State overshadowed by tremendous neighbouring Empires, at grips with one another, from both of whom she coveted important provinces, was necessarily one of calculation. In the years before the war Roumania conceived herself to have been defrauded of Bessarabia by Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1878. From Hungary her desires were at once natural and ambitious. Siebenburgen, Transylvania and to a lesser extent the Bukovina were largely inhabited by men of Roumanian race, and in Transylvania particularly Roumanian sentiment was sternly repressed by the Hungarian Government. To be united to these unredeemed provinces, to join her out-lying kinsfolk to the Motherland, to build in one form or another the integral, ethnological unit of a Great Roumania, was throughout the supreme and dominating motive of Bucharest. These aims had for generations been obvious both to Russia and to Austria-Hungary, who watched without illusion and fully armed every move in Roumanian affairs. On her other borders Roumania clashed with two Balkan States. She competed with Serbian ambitions for the eventual reversion of the Banat of Temesvar. She had profited by the crisis of the Balkan War of 1912 to take the Dobruja from Bulgaria. To her grave preoccupations about Russia and Austria-Hungary, Roumania must henceforward add a persisting fear of Bulgarian revenge.\n\nThese grim external relationships were aggravated by the complications of domestic and dynastic politics. The Roumanian Conservatives, headed by Majoresco, favoured Germany. The Liberals, headed by Bratiano, the new Prime Minister, favoured France. Outside official circles the most prominent politician on the side of the Entente was Take Jonescu, and on the side of Germany Carp. The King was not only pro-German but German, and a faithful son of the House of Hohenzollern to boot. The Heir Apparent was pro-French and his wife pro-English. Both the King and his successor had exceptional consorts. The poetry of 'Carmen Sylva' is widely acclaimed: the courage of Queen Marie was to remain undaunted through every trial the tempest had in store. In short, Roumania, if war came, could move in either direction towards alternative prizes glittering across chasms, and in either case she would find a Party and a Royal Family apt and happy to execute her policy. To choose would be an awful hazard. Yet not to choose, to linger in futile neutrality, might cast away the supreme opportunity of Roumanian national history.\n\nA minor complication upon the threshold of action was a Treaty signed in 1883 between Roumania and Austria-Hungary, to which Germany and Italy had subsequently acceded. By this the two parties engaged to follow a friendly policy, to give mutual support and not enter into any alliance or engagement directed against the other party. If Roumania without provocation on her part were attacked, Austria-Hungary was bound to bring her in ample time help and assistance. If Austria-Hungary were attacked in the same circumstances in a portion of her State bordering on Roumania, Roumania was reciprocally bound to come to her aid.\n\nThis Treaty had been kept strictly secret, and up to the outbreak of war was known in Roumania only to the King and to the Prime Minister. But Russia had deep suspicions that something of the sort existed, and in her railway strategy at least counted Roumania as a potential foe. In 1913 the Treaty, though it still stood, had become extremely precarious, and Count Czernin, the future Austro-Hungarian Foreign Secretary and at that time Austrian Minister to Bucharest, was charged specially with the duty of ascertaining from King Carol what reliance could be placed upon the compact. He achieved his object by suggesting to the King that the Alliance should be ratified by the Parliaments at Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest. This test was conclusive. 'The alarm evinced by the King,' writes Czernin, 'at the suggestion\u2014at the very idea that the carefully guarded secret of the existence of an alliance should be divulged, proved to me how totally impossible it would be in the circumstances to infuse fresh life into such dead matter.'\n\nSwiftly upon this came the bombs of Serajevo. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was friendly to Roumania and adverse to the Magyar domination of Hungary. He was believed to favour a scheme of forming a Great Roumania at the expense of Hungary, and incorporating the whole unit in a tripartite Empire under a Triple instead of a Dual Monarchy. His murder therefore aroused in Roumania not only personal sympathy but national disappointment. At the same time his disappearance removed one of the ties which connected Roumania with the Teutonic Powers. It was left for the Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia to sever the others.\n\nAlmost at the same hour when Sir Edward Grey was reading the brutal terms of this document to the British Cabinet in Downing Street, Count Czernin was repeating them to King Carol in Bucharest. 'Never shall I forget,' writes Czernin, 'the impression it made on the old King when he heard it. He, wise old politician that he was, recognized at once the immeasurable possibilities of such a step, and before I finished reading the document he interrupted me, exclaiming \"It will be a world war.\" It was long before he could collect himself....'\n\nCzernin continues: 'The Ultimatum and the danger of war... completely altered the Roumanian attitude, and it was suddenly recognized that Roumania could achieve her object by other means, not by peace but by war\u2014not with, but against the [Austro-Hungarian] Monarchy. I would never have believed it possible that such a rapid and total change could have occurred practically within a few hours. Genuine and unsimulated indignation at the tone of the Ultimatum was the order of the day, and the universal conclusion arrived at was \"Austria has gone mad....\" Like a rock standing in the angry sea of hatred, poor old King Carol was alone with his German sympathies.'\n\nUpon the complicated politics of aspiring Roumania the Great War had thus supervened. Russia and Austria-Hungary sprang at each other in mortal conflict, while high above the European scene rose the flaming sword of Germany. Each side bid for Roumania's favours and offered bribes for Roumanian intervention. But the inducements of the Great Powers took the form, not of ceding portions of their own territory to Roumanian sovereignty, but rather of promising to cede portions of their rivals' territory to Roumania if with her assistance they won the war. The question which Roumania had to decide was, Who would win the War? It was very difficult to tell, yet on judging rightly depended Ruin or Empire. Long did Roumania hesitate before she gave her answer.\n\nThere was no doubt where at the outset her sympathies lay. Roumania saw like all neutral states, like all detached observers, how flagrantly the Central Powers had put themselves in the wrong and how grossly they had blundered. On the balance far more was to be gained by Roumania from the downfall of Austria-Hungary than from that of Russia. The Pro-French Bratiano ministry was in power. Take Jonescu, like Venizelos in Greece, never swerved from the conviction that England would always come out victorious. Sympathies, merits, interest, mood, all pointed towards Britain, France and Russia. On the other side was King Carol with the Treaty on his conscience\u2014and the fear of national destruction at his heart.\n\nPrudence enjoined delay, and in this atmosphere any proposal of honouring the alliance and joining Austria was out of the question. The Roumanian Government followed the Italian example of declaring that as there had not been an unprovoked attack upon Austria the _casus f\u0153deris_ had not arisen. Roumania declared neutrality, and King Carol had to be content with this. The policy of Roumania henceforward is sourly described by Czernin in the following terms, which cannot be considered just unless her difficulties are also comprehended: 'The Roumanian Government consciously and deliberately placed itself between the two groups of Powers and allowed itself to be driven and pushed by each, got the largest amount of advantages from each, and watched for the moment when it could be seen which was the stronger, in order then to fall upon the weaker.'\n\nWhile the old King lived his influence was sufficient, in spite of the Battle of Lemberg and the Russian advance into Galicia, to prevent Roumania from declaring war upon Austria-Hungary. But on October 10, 1914, King Carol died. By this time it was evident that the war would be long, and its result was more than ever to Roumanian eyes incalculable. In the spring of 1915 the Germans began to shatter the Russian front, and the immense disasters and recoil of the Russian armies dominated the Roumanian mood and paralysed the disconnected British, French and Russian diplomacy. On the other hand, the attack upon the Dardanelles, the prospect of the fall of Constantinople and of the arrival of a British Fleet in the Black Sea was a counterpoise. All through 1915, while the Russian retreat was continual, the expectation of a British and French victory over Turkey kept Roumania true to her convictions and neutral in the war. She accepted money from both sides, she sold corn and oil to Germany, but she obstructed the passage of German munitions to the Dardanelles and closed no gate decisively upon the Allies. With the failure of the Dardanelles Expedition, with the accession of Bulgaria to the Teutonic cause, with the invasion and ruin of Serbia and the final evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, all the military factors became adverse, and Roumania at the beginning of 1916 stood isolated and encompassed by the Central Empires.\n\nThere was however one factor of which Roumania took notice. An allied army based on Salonica faced the Bulgarians along their Southern frontier. We have seen in the second Part the curious beginnings of this enterprise, and, so far as they are worth recording, the still more curious causes which led to its being entrusted to the command of General Sarrail.\n\nSarrail had arrived at Salonica in September, 1915, to find one British and two French divisions in or near the town. The Serbians were retreating in all the cruel severity of the winter before the German-Austro-Bulgarian invasion. Some small French detachments were sent northward up the Vardar valley; but of course it was already too late for Sarrail or the Allied Powers to give any effective help. Sarrail had neither the force nor the communications to enable him to act effectively. As the British General Staff had explained carefully to their Government in October, no sufficient force could be spared, or if spared, landed in Salonica in time, or if landed at Salonica, transported and maintained in Serbia. The roads and railways, the wagons and rolling stock which existed could not carry to the north any army large enough seriously to intervene in the tragedy of the Serbian overthrow. At the same time the attitude of King Constantine had become so openly pro-German that there was an obvious danger of Salonica being converted into a hostile town _behind_ the French advanced detachments which were based upon it. In these circumstances, Sarrail had recalled his troops hastily to the town of Salonica, determined to keep a hold at any rate on his base: and the remnant of the Serbian Army managed in the end to make its escape to the shores of the Adriatic, whence French and Italian warships embarked the indomitable survivors and brought them round to Salonica by sea. Here then in November, 1915, had ended the first futile phase of the Salonica expedition.\n\nBut this as it had turned out was only to be the beginning of the story. Although Serbia was conquered, the remnants of her army rescued, Bulgaria committed to the side of the Central Powers, and although the effectual co-operation of Greece had become hopeless, the Salonica policy was to continue. At the beginning of 1915 both Lloyd George and Briand had had the same idea of sending a large army to Salonica to influence the Balkans. They had not then had the power to execute their plan while it had great prizes to offer; but when almost all the possible advantages had disappeared these two brilliant men, akin in many ways in temperament, found themselves advancing to controlling positions. They both adhered faithfully to their first conception, and neither seemed to realize how vastly its prospects had been curtailed. Such was their influence upon events that a numerous allied army was, at enormous cost, in defiance of military opinion, and after most of the original political objectives had disappeared, carried or being carried to Salonica. At the outset the oppositions to developing the Salonica expedition on a far larger scale seemed overwhelming; the majority of the British Government was against the plan; the General Staff were violently adverse; Lord Kitchener threatened several times to resign if it was pressed. Against this combination was Lloyd George. Similar conditions existed on the other side of the Channel; Joffre and the French Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral were adverse to the proposed diversion of forces from the main theatre. Cl\u00e9menceau was violently hostile, but Briand, adroit, persuasive, and now Prime Minister, had many resources. Joffre's position had been weakened by his defeat in Champagne, and an accommodation was effected between him and the French Cabinet, of which the salient features were that Joffre should have the Salonica army as well as the armies in France under his general command, and that in return Joffre should whole-heartedly support the Salonica project in the councils of the Allies and also with the resources at his disposal. France thus united then threw her whole weight upon the British Cabinet and finally, aided by Lloyd George, induced their compliance.\n\nThe controversies which raged on both sides of the Channel upon the Salonica expedition were silenced by the remarkable fact that it was upon this much abused front that the final collapse of the Central Empires first began. The falling away of Bulgaria, the weakest Ally, produced reactions in Germany as demoralizing as the heaviest blows they had sustained upon the western front. The Salonica policy, for all its burden upon our shipping and resources, its diversion of troops, its false beacon to Roumania, and its futile operations, was nevertheless largely vindicated by the extremely practical test of results. The consternation of Bulgaria at the defeats of the German armies in France was however at least as potent a factor in her collapse as the actual military pressures to which her own troops were subjected. The reactions were reciprocal: the German defeats undermined Bulgarian resistance; and the Bulgarian surrender pulled out the linchpin of the German combination.\n\nTrue strategy in 1915 pointed for the Allies to the south-eastern theatre, to the Balkan States, to Constantinople, to the weaker members of the hostile confederacy; and though everything was done at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and at the wrong place, nevertheless the general direction of the pressure was right, and in the long run produced results. There was however one way in which the true strategic direction could have been armed with tactical force.\n\nIt must have been a hard thing for William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings to call his proud Normans off from the attack, and by feigning a flight down the Hill of Senlac to induce Harold and his army to quit the stockades they had so stubbornly defended. William was not however found unequal to that test, and has in consequence been called the 'Conqueror' ever since.\n\nFollowing this suggestion, the reader will no doubt perceive that the plan of British and Allied war which according to this account would best have served our interests in the year 1916 would have been a surprise attack upon the Dardanelles. Such an operation, if successful, would have been the only parry to a possible German eastward thrust, and the only means of holding Russia and preventing Roumania from being absorbed in the Teutonic combination. In face of the actual German plans for a great offensive at Verdun, for the withdrawal of all German troops from the Austrian Front, and an Austrian offensive in the Trentino, the forcing of the Dardanelles by Allied fleets and armies might well have been decisive. If this could have been accomplished by the month of June, Roumania might have been persuaded to march against the Central Powers simultaneously with the Russian offensive under Brusiloff; and in this event there can be no doubt that the whole Austrian Front towards the east would have been completely swept away. Moreover, the concentration of such large numbers of allied troops already in existence in the eastern Mediterranean, at Salonica, in Egypt and the Islands, and the immense quantities of shipping and small craft of all kinds which were already on the spot, would have rendered a general descent upon the Gallipoli Peninsula, on the Asiatic shore or at Dedeagatch-Bulair, a thoroughly feasible scheme.\n\nA single mental conception would have transformed all the twenty allied divisions, sprawled in defensive or diversive functions, into a vast army crouching, under the cover of perfectly satisfactory explanations, for one swift convergent spring. Assuredly the enemy\u2014Turks and Allies\u2014were absolutely convinced that, dreading the fire that had burned us, we would never molest the Dardanelles again. Within two months of our evacuation they had withdrawn all their troops from the Gallipoli Peninsula except three divisions, and had distributed them in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Thrace. The Turkish Army that had so stoutly defended the Peninsula was scattered to every point of the compass, and separated from that fateful spot by long, uncertain, and inefficient railway and road communications. The British Army that might attack the deserted Peninsula lay within thirty-six hours' steaming of whatever landing places might be selected. The Navy was thoroughly equipped for the task. Not only did we know\u2014to our cost maybe, but also to our experience\u2014every inch of the ground and every yard of the coast, but a situation as favourable as was open in March or April, 1915, had returned. The enemy was once again off his guard, and the choice of time and place had, in this theatre at least, returned to our hands. The very barriers of inhibition that existed in the minds of the British Cabinet, and of which the enemy was clearly conscious, were the prime reason for the attempt. The more morally impossible a military operation, the better chance it will have of success if it is physically practicable. Surprise\u2014that sovereign talisman of War\u2014springs from the doing of the exact thing the enemy is certain will never be tried. 'Whatever happens, they will never do that again. Put yourself in their place\u2014would you?' 'No, it is inconceivable.' Do it then\u2014if this is the enemy's thought\u2014and do it for that very reason. However, no such audacious scheme crossed the minds of our rulers. They trusted they might never hear the name of Gallipoli again, and yielded themselves with placid hopefulness to the immense frontal attacks which were being prepared in France. It was not until the summer of 1918 that Admiral Keyes\u2014strong in the achievement of Zeebrugge\u2014and Admiral Wemyss installed as First Sea Lord, were able to obtain the authority for a renewed naval forcing of the Dardanelles in the possible campaign of 1919. That was at last too late.\n\nLong and anxious were the reflections of the German High Command. They have been elaborately explained by the person chiefly responsible. During Christmas, 1915, Falkenhayn set himself to write a Memorandum for the eye of the Emperor. He has published it in his Memoirs. The document is not an impressive one and it bears evidence of being dressed to the taste of Falkenhayn's august master, but its argument and its conclusion were certainly clear. Falkenhayn deprecated but did not seek to veto the Austrian proposal for an attack on Italy. He disapproved of attacks on England in the East: 'Victories at Salonica, the Suez Canal or in Mesopotamia can only help us in so far as they intensify the doubts about England's invulnerability which have already been aroused amongst the Mediterranean peoples and in the Mohammedan world.... We can in no case expect to do anything of decisive effect in the course of the war, as the advocates of an Alexander march to India or Egypt or an overwhelming blow at Salonica are always hoping....' He rejected plans for continuing the offensive against Russia: 'According to all reports the domestic difficulties of the \"Giant Empire\" are multiplying rapidly. Even if we cannot perhaps expect a revolution in the grand style, we are entitled to believe that Russia's internal troubles will compel her to give in within a relatively short period.... Unless we are again prepared to put a strain on the troops which is altogether out of proportion\u2014and this is prohibited by the state of our reserves\u2014an offensive with a view to a decision in the East is out of the question for us until April, owing to the weather and the state of the ground. _The rich territory of the Ukraine is the only objective that can be considered._ The communications towards that region are in no way sufficient. It is to be presumed that we should either secure the adhesion of Roumania or make up our minds to fight her: both are impracticable for the moment. A thrust at Petersburg, with its million inhabitants, whom we should have to feed from our own short stocks if the operations were successful, does not promise a decision. An advance on Moscow takes us nowhere. We have not the forces available for any of these undertakings. For all these reasons Russia as an object of our offensive must be considered as excluded.'...Falkenhayn then proceeds to examine the Western theatre. 'In Flanders, as far as the Lorette Ridge, the state of the ground prevents any far-reaching operation until the middle of the spring. South of that point the local Commanders consider that about thirty divisions would be required. The offensive in the northern sector would need the same number. Yet it is impossible for us to concentrate those forces on one point of our front.... Moreover, the lessons to be deduced from the failure of our enemies' mass attacks are decisive against any imitation of their battle methods. An attempt at a mass break-through, even with an extreme accumulation of men and material, cannot be regarded as holding out prospects of success against a well-armed enemy whose morale is sound and who is not seriously inferior in number. The defender has usually succeeded in closing the gap. This is easy enough for him if he decides to withdraw voluntarily, and it is hardly possible to stop him doing so. The salients thus made, enormously exposed to the effect of flank fire, threaten to become a mere slaughter-house. The technical difficulties of directing and supplying the masses bottled up in them are so great as to seem practically insurmountable.\n\n'We must equally discountenance any attempt to attack a British sector with comparatively inadequate means. We could only approve that course if we could give such an attack an objective within reasonable reach. There is no such objective; our goal would have to be nothing less than to drive the English completely from the Continent and force the French behind the Somme. If that object at least were not attained the attack would have been purposeless....'\n\nHaving disposed of all these alternatives the General approaches the conclusion to which his reflections had led him: 'There remains only France.... The strain in France has almost reached breaking-point.... The uncertain method of mass break-through, in any case beyond our means, is unnecessary. Within our reach, behind the French sector of the Western Front, there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so, the forces of France will bleed to death\u2014as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal\u2014whether we reach our goal or not. If they do not do so, and we reach our objective, the moral effect on France will be enormous. For an operation limited to a narrow front, Germany will not be compelled to spend herself so completely, for all other fronts are practically drained. She can face with confidence the relief attacks to be expected on those fronts, and indeed hope to have sufficient troops in hand to reply to them with counter-attacks, for she is perfectly free to accelerate or draw out her offensive, to intensify or break it off from time to time as suits her purpose.\n\n'The objectives of which I am speaking now are Belfort and Verdun. The considerations urged above apply to both; yet the preference must be given to Verdun. The French lines at that point are barely 12 miles distant from the German railway communication. Verdun is therefore the most powerful _point d'appui_ for an attempt [by the French] with a relatively small expenditure of effort to make the whole German front in France and Belgium untenable. At Christmas,' says Falkenhayn, 'it was decided to give effect to the views which had crystallized out of this process of reasoning.'\n\nThe execution of Falkenhayn's new policy required an almost complete relaxation of the pressure upon Russia. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were informed that no great enterprises against Russia could be set on foot in 1916, and that they could expect no reinforcements. All the German troops were withdrawn in the south from the Galician Front, and this theatre, so pregnant at once with menace and advantage, was confided entirely to Austrian hands. At the same time the Austrians were not dissuaded from preparing and developing an offensive against Italy in the Trentino, for which purpose they also withdrew a number of their best troops from their Eastern Front. And thus both north and south the Central Powers turned away from the eastern frontiers and their momentous problems, and leaving Russia to recover behind them and Roumania to brood over the scene with anxious eyes, plunged into desperate adventures in the West.\n\nThis was indeed a momentous decision. It involved the complete reversal of the policy by which General von Falkenhayn had in 1915 restored the German situation. Instead of pursuing his advantages against the weaker antagonists, he selected for the great German effort of 1916 the strongest enemy at that enemy's strongest point. That the decision was disastrous has been proved by the event. But it may be contended also that it was wrong. It was based first of all upon an erroneous appreciation of the offensive and defensive conditions on the great battle-fronts in France, and upon the mistaken belief that the general war could be brought to an end in 1916 by some strong effort there by one side or the other. Secondly, it took altogether too narrow and too purely military a view of the general position of Germany and her allies.\n\nThe vital need for Germany was to break the blockade. Unless she could secure to herself resources far greater than could be found within the frontiers of the quadruple Alliance, the long war, to which the world was now condemned, must end inevitably in her exhaustion and defeat. She had no chance of breaking the blockade at sea. Its efficiency might be impaired by the devices of neutrals, but the vast process of starvation not only in food but in materials indispensable to modern armies was remorselessly and unceasingly at work. The British Fleet towered up in massive strength, and no one seriously doubted what the result of a fought-out battle on blue water would be. Sea Power and Land Power were arrayed against each other, and if Germany could not conquer Britain on the seas, where could she turn? Only in one direction lay salvation. If she could not break the blockade by sea, she must break it by land. If the oceans were closed, Asia was open. If the West was barred with triple steel, the East lay bare. Only in the East and South-east and in Asia could Germany find the feeding grounds and breathing room\u2014nay, the man power\u2014without which her military strength however impressive was but a wasting security. Only in spreading their frontiers over new enormous regions could the Central Empires make themselves a self-contained and self-sufficing organism, and only by becoming such an organism could they deprive their enemies of the supreme and deadly weapon\u2014Time.\n\nThe true and indeed the only attainable political objectives open to Germany in 1916 were the final overthrow of Russia and the winning of Roumania to the side of the Central Empires. These were harmonious aims. Success in the first would go far to achieve the second. Roumania was essential to Germany. 'As I now saw quite clearly,' writes Ludendorff of the situation in October, 1916, 'we should not have been able to exist, much less carry on the war, without Roumania's corn and oil....' But if the battered corpse of an invaded and conquered Roumania was thus indispensable at the end of the year, how much more precious would have been Roumania with her resources and her armies as an Ally at the beginning. During 1915 a German convention with Roumania had secured to the Teutonic Powers the vital corn and oil supplies. But Germany in January, 1916, might reasonably look for a far more favourable development. Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers. The Dardanelles were safely shut. Russia was reeling. Roumania was therefore already almost surrounded, and any further collapse of Russia would isolate her completely. If she coveted Transylvania from Hungary, did she not also claim Bessarabia from Russia? A sagacious German policy at this juncture could have offered to Roumania in combination every inducement to join her neighbours, from high rewards to extreme duress.\n\nFollowing upon this it would appear that the true strategic objectives of Germany in 1916 were the Black Sea and the Caspian. These lay within her grasp and required no effort beyond her strength. A continued advance against the south lands of Russia into the Ukraine and towards Odessa would have secured at comparatively little cost sufficient food for the Teutonic peoples. An upward thrust of Turkish armies sustained by German troops and organized by German generals would have conquered the Caucasus. Fleets and flotillas improvised by German science could easily dominate both the inland seas. The command of these waters would threaten simultaneously every point along their 5,000 miles of coast line, absorbing in negative defence ten Russians for every German employed, and multiplying in an almost unlimited degree the opportunities for further advance. Roumania completely encircled, cut from French and British aid by Bulgaria and Turkey, cut from the Russian armies by an Austro-German march from Lemberg to Odessa, could have had no choice but to join the Central Empires. The skilful employment of fifteen or twenty German divisions animating Austrian and Turkish armies would surely and easily have extended the territories which nourished Germany so as to include by the end of the summer of 1916 the whole of South-Eastern Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian. The Austro-German Front against Russia might have stretched from Riga to Astrakhan, with little more expenditure of force than was required to hold the existing Eastern line. At every moment and at every stage in these vast combinations the pressure upon Russia and upon her failing armies would have increased: and at every stage her troops and those of her allies would have been dissipated in vain attempts to wall in the ever-spreading flood in the East, or would have been mown down in frantic assaults upon the German trenches in France.\n\nAnd this was itself only a stage in the process of land expansion and strategic menace open to the German military power. From the Caspian once navally commanded, Persia was a cheap and easy prey. There was no need to march large armies like Alexander to the East. Literally a few thousand Germans could have dominated Northern Persia, and eastward still beyond Persia lay Afghanistan and the threat to India. The consequences of such a German policy must have paralysed all British war effort from her Indian Empire. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, and in India whole armies of British and Indian troops would have been forced to stand idle in apprehension of impending invasion or revolt, while the glory of the German eagles and the sense of approaching change swept far and wide through the peoples of Asia.\n\nBut from all the prospects so opened out to her in the East Germany was lured away. The final destruction of Russia, the overawing and conversion of Roumania, the conquest of granary after granary and oilfield after oilfield, the indefinite menace to the British Empire in Asia, with consequent diversion and dissipation of British forces, were all renounced by Falkenhayn in a few meagre sentences. Germany was made to concentrate her whole available offensive effort upon the cluster of wooded hills and permanent defences which constituted the strong fortress of Verdun. One-half the effort, one-quarter the sacrifice, lavished vainly in the attack on Verdun would have overcome the difficulty of the defective communications in 'the rich lands of the Ukraine.' The Russian armies in the south would have been routed long before they had gained their surprising victories under Brusiloff; and Roumania, her 500,000 men and her precious supplies of corn and oil, would have been brought into the war early, not late, and as an ally and not as a foe. But the school of formula had vanquished the school of fact, the professional bent of mind had overridden the practical; submission to theory had replaced the quest for reality. Attack the strongest at his strongest point, not the weakest at his weakest point, was once again proclaimed the guiding maxim of German military policy.\n\nFrom the moment when he received the news of the total evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, the opportunity of General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, was to pronounce the word _ROUMANIA._ He pronounced instead the word _VERDUN._\n\n# CHAPTER IV\n\n# VERDUN\n\nThe Dismantled Forts\u2014Fact and Sentiment\u2014The Anvil\u2014Falkenhayn's Tactical Conception\u2014The Attitude and Responsibility of the Crown Prince\u2014Colonel Driant, Deputy for Nancy\u2014Galli\u00e9ni and Joffre\u2014\u2014Castelnau's Mission\u2014The Battle begins\u2014The composure of General Joffre\u2014Activities of Castelnau and P\u00e9tain\u2014The Struggle prolonged\u2014Falkenhayn entangled\u2014Cost of a Rigid Defence\u2014Galli\u00e9ni's last Act\u2014'Unity of front'\u2014Genesis of the Somme Plan\u2014Reaction of Verdun on the Somme\u2014The Revival of Russia\u2014The Fatal Defect\u2014Brusiloff's Offensive\u2014Surprise\u2014Consequences\u2014The Price of Verdun.\n\nThe drama of Verdun may perhaps be opened by the visit to the fortress in July, 1915, of a delegation from one of the Army Commissions of the Chamber. The deputies had been disquieted by the rumours they had heard of the insecurity of the region before which lay the army of the German Crown Prince. The delegation were received by General Dubail, commanding the group of armies of the East, and by the Governor of Verdun, General Coutanceau. General Dubail explained that after the experiences of Li\u00e9ge and Namur permanent forts were no longer useful. They could be destroyed with certainty by heavy howitzers and were mere shell traps for their garrisons. The only effective defence of Verdun lay in field troops holding an extended line around the fortress. Following these ideas, for which there was much to say, the forts had been dismantled and their coveted guns, garrisons and stores dispersed among the armies. The Governor, General Coutanceau, had the temerity to express a different opinion. He considered that the forts still had a high value and should play an important part in conjunction with the field defences. General Dubail was so irritated at this intervention of his subordinate and rebuked him in terms of such severity, that the Commission on their return to Paris thought it necessary to appeal to the Minister of War to shield the outspoken Governor from punishment and disgrace. In fact however, after an interval of a few weeks General Coutanceau was removed from the Governorship of Verdun, and his place was taken by General Herr. At the beginning of February, 1916, on the very eve of the attack the army of which the Verdun troops formed a part was transferred from the command of General Dubail to the centre group under General de Langle de Cary. Thus the responsibility for the neglect to develop to the full the defences of this area was divided and difficult to trace.\n\nIn a military sense, Verdun had no exceptional importance either to the French or to the Germans. Its forts were disarmed; it contained no substantial magazines; it guarded no significant strategic point. It was two hundred and twenty kilometres from Paris, and its capture would not have made any material difference to the safety either of the capital or of the general line. Falkenhayn and Ludendorff both speak of it as a dangerous sally port against their main railway communications, scarcely twelve miles away. But seeing that only two inferior lines of railway served Verdun, while the German occupied area in its front was fed by no less than fifteen, it should have been easy for the Germans to provide against such a sally. At its highest, the capture of Verdun would have been a military convenience to the Germans, and in a lesser degree an inconvenience to the French.\n\nBut then there was the sentiment which attached to Verdun. 'It was,' says a French historian, 'the great fortress proudly confronting its rival Metz, whose name had for centuries not ceased to haunt Germanic imaginations; it was the great advanced citadel of France; the principal bastion of her Eastern Frontier, whose fall resounding throughout Europe and the whole world would efface for ever the victories of the Marne and Yser.'\n\nThis then was the foundation upon which Falkenhayn's conception of the German attack upon Verdun stood. It was not to be an attempt at a 'break through.' The assailants were not to be drawn into pockets from which they would be fired at from all sides. They were to fire at the French and assault them continually in positions which French pride would make it impossible to yield. The nineteen German divisions and the massed artillery assigned to the task were to wear out and 'bleed white' the French Army. Verdun was to become an anvil upon which French military manhood was to be hammered to death by German cannon. The French were to be fastened to fixed positions by sentiment, and battered to pieces there by artillery. Of course this ingenious plan would be frustrated if the French did not lend themselves to it, and if they did not consider themselves bound to make disproportionate sacrifices to retain the particular hills on which stood the empty forts of Verdun.\n\nIt is not intended to press this argument too far. Verdun was a trophy. The German challenge had to be met by the whole resources of the French Army; but ground should have been sacrificed in the conflict as readily as men, with the sole object of exacting the highest price from the enemy at every stage. A greater man\u0153uvring latitude accorded to the defence would have rendered the whole episode far less costly to the French Army, and would have robbed the plan of General von Falkenhayn of such reasons as it could muster. But the German commander, wrong in so much else, had rightly gauged the psychology of the French nation.\n\nWriting in August, 1916, I tried to penetrate and analyse the probable motives which animated the Germans in their attack on Verdun.\n\n'.... Suppose your gap is blasted\u2014what then? Are you going to march to Paris through it? What is to happen, if you break the line of an otherwise unbeaten army? Will you really put your head into the hole?'\n\n'No,' say Main Headquarters; 'we are not so foolish. We are not seeking Verdun. Nor are we seeking to blast a hole. Still less do we intend to march through such a hole. Our aim is quite different. We seek to wear down an army, not to make a gap; to break the heart of a nation, not to break a hole in a line. We have selected Verdun because we think the French will consider themselves bound to defend it at all costs; because we can so dispose our cannon around this apex of their front as to pound and batter the vital positions with superior range and superior metal, and force our enemy to expose division after division upon this anvil to our blows.'\n\nThe strategic and psychological conceptions which had led Falkenhayn to select Verdun as the point of the German attack became mingled in the tactical sphere with his impressions derived from the success of the Gorlice-Tarnow attack on Russia in the previous year. There a punch followed by a scoop executed on a moderate front, but backed by a blasting concentration of artillery and gas, had led to a general withdrawal of the Russian line; and the process had been repeated again and again. His plan at Verdun was therefore by this intense punch on a narrow front with high-class troops and unprecedented cannon fire to hammer the French on the anvil of fixed positions, and if successful, to rip their front, as a purely subsidiary development, to the right and left. In pursuance of this idea, he allocated to the Crown Prince nearly 2,000 extra guns, including all the latest types, and masses of shells, but added only four army corps to the forces of the Fifth German Army holding the line. He prescribed the exact frontage and scope of the attack and confined it strictly within the limits possible to these modest forces.\n\nThe French trench line ran in a half-moon salient five or six thousands yards around the permanent forts of Verdun. This position was cut in two unequal portions by the Meuse River, at this season nearly a kilometre wide. There were therefore the defences of the left bank (the West or the French left); the defences of the right bank (the East or French centre); and farther east (and to the French right) the plain of the Woeuvre and the fortified eastern heights of the Meuse. It was upon the French centre, between the Meuse and the Woeuvre plain, that the intense punch was to be directed. The German High Command believed that if this centre were pierced to a certain depth, the retreat of the two flanks would ensue automatically, or could easily be procured by further pressure. Their tactical studies of the ground before the war had led them to regard the positions of the left bank, unless and until compromised by the retreat of the French centre, as exceptionally strong and forbidding. All these conclusions and decisions were duly imparted to the Crown Prince and the Fifth Army Staff of which General von Knobelsdorf was the chief.\n\nThe Crown Prince has been harshly judged in the passion and propaganda of the war. He has been represented at once as a fop and as a tyrant, as a callow youth and as a Moloch; as an irresponsible passenger and as a commander guilty of gross and disastrous military errors. None of these contradictory alternatives fit the truth. The German Imperial Princes in command of armies or groups of armies were held in strong control. The Headquarters Staff, main and local, decided and regulated everything, and the function of the ill-starred Heir Apparent was largely to bear the odium for their miscalculations and to receive, during the early years of the war, their ceremonious civilities. Even these civilities became attenuated as the long-drawn conflict deepened. Nevertheless, the Crown Prince had influence. He had with the All Highest the access of a son to a father. He had the right to express a view, to pose a question, to require an answer from any General, however august. He also had a share in the Emperor's unique point of view. He was a proprietor. Life, limb and fortune were risked by all the combatants in the Great War, but the inheritance to the Imperial throne, turning so nakedly on the general result, exercised from the first days of the war a sobering and concentrating effect upon a hitherto careless mind. It may also be said that no group of German armies was more consistently successful than his; and that there is evidence that his personal influence\u2014whatever it may have been\u2014was often thrown into the right side of the scales.\n\nThe Crown Prince did not feel comfortable about the attack at Verdun in 1916. He thought that it would be wiser to finish first with Russia in the East. He had of course a long-suppressed eagerness 'to lead his tried and trusty troops once more to battle against the enemy, etc.' But he was disquieted by Falkenhayn's repeated statements that the French Army was to be 'bled white' at Verdun, and he felt no conviction that this would only happen to the French. It might even happen to the House of Hohenzollern. Moreover, on the tactical form of the attack his misgivings were supported or perhaps inspired by General von Knobelsdorf and his Staff. Their view was that the attack, if made at all, should be made on a broader front, comprising simultaneously both sides of the Meuse, and that large reserves should be at hand from the outset to exploit the advantages in the initial surprise. The Crown Prince sent Knobelsdorf to lay these claims before Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn insisted on his plan. He had framed it in relation to the whole situation as he saw it and he adhered to the smallest detail. There was to be an anvil. There was to be a punch on a narrow front. There was to be an unparalleled artillery, and only just enough infantry to exploit success. They were to proceed step by step, their way forward being blasted at each stage by cannon. Thus, whether Verdun was taken or not, the French Army would be ruined and the French nation sickened of war. It was a simple solution for world-wide problems, but it was Falkenhayn's solution, and he was in supreme control. By his determination and superior authority Knobelsdorf was soon over-persuaded, and the Crown Prince was thereafter overruled by the military hierarchy in mechanical unanimity. Such are the facts. While the newspapers of the time and in these days many of the histories have dwelt on the vanity and ruthless pride which prompted the heir to the Imperial throne to drive the manhood of Germany ceaselessly into the fires of Verdun, the truth is different. The Crown Prince, shocked and stricken by the butchery and opposed to the operation, continuously endeavoured to use such influence as he commanded to bring it to a close; and we have Ludendorff's testimony to his expressions of relief and pleasure when that decision was finally taken.\n\nThe first warning of the unprepared condition of the Verdun defences reached the French Government through an irregular channel. Colonel Driant, Deputy for Nancy, commanded a group of Chasseur battalions in the advanced lines of Verdun. At the end of November this officer and Member of Parliament came on leave to Paris and requested to be heard by the Army Commission of the Chamber, and on December 1 he exposed to his fellow-deputies the lack of organization and general inadequacy of the defences of the fortress. The Commission confirmed the account given by Colonel Driant, and their report was presented by the Commission to the Minister of War. The vigilant Galli\u00e9ni was already possessed of similar statements from other quarters, and on December 16 he wrote to General Joffre. From different sources, he said, came accounts of the organization of the front which showed defects in the state of the defences at certain points, particularly and notably in the region of the Meurthe, and of Toul and Verdun. The network of trenches was not complete as it was on the greater part of the front. Such a situation, if it were true, ran the risk of presenting grave embarrassment. A rupture by the enemy in such circumstances would involve not only General Joffre's own responsibility but that of the whole Government. Recent experience of the war proved superabundantly that the first lines could be forced, but that the resistance of second lines could arrest even a successful attack. He asked for an assurance that on all the points of the front the organization at least of two lines should be designed and developed with all the necessary fortifications\u2014barbed wire, inundations, abatis, etc.\n\nThe Commander-in-Chief hastened to reply on December 18 in a letter which holds its place in the records of ruffled officialdom. He asserted in categorical detail that nothing justified the misgivings of the Government. He concluded upon that peculiar professional note of which French military potentates have by no means the monopoly.\n\n'But since these apprehensions are founded upon reports which allege defects in the state of the defences, I request you to communicate these reports to me and to specify their authors. I cannot be party to soldiers placed under my command bringing before the Government, by channels other than the hierarchic channel, complaints or protests concerning the execution of my orders. Neither does it become me to defend myself against vague imputations, the source of which I do not know. The mere fact that the Government encourages communications of this kind, whether from mobilized Members of Parliament or directly or indirectly from officers serving on the front, is calculated to disturb profoundly the spirit of discipline in the Army. The soldiers who write know that the Government weighs their advice against that of their Chiefs. The authority of these Chiefs is prejudiced. The morale of all suffers from this discredit.\n\n'I could not lend myself to the continuation of this state of things. I require the whole-hearted confidence of the Government. If the Government trusts me, it can neither encourage nor tolerate practices which diminish that moral authority of my office, without which I cannot continue to bear the responsibility.'\n\nEvidently Colonel and Deputy Driant in his trenches before Verdun was in danger from more quarters than one.\n\nIt is asserted that General Galli\u00e9ni had no mind to put up with this sort of thing, and that he framed a rejoinder both commanding and abrupt. But colleagues intervened with soothing processes. The Minister for War was marshalling with much assent the heads of a broad indictment of the Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral. He was persuaded to reduce this particular incident to modest proportions. At any rate, in the end he signed a soft reply. Joffre and G.Q.G. had vindicated their authority. The Ministry for War and the presumptuous and meddling deputies had been put in their places. But there were still the facts to be reckoned with\u2014and the Germans.\n\nEvidence continued to accumulate, and gradually a certain misgiving began to mingle with the assurance of Chantilly. Their own officers sent to examine the Verdun defences threw, in discreet terms, doubts upon the confident assertions with which the Commander-in-Chief had replied to the Minister of War. The troops on the spot and their Commanders were convinced they were soon to be attacked. The defences were still unsatisfactory. The Parliamentary Commissions buzzed incessantly. Finally, on January 20, General de Castelnau, the Major-General of the armies, and General Joffre's virtual Second-in-Command and potential successor, immediately on his return from Salonica, visited Verdun in person. He found much to complain of and gave various directions to remedy the neglects. A regiment of engineers was hurried to the scene; the necessary materials for fortification were provided; communications were improved and work begun. But time was now very short. The German masses were gathering fast. Their enormous magazines swelled each day. Their immense concentration of heavy artillery perfected itself.\n\nQuite early in January the 2nd Bureau (Intelligence) began to indicate Verdun as the point at which a German attack would be delivered. A constant increase of batteries and troops in the regions north of Montfaucon and on both sides of the Meuse, the presence of 'storm' divisions near Hattonch\u00e9tel, and the arrival of Austrian heavy howitzers were definitely reported. General Dupont, head of the 2nd Bureau, declared with conviction that Verdun was to be the object of a heavy and immediate attack.\n\nThe French Operations Staff, to judge by Pierrefeu's excellent account, seemed to have abandoned their scepticism slowly. Certainly there seemed many parts of the French line more attractive to a hostile attack. But by the middle of February, those who doubted that a great German offensive was soon to break upon Verdun were few. The majority of the staff were at last convinced that the hour was near and all\u2014so we are told\u2014were eager for the day and confident of its results. No one however had the least idea what the mechanical force of the onslaught would be.\n\nAt four o'clock in the morning of February 21 the explosion of a fourteen-inch shell in the Archbishop's Palace at Verdun gave signal of battle, and after a brief but most powerful bombardment three German Army Corps advanced upon the apex of the French front, their right hand on the Meuse. The troops in the forward positions attacked were, except towards the eastern flank, driven backwards towards the fortress line. The battle was continued on the 22nd and the 23rd. The brave Colonel Driant was killed in the woodlands covering the retreat of his Chasseurs. The line was reformed on the ridges near Douaumont: but the German six-inch artillery, dragged forward by tractors, hurled upon the new position so terrific a firestorm that the French Division chiefly concerned collapsed entirely. During the afternoon of the 24th, both the General commanding the Verdun area and the Commander of the Group of Armies in which it lay (Langle de Cary), telegraphed to Chantilly, advising an immediate withdrawal to the left bank of the Meuse, and the consequent abandonment of the town and fortress of Verdun.\n\nGeneral Joffre was by no means disconcerted by these unexpected and untoward events. He preserved throughout that admirable serenity for which he was noted, which no doubt would have equally distinguished him on the flaming crests of Douaumont. He assented on the 22nd to the movement of the 1st and XXth Corps, and to a request to Sir Douglas Haig to relieve in the line with British troops the Tenth French Army to reinforce Verdun. For the rest he remained in Olympian tranquillity, inspiring by his unaffected calm, regular meals and peaceful slumbers confidence in all about him. A less detached view was necessarily taken by Castelnau. The Second French Army had been relieved in the line some time before by the increasing British forces. This army was in the best order, rested and trained. Its staff had not been affected by the new French rule obliging every Staff Officer to do a spell of duty with the fighting troops. Its Commander, P\u00e9tain, had gained already in the war one of the highest reputations. On the evening of February 24, General de Castelnau presented himself to General Joffre and proposed to move the whole of the Second French Army to Verdun. The Commander-in-Chief assented to this. At eleven o'clock on the same night Castelnau, having received further reports of the most serious character, requested by telephone permission to proceed personally to Verdun with plenary powers. Pierrefeu has described the incident which followed. The Commander-in-Chief was already asleep. Following his almost invariable custom he had retired to rest at ten o'clock. The orderly officer on duty declared it impossible to disturb him. At first Castelnau submitted. But a few minutes later a further message from Verdun foreshadowing the immediate evacuation of the whole of the right bank of the Meuse arrived, and on this Castelnau would brook no further obstruction. He went in person to the villa Poiret in which the great soldier was reposing. Upon the express order of the Major-General an aide-de-camp took the responsibility of knocking at the formidable double-locked door. The supreme Chief, after perusing the telegrams, gave at once the authorization for General de Castelnau to proceed with full powers, declared there must be no retreat, and then returned to his rest.\n\nCastelnau started forthwith a little after midnight. At Avize, Headquarters of Langle de Cary and the centre group of armies, he quelled the pessimism that existed, and from there telephoned to Verdun announcing his impending arrival and calling upon General Herr 'on the order of the Commander-in-Chief not to yield ground but to defend it step by step,' and warning him that if this order was not executed, 'the consequences would be most grave for him (Herr).' By daylight of the 25th Castelnau reached Verdun and found himself confronted with the tragic scenes of confusion and disorder which haunt the immediate rear of a defeated battle-front. All accounts agree that the influence and authority of Castelnau on the 25th reanimated the defence and for the moment restored the situation. Wherever he went, decision and order followed him. He reiterated the command at all costs to hold the heights of the Meuse and to stop the enemy on the right bank. The XXth and 1st Army Corps now arriving on the scene were thrown into the battle with this intention. While taking these emergency measures, Castelnau had already telegraphed to P\u00e9tain ordering him to take command, not only of the Second French Army, which was now moving, but also of all the troops in the fortified region of Verdun.\n\nOn the morning of the 26th P\u00e9tain received from Castelnau the direction of the battle, which he continued to conduct, while at the same time mastering the local situation. The neglect of the field and permanent defences of a fortress which it was decided to defend to the death, now bequeathed a cruel legacy to the French troops. In advance of the permanent forts there were neither continuous lines of trenches nor the efficient organization of strong points. Telephone systems and communication trenches were scarce or non-existent. The forts themselves were all empty and dismantled. Even their machine guns and cupolas had been extracted and their flanking batteries disarmed. All these deficiencies had now to be repaired in full conflict and under tremendous fire. Besides the direction of the battle and the organization of his forces and rapidly growing artillery, P\u00e9rain took a number of general decisions. Four successive lines of defence were immediately set in hand. In full accord with the views of the much-chastised General Coutanceau, P\u00e9tain directed the immediate reoccupation and re-arming of all the forts. To each he assigned a garrison with fourteen days' food and water, and solemn orders never to capitulate. The immense value of the large subterranean galleries of these forts, in which a whole battalion could live in absolute security till the moment of counter-attack, was now to be proved. Lastly, the new commander instituted the marvellous system of motor-lorries between Verdun and Bar le Duc. No less than three thousand of these passed up and down this road every twenty-four hours, and conveyed each week during seven months of conflict an average of 90,000 men and 50,000 tons of material. Along this 'Sacred Way,' as it was rightly called, no less than sixty-six divisions of the French Army were to pass on their journey to the anvil and the furnace fires.\n\nBy the end of February the first German onslaught had been stemmed. Large armies were on both sides grappling with each other round the fortress, ever-increasing streams of reinforcements and munitions flowed from all France and Germany towards the conflict, and ever-increasing trains of wounded ebbed swiftly from it. It had become a trial of strength and military honour between Germany and France. Blood was up and heads were down. Vain had it been for Falkenhayn to write at Christmas: Germany will be 'perfectly free to accelerate or draw out her offensive; to intensify or break it off from time to time as suits her purpose.' His own professional and official existence was now engaged. The wine had been drawn and the cup must be drained. The French and German armies continued accordingly to tear each other to pieces with the utmost fury, and the power of the German artillery inflicted grievous losses day by day on the now more numerous French.\n\nWhen the Germans had attacked on February 21, they had, in accordance with Falkenhayn's plan, used only the three Army Corps of their centre, and three others had stood idle on the two flanks. It can scarcely be doubted that had the whole assaulting forces been thrown in at once, the position of the French, already so critical, could not at the outset have been maintained. However, on March 6 the three flanking Army Corps joined in the battle, and a new series of sanguinary engagements was fought during the whole of March and April for the possession mainly of the hill called 'Le Mort Homme' on the left bank of the Meuse, and for the C\u00f4te du Poivre on the right. But the Germans achieved no success comparable to that of their opening. The conditions of the conflict had become more equal. Closely locked and battling in the huge crater-fields and under the same steel storm, German and French infantry fell together by scores of thousands. By the end of April nearly a quarter of a million French and Germans had been killed or wounded in the fatal area, though influencing in no decisive way the balance of the World War.\n\nTo the war of slaughter and battles was added that of propaganda and communiqu\u00e9s. In this the French had largely the advantage. They did not cease to proclaim day after day the enormous German losses which attended every assault. As the Germans were obviously storming entrenchments and forts, the world at large was prepared to believe that they must be making sacrifices far greater than those of the French. 'Up till March,' says Ludendorff, 'the impression was that Verdun was a German victory,' but thereafter opinion changed. Certainly during April and May Allies and neutrals were alike persuaded that Germany had experienced a profound disappointment in her attack on Verdun, and had squandered thereon the flower of her armies.\n\nI myself shared the common impression that the German losses must be heavier than those of the French. All accounts however showed that the strain upon the French Army was enormous. They were compelled to defend all sorts of positions, good, bad and indifferent, and to fight every inch of the ground with constant counter-attacks under a merciless artillery; and it was clear that they were conducting the defence in the most profuse manner. 'The French,' I wrote at the time, 'suffered more than the defence need suffer by their valiant and obstinate retention of particular positions. Meeting an artillery attack is like catching a cricket ball. Shock is dissipated by drawing back the hands. A little \"give,\" a little suppleness, and the violence of impact is vastly reduced. Yet, notwithstanding the obstinate ardour and glorious passion for mastery of the French, the German losses at Verdun greatly exceeded theirs.'\n\nIt is with surprise which will perhaps be shared by others that I have learned the true facts. During the defensive phase from February to June the French Army suffered at Verdun the loss of no fewer than 179,000 men (apart from officers) killed, missing or prisoners, and 263,000 wounded: a frightful total of 442,000; or with officers, probably 460,000. The Germans on the other hand, although the attackers, used their man-power so much less and their artillery so much more that their loss, including officers, did not exceed 72,000 killed, missing and prisoners, and 206,000 wounded: a total of 278,000. From the totals of both sides there should be deducted the usual one-eighth for casualties on other parts of the front where French and Germans faced each other. But this in no way alters the broad fact that the French sacrificed in defending Verdun more than three men to every two attacking Germans. To this extent therefore the tactical and psychological conceptions underlying Falkenhayn's scheme were vindicated.\n\nEver since the opening phase of the struggle of Verdun the personal position of General Joffre had deteriorated. The neglect to prepare the field defences of Verdun, the disarming of its forts, the proved want of information of the Commander-in-Chief and his Headquarters Staff upon this grave matter, the fact that it had been left to the Parliamentary Commission to raise the alarm, the obstinacy with which this alarm had been received and resented, were facts known throughout Government and Opposition circles in Paris. The respective parts played by Joffre and Castelnau in the first intense crisis of the Verdun situation were also widely comprehended. In the whole of this episode little credit could be discovered either for the Commander-in-Chief or for the gigantic organization of the Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral sourly described as 'Chantilly.' Consideration of all these facts led General Galli\u00e9ni to a series of conclusions and resolves. First, he wished to bring Joffre to Paris, from which centre he would exercise that general command over all the French armies, whether in France or the Orient, which had been entrusted to him. Secondly, he wished to place General de Castelnau at the head of the armies in France. Thirdly, he proposed to diminish in certain respects the undue powers which Chantilly had engrossed to itself, and to restore to the Ministry of War the administrative functions of which it had to a large extent been deprived. Galli\u00e9ni laid proposals in this sense, though without actually naming Castelnau, before the Council of Ministers on March 7, 1916. France now had the opportunity of securing for her armies and for her Allies military leadership in the field of the first order, without at the same time losing any advantage which could be derived from the world prestige of Joffre.\n\nThe Cabinet was greatly alarmed. They feared a political and ministerial crisis, as well as a crisis in the Supreme Command\u2014all during the height of the great battles raging around Verdun. Briand intervened with dexterous argument, but General Galli\u00e9ni was resolved. Stricken by an illness which compelled an early and grave operation, he had laid what he considered his testament and the last remaining service he could render France before his colleagues. When his advice was not accepted, he immediately resigned. For several days his resignation was kept a secret. Then it was explained on grounds of health, and the charge of the War Ministry was taken temporarily by the Minister of Marine. Finally, when his resolves were seen to be unshakable, a colourless but inoffensive successor was discovered in the person of General Roques, an intimate friend of Joffre and actually suggested by him. Thus did General Joffre receive a renewed lease of power sufficient to enable him to add to the dearly bought laurels of Verdun the still more costly trophies of the Somme.\n\nGalli\u00e9ni was now to quit the scene for ever. Within a fortnight of his resignation he withdrew to a private hospital for an operation\u2014at his age of the greatest danger\u2014but which, if successful, meant a swift restoration of activity and health. From the effects of this operation he expired on May 27. To his memory and record not only his countrymen, but also their Allies, who profited by his genius, sagacity and virtue, and might have profited far more, should not fail to do justice.\n\nAfter the disasters of 1915 an earnest effort had been made by the British, French and Russian Governments to concert their action for 1916. No sooner had Briand attained the Premiership than he used a phrase which pithily expressed the first great and obvious need of the Allies\u2014'Unity of front.' Unity of front did not mean unity of command. That idea, although it had dawned on many minds, was not yet within the bounds of possibility. Unity of front, or 'only one front,' meant that the whole great circle of fire and steel within which the Allies were gripping the Central Powers should be treated and organized as if it were the line of a single army or a single nation; that everything planned on one part of the front should be related to everything planned on every other part of the front; that instead of a succession of disconnected offensives, a combined and simultaneous effort should be made by the three great Allies to overpower and beat down the barriers of hostile resistance. In these broad and sound conceptions Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Kitchener, Monsieur Briand, General Joffre, General Cadorna, the Czar and General Alexeieff, all four Governments and all four General Staffs, were in full accord.\n\nIn pursuance and execution of this conception it had been decided to make a vast combined onslaught upon Germany and Austria, both in the east and in the west, during the summer months. The Russians could not be ready till June, nor the British till July. It was therefore agreed that a waiting policy should as far as possible be followed during the first six months of the year, while the Russians were re-equipping and increasing their armies, while the new British armies were perfecting their training, and while enormous masses of shells and guns were being accumulated. To these immense labours all four great nations thenceforth committed themselves.\n\nIt was further agreed that the Russians should endeavour to hold the Germans as far as possible on the northern part of the Eastern Front, and that the main Russian attack should be launched in Galicia in the southern theatre. At the same time, or in close relation to this, it was decided that a tremendous offensive, exceeding in scale anything ever previously conceived, should be delivered by the British and French, hand in hand, astride of the Somme ( _\u00e1 cheval sur la Somme_ ). It was intended to attempt to break through on a front of seventy kilometres: the English to the north of the Somme on the twenty-five kilometres from H\u00e9buterne to Maricourt; and the French astride the Somme, but mainly to the south of it, on a forty-five kilometre front from Maricourt right down to Lassigny. Two entire British armies, the Third and Fourth, under Allenby and Rawlinson, and comprising from twenty-five to thirty divisions, constituted the British attack; and three French armies, the Second, the Sixth and the Third, comprising thirty-nine divisions, were to be placed under the command of Foch for the French sector. The whole of these five armies, aggregating over one and a half million men and supported by four or five thousand guns, were thus to be hurled upon the Germans at a moment when it was hoped they and their Austrian allies would already be heavily and critically engaged on the Eastern Frontiers. The original scheme for this stupendous battle was outlined in December, 1915, at the first Conference of the Allied General Staffs at Chantilly, and its final shape was determined at a second conference on February 14.\n\nThe ink was hardly dry on these conventions when the cannon of Verdun began to thunder, and the Germans were seen advancing successfully upon the neglected defences of that fortress. It is certainly arguable that the French would have been wise to have played with the Germans around Verdun, economizing their forces as much as possible, selling ground at a high price in German blood wherever necessary, and endeavouring to lead their enemies into a pocket or other unfavourable position. In this way they might have inflicted upon the Germans very heavy losses without risking much themselves, and as we now know they would certainly have baffled Falkenhayn's plan of wearing out the French Army and beating it to pieces upon the anvil. By the end of June the Germans might thus have exhausted the greater part of their offensive effort, advancing perhaps a dozen miles over ground of no decisive strategic significance, while all the time the French would have been accumulating gigantic forces for an overwhelming blow upon the Somme.\n\nHowever, other counsels\u2014or shall we call them passions?\u2014prevailed, and the whole French nation and army hurled itself into the struggle around Verdun. This decision not only wore out the French reserves and consumed the offensive strength of their army, but it greatly diminished the potential weight of the British attack which was in preparation. Already before the German attack opened, Sir Douglas Haig had taken over an additional sector of the French front, liberating, as we have seen, the Second French Army which was thus enabled to restore the situation at Verdun. As soon as the Battle of Verdun had begun, Joffre requested Haig to take over a fresh sector, and this was accordingly effected in the early days of March, thus liberating the whole of the Tenth French Army. Thus the number of British divisions resting and training for the great battle was at the outset sensibly diminished. As the Verdun conflict prolonged itself and deepened all through March, April and May the inroads upon the fighting strength and disposable surplus of the French Army became increasingly grave. And as July approached the thirty-nine French divisions of the original scheme had shrunk to an available eighteen. This greatly diminished the front of the battle and the weight behind the blow. The numbers available were reduced by at least one-third, and the front to be attacked must be contracted from seventy to about forty-five kilometres. Whereas in the original conception the main onslaught would have been made by the French with the British co-operating in great strength as a smaller army, these r\u00f4les had now been reversed by the force of events. The main effort must be made by the British, and it was the French who would co-operate to the best of their ability in a secondary r\u00f4le.\n\nWhile the eyes of the world were riveted on the soul-stirring frenzy of Verdun, and while the ponderous preparations for the Allied counter-stroke on the Somme were being completed, great events were at explosion-point in the East. To those who knew that Russia was recovering her strength with every day, with every hour that passed, who knew of the marshalling of her inexhaustible manhood, and the ever-multiplying and broadening streams of munitions of war which were flowing towards her, the German attack on Verdun had come with a sense of indescribable relief. Russia had been brought very low in the preceding autumn, before the rearguards of the winter closed down on her torn and depleted line. But mortal injury had been warded off. Her armies had been extricated, her front was maintained, and now behind it 'the whole of Russia' was labouring to re-equip and reconstitute her power.\n\nFew episodes of the Great War are more impressive than the resuscitation, re-equipment and renewed giant effort of Russia in 1916. It was the last glorious exertion of the Czar and the Russian people for victory before both were to sink into the abyss of ruin and horror. By the summer of 1916 Russia, who eighteen months before had been almost disarmed, who during 1915 had sustained an unbroken series of frightful defeats, had actually managed, by her own efforts and the resources of her Allies, to place in the field\u2014organized, armed and equipped\u2014sixty Army Corps in place of the thirty-five with which she had begun the war. The Trans-Siberian Railway had been doubled over a distance of 6,000 kilometres, as far east as Lake Baikal. A new railway 1,400 kilometres long, built through the depth of winter at the cost of unnumbered lives, linked Petrograd with the perennially ice-free waters of the Murman coast. And by both these channels munitions from the rising factories of Britain, France and Japan, or procured by British credit from the United States, were pouring into Russia in broadening streams. The domestic production of every form of war material had simultaneously been multiplied many fold.\n\nIt was however true that the new Russian armies, though more numerous and better supplied with munitions than ever before, suffered from one fatal deficiency which no Allied assistance could repair. The lack of educated men, men who at least could read and write, and of trained officers and sergeants, woefully diminished the effectiveness of her enormous masses. Numbers, brawn, cannon and shells, the skill of great commanders, the bravery of patriotic troops, were to lose two-thirds of their power for want, not of the higher military science, but of Board School education; for want of a hundred thousand human beings capable of thinking for themselves and acting with reasonable efficiency in all the minor and subordinate functions on which every vast organization\u2014most of all the organization of modern war\u2014depends. The mighty limbs of the giant were armed, the conceptions of his brain were clear, his heart was still true, but the nerves which could transform resolve and design into action were but partially developed or non-existent. This defect, irremediable at the time, fatal in its results, in no way detracts from the merit or the marvel of the Russian achievement, which will for ever stand as the supreme monument and memorial of the Empire founded by Peter the Great.\n\nAt the beginning of the summer the Russian front, stretching 1,200 kilometres from the Baltic to the Roumanian frontier, was held by three main groups of armies, the whole aggregating upwards of 134 divisions: the northern group under the veteran Kouropatkine; the centre group(between the Pinsk and the Pripet) under Evert; the southern group (to the south of the Pripet) under Brusiloff. Against this array the Central Empires marshalled the German armies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the north, of Prince Leopold of Bavaria and General von Linsingen opposite the centre and southern centre, and the three Austrian armies of the Archduke Frederick in the south. The drain of Verdun and the temptations of the Trentino had drawn or diverted from the Eastern Front both reserves and reinforcements, and practically all the heavy artillery. And in the whole of the sector south of the Pripet, comprising all Galicia and the Bukovina, not a German division remained to sustain the armies of the Austrian Archduke against the forces of Brusiloff.\n\nThe original scheme had contemplated July 1 as the date of the general Allied attack, both in the west and in the east. But the cries of Italy from the Trentino and the obvious strain under which the French were living at Verdun led to requests being made to the Czar to intervene if possible at an earlier date. Accordingly on June 4 Brusiloff, after a thirty hours' bombardment, set his armies of over a million men in motion, and advanced in a general attack on the 350-kilometre front between the Pripet and the Roumanian frontier. The results were equally astounding to victors and vanquished, to friend and foe. It may well be that the very ante-dating of the attack imparted to it an element of surprise that a month later would have been lacking. Certainly the Austrians were entirely unprepared for the weight, vigour and enormous extent of the assault. The long loose lines in the east in no way reproduced the conditions of the Western Front. The great concentrations of artillery, the intricate systems of fortification, the continuous zones of machine-gun fire, the network of roads and railways feeding the front and enabling reserves to be thrown in thousands and tens of thousands in a few hours upon any threatened point, were entirely lacking in the east. Moreover, the Austrian armies contained large numbers of Czech troops fighting under duress for a cause they did not cherish and an Empire whose downfall they desired.\n\nNo one was more surprised than Falkenhayn.\n\n'After the failure,' he wrote, 'of the March offensive in Lithuania and Courland, the Russian front had remained absolutely inactive.... There was no reason whatever to doubt that the front was equal to any attack on it by the forces opposing it at the moment.... General Conrad von H\u00e9tzendorf... declared that a Russian attack in Galicia could not be undertaken with any prospect of success in less than from four to six weeks from the time when we should have learnt that it was coming. This period at least would be required for the concentration of the Russian forces, which must be a necessary preliminary thereto.... However, before any indication of a movement of this sort had been noticed, to say nothing of announced, a most urgent call for assistance from our ally reached the German G.H.Q. on the 5th of June.\n\n'The Russians, under the command of General Brusiloff, had on the previous day attacked almost the entire front, from the Styr-Bend, near Kolki, below Lutsk, right to the Roumanian borders. After a relatively short artillery preparation they had got up from their trenches and simply marched forward. Only in a few places had they even taken the trouble to form attacking groups by concentrating their reserves. It was a matter not simply of an attack in the true sense of the word, but rather of a big scale reconnaissance....\n\n'A \"reconnaissance\" like Brusiloff's was only possible, of course, if the General had decisive reason for holding a low-opinion of his enemy's power of resistance. And on this point he made no miscalculation. His attack met with splendid success, both in Volhynia and in the Bukovina. East of Lutsk the Austro-Hungarian front was clean broken through, and in less than two days a yawning gap fully thirty miles wide had been made in it. The part of the 4th Austro-Hungarian Army, which was in line here, melted away into miserable remnants.\n\n'Things went no better with the 7th Austro-Hungarian Army in the Bukovina. It flowed back along its entire front, and it was impossible to judge at the moment whether and when it could be brought to a halt again....\n\n'We were therefore faced with a situation which had fundamentally changed. A wholesale failure of this kind had certainly not entered into the calculations of the Chief of the General Staff (himself). He had considered it impossible.'\n\nAll along the front the Russian armies marched over the Austrian lines or through wide breaches in them. In the north the army of Kaledine advanced in three days on a 70-kilometre front no less than 50 kilometres, taking Lutsk. In the south the army of Letchitsky, forcing successively the lines of the Dniester and the Pruth, invested Czernovitch after an advance of 60 kilometres. The German front under Linsingen wherever attacked maintained itself unbroken or withdrew in good order in consequence of adjacent Austrian retirements. But within a week of the beginning of the offensive the Austrians had lost 100,000 prisoners, and before the end of the month their losses in killed, wounded, dispersed and prisoners amounted to nearly three-quarters of a million men. Czernovitch and practically the whole of the Bukovina had been reconquered, and the Russian troops again stood on the slopes of the Carpathians. The scale of the victory and the losses of the defeated in men, material and territory were the greatest which the war in the east had yet produced.\n\nThe Austrian offensive on the Trentino was instantly paralysed, and eight divisions were recalled and hurried to the shattered Eastern Front. Although the Battle of Verdun was at its height and Falkenhayn deeply committed to procuring at least a moral decision there, and while he could watch each week the storm clouds gathering denser and darker on the Somme, he found himself forced to withdraw eight German divisions from France to repair those dykes he had so improvidently neglected in the east, or at any rate to limit the deluge now pouring forward impetuously in so many directions. The Hindenburg-Ludendorff armies, which had successfully sustained the subsidiary attacks delivered by the Russians upon their front, were also called upon to contribute large reinforcements for the south; and an immense German effort was made to close the breaches and re-establish the Southern Front. By the end of June the failure of the Austro-German campaign of 1916, which had opened with such high prospects, was apparent. The Trentino offensive was hamstrung; Verdun was in Ludendorff's words 'an open wasting sore'; and a disaster of the first magnitude had been suffered in that very portion of the Eastern Front which had offered the most fruitful prospects to Teutonic initiative. But this was not the end. The main struggle of the year was about to begin in the west, and Roumania, convulsed with excitement at the arrival of victorious Russian armies before her very gates, loomed up black with the menace of impending war.\n\n# CHAPTER V\n\n# JUTLAND: THE PRELIMINARIES\n\n' _A thousand years scarce serve to form a State;  \nAn hour may lay it in the dust._'\n\nA Battle or an Encounter\u2014Risks of forcing a Battle\u2014Strategic Consequences of British Victory and Defeat\u2014Unequal Stakes\u2014Sir John Jellicoe\u2014Under-water Dangers\u2014Extreme Precautions\u2014Jellicoe's Letter of October 14, 1914\u2014The Admiralty Reply\u2014Changing Conditions\u2014Admiralty Intelligence\u2014The Rival Fleets\u2014The Grand Fleet at Sea\u2014'Enemy in Sight'\u2014Delay of the 5th Battle Squadron\u2014Beatty's Decision\u2014Hipper's Trap\u2014The Battle-cruiser Action\u2014The Immortal Marine\u2014The Crisis Surmounted\u2014Intervention of the 5th Battle Squadron\u2014The High Sea Fleet in Sight\u2014The Run to the North\u2014The Ordeal of the 5th Battle Squadron\u2014The End of the First Phase.\n\nThere are profound differences between a battle where both sides wish for a full trial of strength and skill, and a battle where one side has no intention of fighting to a finish, and seeks only to retire without disadvantage or dishonour from an unequal and undesired combat. The problems before the Commanders, the conditions of the conflict itself, are widely different in a fleeting encounter\u2014no matter how large its scale\u2014from those of a main trial of strength. In an encounter between forces obviously unequal, the object of the weaker is to escape, and that of the stronger to catch and destroy them. Many of the tactical processes and man\u00e9uvres appropriate to a battle where both sides throw their whole might into the scale and continue at death-grips till the climax is reached and victory declares itself are not adapted to a situation in which keeping contact is the task of the stronger and evasion the duty of the weaker.\n\nThis is especially true of the preliminaries; the mode of approach, the deployment of the fleet, the development of the fire, the methods of meeting or parrying the attack of torpedo craft, would naturally be modified according to the view taken of the intentions of the enemy. If he were expected to seek a fight to a finish, there would be no need for hurry. There would be every reason to economize loss in the earlier stages and make every ship and gun play its maximum part in a supreme crisis. If on the other hand the enemy was certain to make off as soon as he saw himself in the presence of very superior forces, it would be necessary for the stronger fleet to run greater risks if it was determined to force a battle. Not only the light forces and the fast heavy ships would be thrown forward to attack, but the Battle Fleet itself would be driven at a speed which would leave the slowest squadrons and the slowest ships tailing away behind. Thus the pursuing squadrons would not come into action simultaneously but successively.\n\nMoreover, modern inventions give new advantages to a retreating fleet. It may entice its enemy across mine-fields through which perhaps it alone knows the channels, or into a carefully prepared ambuscade of submarines. It can throw out mines behind it. It can fire torpedoes across the course of a pursuing fleet, and itself remain outside torpedo range. From these and other technical causes there can be no doubt that the task of forcing a battle against the enemy's desire involves a far higher degree of risk to the stronger fleet than would arise in a trial of strength willingly accepted or sought for by both sides. In studying the naval encounter of Jutland, the first question upon which it is necessary to form an opinion is what extra degree of risk, beyond the risk of a pitched battle, the British Fleet was justified in incurring in the hopes of bringing the Germans to action and destroying them. This question cannot be decided without reference to the general strategic situation on the seas.\n\nIf the German Fleet had been decisively defeated on May 31, 1916, in battle off Jutland, very great reliefs and advantages would have been gained by the Allies. The psychological effect upon the German nation cannot be estimated, but might conceivably have been profound. The elimination of the German Battle Fleet would have been an important easement to Great Britain, enabling men and material required by the Admiralty for the Grand Fleet to be diverted for the support of the Army. It would have brought the entry of the Baltic into immediate practical possibility. Whether the presence of the British squadrons in the Baltic during the winter of 1916 and the spring of 1917 would have prevented the Russian Revolution is a speculative question, but one which cannot be overlooked. The reactions of a great defeat at sea upon the U-boat attack of 1917, which the Germans were actively preparing, are diverse. On the one hand the disappearance of most of the German battleships might have led to a greater concentration of skilled men and resources upon the development of the U-boat campaign. On the other hand the liberation of the Grand Fleet flotillas and the increased sense of mastery at sea might well have led the Admiralty to more aggressive action against the German river mouths and to an earlier frustration of the U-boat attack. These important advantages must however be compared with the consequences to Britain and her Allies which would immediately have followed from a decisive British defeat. The trade and food-supply of the British islands would have been paralysed. Our armies on the Continent would have been cut from their base by superior naval force. All the transportation of the Allies would have been jeopardized and hampered. The United States could not have intervened in the war. Starvation and invasion would have descended upon the British people. Ruin utter and final would have overwhelmed the Allied cause.\n\nThe great disparity of the results at stake in a battle between the British and German navies can never be excluded from our thoughts. In a pitched battle fought to a conclusion on British terms between the British and German navies our preponderance was always sufficient to make victory reasonably probable, and in the spring of 1916 so great as to have made it certain. No such assurance could be felt, in the earlier days at any rate, about the results of a piecemeal pursuing engagement against a retreating enemy. If that enemy succeeded in drawing part of our Fleet into a trap of mines or submarines, and eight or nine of the most powerful ships were blown up, the rest might have been defeated by the gunfire of the German fleet before the whole strength of the British line of battle could have reached the scene. This as we know was always the German dream: but there would certainly be no excuse for a Commander to take risks of this character with the British Fleet at a time when the situation on sea was entirely favourable to us. Neither would there be any defence for a British Admiralty which endeavoured to put pressure upon their Admiral to try to achieve some spectacular result against his better judgment, and by overstraining risks when the prizes on either side were so unequal. To be able to carry on all business on salt water in every part of the world without appreciable let or hindrance, to move armies, to feed nations, to nourish commerce in the teeth of war, imply possession of the command of the sea. If these are the tests, that priceless sovereignty was ours already. We had the upper hand; we had the advantage; time\u2014so it then seemed, so in the end it proved\u2014was on our side. We were under no compulsion to fight a naval battle except under conditions which made victory morally certain and serious defeat, as far as human vision goes, impossible. A British Admiralissimo cannot be blamed for making these grave and solid reasons the basis of his thought and the foundation from which all his decisions should spring.\n\nIn the tense naval controversy upon Jutland the keenest minds in the Navy have sifted every scrap of evidence. Every minute has been measured. The speed, the course, the position of every ship great or small, at every period in the operation, have been scrutinized. The information in the possession of every Admiral in each phase has been examined, weighed, canvassed. The dominant school of naval thought and policy are severe critics of Sir John Jellicoe. They disclaim all personal grounds or motives; they affirm that the tradition and future of the British Navy join in demanding that a different doctrine, other methods and above all another spirit must animate our captains at sea, if ever and whenever the Navy is once again at war. They declare that such an affirmation is more important to the public than the feelings of individuals, the decorous maintenance of appearances, the preservation of a superficial harmony, or the respect which may rightly be claimed by a Commander-in-Chief who, over the major portion of the war, discharged an immense and indeed inestimable responsibility.\n\nSir John Jellicoe was in experience and administrative capacity unquestionably superior to any British Admiral. He knew every aspect and detail of his profession. Afloat or at the Admiralty his intellect, energy, and efficiency won equal confidence from those he served and those he led. Moreover, he was a fine sea officer, capable of handling in the most difficult circumstances of weather and navigation the immense Fleet with which he was entrusted. He had served on active service in more than one campaign with courage and distinction. Before the war he was marked out above all others for the supreme command. When at its outbreak he assumed this great duty, his appointment was acclaimed alike by the nation and the Navy. Nearly two years of the full strain of war had only enhanced the confidence and affection with which he was regarded by his officers and men. In judging his discharge of his task we must consider first his knowledge and point of view; secondly, the special conditions of the war; and thirdly, the spirit which should impel the Royal Navy.\n\nThe standpoint of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was unique. His responsibilities were on a different scale from all others. It might fall to him as to no other man\u2014Sovereign, Statesman, Admiral or General\u2014to issue orders which in the space of _two or three hours_ might nakedly decide who won the war. The destruction of the British Battle Fleet would be final. Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon. First and foremost, last and dominating, in the mind of the Commander-in-Chief stood the determination not to hazard the Battle Fleet. The risk of under-water damage by torpedo and mine, and the consequent destruction of British battleship superiority, lay heavy upon him. It far outweighed all considerations of the results on either side of gunfire. It was the main preoccupation of Admiralty thought before the war. From the opening of hostilities the spectacle of great vessels vanishing in a few moments as the result of an under-water explosion constantly deepened the impression. Alone among naval authorities of the highest order Sir Reginald Custance had maintained the contrary view, and had ceaselessly laboured to correct what he conceived to be the exaggerated importance attached to the Whitehead torpedo. Again and again I have heard him contend that the torpedo would play only a very unimportant part in a great sea battle, and that the issue would be decided by a combination of gunfire and man\u0153uvre. The results of Jutland seem to vindicate this unfashionable opinion. For twelve hours the main fleets of Britain and Germany were at sea in close contact with one another both by day and by night, amid torpedo flotillas of the highest strength and quality numbered by scores, and only three large ships out of over a hundred exposed to the menace were seriously damaged by the torpedo. The purely passive r\u00f4le enjoined upon the British destroyers during the night may partially explain this result. It was certainly at variance with the pre-war expectations of most of the leading naval authorities in England.\n\nThe safety and overwhelming strength of the Grand Fleet was Jellicoe's all-embracing aim. Its strength must be continually augmented. Every service ancillary to the Battle Fleet must be continually developed on the largest scale and to the highest efficiency. Every vessel that the northern harbours could contain must be placed at his disposal. With this object the Commander-in-Chief in his official letters to the Admiralty and by every other channel open to him continually dwelt upon the weakness and deficiencies of the force at his disposal, and at the same time magnified the power of the enemy. This habit of mind had been acquired during many years of struggle for money with peace-time Governments. It had now become ingrained in his nature. We have seen in the first volume evidences of this cautious and far from sanguine mood.\n\nThe enemy, according to his view, would be more numerous than the Admiralty Intelligence Department admitted. Their best ships would be found re-armed with much heavier guns. The speed of these vessels would turn out to be greater than we knew. Almost certainly they had some astonishing surprises in store. 'The Germans,' he had written to Lord Fisher on December 4, 1914, 'would have eight flotillas comprising eighty-eight torpedo boat destroyers, all of which would certainly be ready at the selected moment. They had five torpedoes each: total 440 torpedoes\u2014 _unless I can strike at them first._ ' He then argued that he might fall as low as 32, or even 28, destroyers. 'You know,' he added, 'the difficulty and objections to turning away from the enemy in a Fleet action: but with such a menace I am bound to do it, unless my own torpedo boat destroyers can stop or neutralize the movement.' At the date which this story has now reached he was convinced that the 10,000 yards correctly assigned by the Admiralty Intelligence Department as the extreme range of the German torpedo was too little: 15,000 yards must be the margin of safety on which he should rely. Even in 1917 at the end of his time at the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, when a large part of the American Navy was serving with our own and when the strength of the Allied Fleets was at least four times that of their antagonists, he is still found seriously disquieted at his relative strength in battle-cruisers. It is obvious that there are limits beyond which this outlook ceases to contribute to the gaining of victory in war. But this does not affect the main argument.\n\nAll Jellicoe's thought was rightly centred upon the naval battle which he would some day have to fight. On October 14, 1914, he addressed to the Admiralty a letter which reveals his deepest conviction and his consistent intentions. From this extensive quotation is necessary.\n\n'... The Germans have shown that they rely to a very great extent on submarines, mines and torpedoes, and there can be no doubt whatever that they will endeavour to make the fullest use of these weapons in a fleet action, especially since they possess an actual superiority over us in these particular directions. It therefore becomes necessary to consider our own tactical methods in relation to these forms of attack....\n\n'The German submarines, if worked as is expected with the battle fleet, can be used in one of two ways:\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) With the cruisers, or possibly with destroyers;\n\n( _b_ ) With the battle fleet.\n\n'In the first case the submarines would probably be led by the cruisers to a position favourable for attacking our battle fleet as it advanced to deploy, and in the second case they might be kept in a position in rear, or to the flank, of the enemy's battle fleet, which would move in the direction required to draw our own Fleet into contact with the submarines.\n\n'The first move at ( _a_ ) should be defeated by our own cruisers, provided we have a sufficient number present, as they should be able to force the enemy's cruisers to action at a speed which would interfere with submarine tactics....\n\n'The second move at ( _b_ ) can be countered by judicious handling of our battle fleet, but may, and probably will, involve a refusal to comply with the enemy's tactics by moving in the invited direction. If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from an advancing fleet, I should assume that the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines, and should decline to be so drawn.\n\n'I desire particularly to draw the attention of their Lordships to this point, since it may be deemed a refusal of battle, and, indeed, might possibly result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as is expected and hoped.\n\n'Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British Naval Officers and men, but with new and untried methods of warfare new tactics must be devised to meet them.\n\n'I feel that such tactics, if not understood, may bring odium upon me, but so long as I have the confidence of their Lordships, I intend to pursue what is, in my considered opinion, the proper course to defeat and annihilate the enemy's battle fleet, without regard to uninstructed opinion or criticism.\n\n'The situation is a difficult one. It is quite within the bounds of possibility that half of our battle fleet might be disabled by under-water attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false step is made, and I feel that I must constantly bear in mind the great probability of such attack and be prepared tactically to prevent its success.\n\n'The safeguard against submarines will consist in moving the battle fleet at very high speed to a flank before deployment takes place or the gun action commences.\n\n'This will take us off the ground on which the enemy desires to fight, but it may, of course, result in his refusal to follow me....\n\n'The object of this letter is to place my views before their Lordships, and to direct their attention to the alterations in preconceived ideas of battle tactics which are forced upon us by the anticipated appearance in a fleet action of submarines and minelayers....'\n\nLord Fisher, Sir Arthur Wilson, and the Chief of the Naval Staff, then Admiral Sturdee, all considered fully this communication, which was of course only one of a regular stream of reports, despatches and private letters from the Commander-in-Chief. They had no doubt what answer should be sent. They advised me that Sir John Jellicoe's statement should receive the general approval of the Board of Admiralty. I agreed fully with their advice. An answer in the contrary sense was obviously impossible. To tell the Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleet, in the strategic situation which then existed, that even if he suspected the German Fleet were retiring to lead him into a trap of mines and submarines, he should nevertheless follow directly after them, and that if he failed to bring them to battle by man\u0153uvring against his better judgment, no matter what the risk, he would be held blameworthy, would have been madness. The fullest possible latitude of man\u00e9uvre, the strongest assurances of personal confidence, were the indefeasible right of any officer in his great situation. Moreover, in October, 1914, our margins of superiority were at their minimum. A plurality of only six or seven Dreadnoughts could be counted on with certainty. We had never met the enemy's great ships in battle. No one could say with certainty to what degree of excellence their gunnery or torpedo practice had attained, or whether their projectiles or their tactics contained some utterly unexpected feature. There was certainly no reason in this first phase of the naval war for seeking a battle except on the best conditions.\n\nI take the fullest responsibility for approving at this date the answer proposed to me by the First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson, and the Chief of the Staff. If I had not agreed with it, I should not have allowed it to pass unchallenged. But I was far from sharing the Commander-in-Chief's impressions upon the relative strength and quality of the British and German Fleets. I always believed that the British line of battle could fight the Germans ship for ship, and should never decline an encounter on those terms. I always regarded every addition to equality on our side as a precautionary advantage, not necessary to the gaining of victory, but justified by the far greater stake which a naval battle involved to Britain than to Germany. These views appeared to be vindicated three months later when on January 24, 1915, Admiral Beatty with five battle-cruisers met Admiral Hipper with four. On the morrow of that action, January 26, I wrote to Sir John Jellicoe as follows:\u2014\n\n'The action on Sunday bears out all I have thought of the relative British and German strength. It is clear that at five to four they have no thought but flight, and that a battle fought out on this margin could have only one ending. The immense power of the 13\u00b75-inch gun is clearly decisive on the minds of the enemy, as well as on the progress of the action. I should not feel the slightest anxiety at the idea of your engaging with equality. Still I think it would be bad management on our part if your superiority was not much nearer six to four than five to four, even under the worst conditions.'\n\nAnd to the Prime Minister, January 24, 1915, 3.45 p.m.:\u2014\n\n'This action gives us a good line for judging the results of a general battle. It may be roughly said that we should probably fight six to four at the worst, whereas to-day was five to four.'\n\nIn the great episode which has now to be described the British superiority was not five to four, nor six to four; it was at least two to one. Sir John Jellicoe is fully justified in pointing to his letter of October 14 as a proof that his conduct in the stress of action was in accord with what he had long purposed in cold blood, and with a general tactical policy which he had already laid before the Board of Admiralty. But I do not accept on behalf of the Board of Admiralty of 1914 any responsibility for the actual conduct by the Commander-in-Chief of an operation which took place eighteen months later in conditions of relative strength different from those which existed in October, 1914, and, as will be seen as this account proceeds, in tactical circumstances entirely different from those which were contemplated by him in his letter A perception that a decisive battle is not a necessity in a particular situation, and ought not to be purchased at a heavy risk, should not engender a defensive habit of mind or scheme of tactics.\n\nAfter these preliminary observations the story may be told in its simplest form, with pauses to examine the issues involved at the crucial moments.\n\nIn the first volume of this account I recorded the events which secured for the Admiralty the incomparable advantage of reading the plans and orders of the enemy before they were executed. Without the cryptographers' department there would have been no Battle of Jutland. But for that department, the whole course of the naval war would have been different. The British Fleet could not have remained continuously at sea without speedily wearing down its men and machinery. Unless it had remained almost continuously at sea, the Germans would have been able to bombard two or three times a month all our East Coast towns. The simplest measurements on the chart will show that their battle-cruisers and other fast vessels could have reached our shores, inflicted an injury, and returned each time safely, or at least without superior attack, to their own home bases. Such a state of affairs would not necessarily have altered the final course of the war. The nation would have been forced to realize that the ruin of its East Coast towns was as much their part of the trial and burden as the destruction of so many Provinces to France. After national resentment had expended itself in the removal of one or more Governments or Boards of Admiralty, a resolute people would have faced the facts with which they were confronted, would indeed have derived from them a new vigour of resistance.\n\nBut it so chanced that they were spared this particular ordeal. The secret signal-books of the German Navy fell into the hands of the Russians in the Baltic when the light cruiser _Magdeburg_ was sunk in October, 1914, and were conveyed to London. These signal-books and the charts connected with them were subjected to a study in Whitehall in which self-effacing industry and imaginative genius reached their highest degree. By the aid of these books and the deductions drawn from their use, the Admiralty acquired the power of reading a proportion of the German wireless messages. Well as was the secret kept, the coincidence of events aroused suspicion in the German mind. They knew the British squadrons could not always be at sea; and yet often when a German raid was launched, there at the interception point, or very near it, were found important British naval forces. They therefore redoubled the precaution of their codes. Moreover, they had themselves pierced to some extent the British codes, and had actually established at Neum\u00e9nster a station for transmitting to their Fleet intercepted British messages. Nevertheless, during the central period of the war at any rate the Admiralty were capable of presenting to the Fleet a stream of valuable information.\n\nThe Naval Staff discovered in the last week of May, 1916, peculiar symptoms of impending activity in the German Fleet. The Intelligence had from other sources reported the appointment of Admiral Scheer to the chief command. This officer was reputed at the time to be the advocate of an aggressive war policy at sea. He had espoused an unlimited submarine campaign. He was the nominee of Tirpitz the Bold. The cautious and even timid tactics adopted by the German Navy under the direct orders of the Emperor ever since Beatty had broken into the Heligoland Bight at the end of August, 1914, were now to be abandoned. Admiral Scheer planned offensive action against the English coast for the purpose of drawing the British Fleet out over prepared ambuscades of submarines, and then if Fortune was favourable fighting that weakened Fleet, or better still a detached division of it, a decisive battle for the command of the seas. The imminence of an important operation was deduced by the Admiralty from the whole body of their intelligence.\n\nAt five o'clock on May 30 the Admiralty informed the Fleet that there were indications of the Germans putting to sea. The Fleet, which had been previously ordered to raise steam, was directed to concentrate 'eastward of the Long Forties' (about 60 miles east of the Scottish coast) ready for eventualities.\n\nThe two Fleets that put to sea in the evening of May 30, 1916, constituted the culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world. But tremendous as was the power of the German Fleet, it could not compare with the British in numbers, speed or gun power. The British marshalled 28 Dreadnought battleships and 9 battle-cruisers against Admiral Scheer's 16 Dreadnoughts and 5 battle-cruisers. In addition the Germans had 6 pre-Dreadnought ships of the Deutschland class, whose slow speed and poor armament made them a source of anxiety to the German Commander. The speed of the British Fleet was decidedly superior. Its slowest battleship could steam 20 knots, while the 5th Battle Squadron, comprising four _Queen Elizabeths_ , the strongest and swiftest battleships afloat, was capable of steaming 24 to 25 knots. The fastest German battleship could only steam 21 knots, while the 6 Deutschlands reduced the combined maximum speed of the Battle Fleet to 16 knots.\n\nStill greater was the British superiority in gun fire. Sir John Jellicoe's battleships and battle-cruisers mounted 272 heavy guns against 200 German. But this superiority in numbers was magnified by an enormous superiority in size: 48 British 15-inch, 10 14-inch, 142 13\u00b75-inch, and 144 12-inch guns were matched against 144 German 12-inch and 100 11-inch, making a total British broadside of 396,700 lbs. against a German of 189,958.\n\nThe torpedo strength of the two fleets, including vessels of every class, was numerically almost equal. The British mounted 382 21-inch and 75 18-inch torpedo tubes; the Germans 362 19.7-inch and 107 17.7 inch. The smaller short-ranged class of torpedoes on either side were hardly likely to be serviceable in a daylight action; and the British 21-inch were slightly superior to the German 19.7-inch in range and in speed. A clear advantage even in this arm therefore rested with the British.\n\nThe British preponderance in capital ships was fully maintained in cruisers and destroyers. The British had 31 cruisers at sea, of which eight were the most powerful armoured cruisers of the pre-Dreadnought era: the Germans had 11. On the long-expected day of battle Sir John Jellicoe, although not provided with the cruisers and destroyers of the Harwich force, could muster 85 destroyers to the German 72. As in the case of the larger ships, the numerical superiorities alike in cruisers and in destroyers were enhanced by a great additional strength in gun power in every class, and a large advantage in the speed of the cruisers and in the size of the destroyers. Inferiority in any important arm or factor cannot be discerned at any point in the British array.\n\nIn consequence of the Admiralty orders, Sir John Jellicoe concentrated from Scapa Flow and Cromarty 24 Dreadnought battleships, 3 battle-cruisers, 3 cruiser squadrons and 3 destroyer flotillas in the 'Long Forties' on the morning of May 31. He had sent Admiral Beatty from the Forth about 65 miles ahead of him with 6 battle-cruisers, 2 light cruiser squadrons, 2 flotillas and\u2014massive addition\u20144 _Queen Elizabeths._ In this formation both were to steam towards the Heligoland Bight till 2 p.m. when, if nothing was seen, Beatty was to come back into sight of the Battle Fleet, which would turn eastward for a further sweep towards the Horn Reef before returning home. The distance of 65 miles between the main Fleet and its powerful scouting forces had been criticized as excessive. It precluded visual contact between the two portions of the Fleet, and impeded their harmonious combination in the all-important preliminary phases of a great battle. If Beatty, arriving at his rendezvous, found the enemy there or thereabouts, Jellicoe would be out of tactical relation and too far off to force a battle. This disposition had however been used several times before; and Beatty with his fast powerful ships was quite capable of acting independently. Both Admirals had been out so often on these sweeps that though all precautions were observed neither, on the skeleton information available, had any particular expectation of encountering the enemy.\n\nThe day was bright and calm, and as the morning wore away such hopes as they had indulged gradually departed. The last gleam was finally extinguished by a signal from the Admiralty at 12.35 p.m. stating that directionals (i.e. directional wireless) placed the enemy flagship in the Jade at 11.10 a.m. Both Admirals tarried on their course to examine suspicious trawlers, and both were a few miles short of their prescribed positions and out of their reckoning when the hour for the battle-cruisers to turn northwards and close the Battle Fleet approached. Admiral Beatty had already made the signal for an almost complete turn about, and at 2.15 p.m. all his heavy ships had obeyed it. His cruiser screen was in process of turning on to the new direction when the light cruiser _Galatea_ saw a steamer about eight miles off apparently stopped and molested by two strange vessels. At 2.20 she signalled: 'Enemy in sight. Two cruisers probably hostile bearing south-east, course unknown.' The full situation is exposed in the plan. The strange vessels were two of the leading torpedo-boats of the German Second Scouting Group. All the British light cruisers began spontaneously to draw towards the _Galatea_ , and eight minutes later she opened fire. One after another German light cruisers and destroyers emerged and defined themselves from the dimness of the horizon, and behind them a long smoke cloud declared the presence of important hostile forces.\n\nThe _Galatea's_ message at 2.20 and the sound of her guns at 2.28 were sufficient for Admiral Beatty. A hostile enterprise of some kind was in progress. German warships were at sea. At 2.32 the _Lion_ , having already warned her consorts by signal of her intentions, turned about again, and increasing her speed to 22 knots set off in pursuit, steering for the Horn Reef Channel and meaning to cut whatever enemy might be abroad from their harbours. All the battle-cruisers followed the _Lion_ , and executed the Vice-Admiral's order. But the 5th Battle Squadron, 4\u00bd miles astern, continued to carry out the previous instructions, and for eight minutes steered in exactly the opposite direction along the left leg of a northward zigzag, as if oblivious to the vital change in the situation. During these eight minutes the 5th Battle Squadron was losing touch with the battle-cruisers at the rate of over forty miles an hour. When eventually they turned at 2.40 they were already 10 miles behind the van. This loss of distance and time their best efforts were not able fully to retrieve before action was joined.\n\nOne of the many controversies of Jutland centres around this delay in turning the 5th Battle Squadron. On the one hand it is contended that Rear-Admiral Evan-Thomas who commanded it did not make out the signal flags until 2.40. On the other, it is claimed that he knew at 2.20 that enemy ships were in sight; that the _Barham_ , his flagship, received at 2.30 by wireless the course about to be steered by the _Lion_ ; that his general and dominant orders were to keep supporting station 5 miles from the _Lion_ ; that whatever the difficulty in reading the signal flags, the movements of the battle-cruisers were obvious; that no one on the _Barham's_ bridge could miss seeing all the six enormous British ships only 9,000 yards away suddenly turn about and steer eastward towards the enemy; and that no flag signals or wireless orders were needed to require Rear-Admiral Evan-Thomas's battle squadron to conform to the movements of the force and of the Commander his whole purpose and duty was to support. Such are the rival views, and decision upon them is scarcely difficult. It is common ground between all parties that Admiral Evan-Thomas, once he realized the situation, did all in his power to recover the lost distance, and that, profiting by the man\u00e9uvring deviations of the converging and fighting lines, he in fact recovered upwards of four miles of it. The result however of his eight minutes' delay in turning was inexorably to keep him and his tremendous guns out of the action for the first most critical and most fatal half-hour, and even thereafter to keep him at extreme range.\n\nBut the question has also been raised: was Admiral Beatty right to turn instantly in pursuit of the enemy? Ought he not first to have closed on the 5th Battle Squadron and turned his whole ten great ships together? To this question the answer also seems clear. It is the duty of a Commander, whenever possible, to concentrate a superior force for battle. But Beatty's six battle-cruisers were in themselves superior in numbers, speed, and gun power to the whole of the German battle-cruisers, even if, as was not at this moment certain, any or all of these were at sea. The issue for the British Admiral was not therefore whether to concentrate a superior force or not, but whether, having concentrated a superior force, to steam for six minutes away from the enemy in order to concentrate an overwhelming force. Six minutes' steaming away from the enemy might mean a loss of six thousand yards in pursuit. The last time Beatty had seen German ships was when Hipper's battle-cruisers faded out of the sight of the crippled _Lion_ sixteen months before at the Dogger Bank. The impression that every minute counted was dominant in his mind. Why should he wait to become stronger when by every test of paper and every memory of battle he was already strong enough? Had the 5th Battle Squadron turned when he turned, it would have been in close support if fighting occurred and took an adverse turn. The doctrine that after sufficient force has been concentrated an Admiral should delay, and at the risk of losing the whole opportunity gather a still larger force, was one which could only be doubtfully applied even to the Battle Fleet, and would paralyse the action of fast scouting forces. It would however no doubt have been better if the original cruising formation of the battle-cruisers and the 5th Battle Squadron had been more compact. But the facts, when at 2.32 Beatty decided that the enemy was present in sufficient strength to justify turning the heavy ships about, made it his clear duty to steam at once and at the utmost speed in their direction. All that impulse, all that ardour give was no doubt present in the Admiral's mind; but these were joined by all that the coldest science of war and the longest view of naval history proclaimed.\n\nIt was unlikely that no stronger enemy forces should be behind the German scouting screen: but up till this moment nothing but light cruisers and destroyers had appeared. Now at about 3.20 the _New Zealand_ sighted five enemy ships on her starboard bow; and from 3.31 onwards the _Lion_ distinguished one after another the whole five German battle-cruisers. Admiral von Hipper had for an hour been passing through experiences similar to those of Admiral Beatty. His light cruisers had brushed into British scouting ships. He had hurried forward to their aid. Suddenly at 3.20 he was confronted with the apparition of Beatty's six battle-cruisers bearing down on him at full speed, accompanied by their flotillas and light cruisers and supported by the menace of dark smoke banks against the western sky. As on January 24, 1915, he acted with promptitude. He immediately turned about and ran apparently for home. But this time there were two new factors at work. Beatty knew for certain from their relative position in the sea that he could force his enemy to battle. Hipper knew that he was drawing Beatty into the jaws of the advancing High Sea Fleet. We see these splendid squadrons shearing through the waters that will soon be lashed by their cannonade, each Commander with the highest hopes\u2014the British Admiral exulting because he had surely overtaken his foe; the German nursing the secret of his trap. So for a space both fleets drove forward in a silence.\n\nThe combat of the battle-cruisers which preceded the encounter of the main fleets off Jutland is a self-contained episode. Both Admirals, tactics apart, wished for a trial of strength and quality. Human beings have never wielded so resolutely such tremendous engines or such intense organizations of destruction. The most powerful guns ever used, the highest explosives ever devised, the fastest and the largest ships of war ever launched, the cream of the officers and men of the British and German nations, all that the martial science of either Navy could achieve\u2014clashed against each other in this rigorous though intermittent duel. Each in turn faced an adverse superiority of numbers; each had behind him supporting forces which, could they be made available, would have involved the destruction of the other. Hipper counted on the High Sea Fleet, and Beatty could always fall back on his four _Queen Elizabeths._ Each in turn retired before superior forces and endeavoured to draw his opponent into overwhelming disadvantage. The officers and the men on both sides showed themselves completely unaffected in their decisions and conduct by the frightful apparatus which they used upon each other; and their conflict represents in its intensity the concentration and the consummation of the war effort of man. The battle-cruiser action would of course have been eclipsed by a general battle between the main Fleets. But since this never occurred to any serious extent, the two hours' fight between Beatty and Hipper constitutes the prodigy of modern war on sea.\n\nThe detailed story of the action has been told so often and told so well that it needs only brief repetition here. Both the German and French accounts are excellent, and the British Official Narrative is a model of exact and yet stirring professional description. The salient features can be recognized by anyone.\n\nBoth sides deliberately converged to effective striking distance. Fire was opened by the _L\u00fctzow_ and answered by the _Lion_ a little after a quarter to four. Each ship engaged its respective antagonist. As there were six British to five German battle-cruisers, the _Lion_ and the _Princess Royal_ were able to concentrate on the enemy's flagship _L\u00fctzow._ The chances of the battle on either side led to discrepancies in the selection of targets, and sometimes two British ships were firing at one German, while another was ignored, or _vice versa._ Two minutes after the great guns had opened fire at about 14,000 yards, the _Lion_ was hit twice; and the third salvo of the _Princess Royal_ struck the _L\u00fctzow._ On both sides four guns at a time were fired, and at every discharge four shells each weighing about half a ton smote target or water in a volley. In the first thirty-seven minutes of an action which lasted above two hours, one-third of the British force was destroyed. At four o'clock the _Indefatigable_ , after twelve minutes at battery with the _Von der Tann_ , hit by three simultaneous shells from a salvo of four, blew up and sank almost without survivors. Twenty-six minutes later the _Queen Mary_ , smitten amidships by a plunging salvo from the _Derfflinger_ , burst into flame, capsized, and after thirty seconds exploded into a pillar of smoke which rose 800 feet in the air, bearing with it for 200 feet such items as a 50-foot steamboat. The _Tiger_ and the _New Zealand_ , following her at the speed of an ordinary train, and with only 500 yards between them, had barely time to sheer off port and starboard to avoid her wreck. The _Tiger_ passed through the smoke cloud black as night, and her gunnery officer, unable to fire, took advantage of the pitch-darkness to reset to zero the director controls of his four turrets. Meanwhile the _Lion_ , after being eight minutes in action, was hit on her midship turret (Q) by a shell which, but for a sublime act of personal devotion and comprehension, would have been fatal.\n\nAll the crew of the turret except its commanding officer, Major Hervey (Royal Marine Artillery), and his sergeant were instantly killed; and Major Hervey had both his legs shattered or torn off. Each turret in a capital ship is a self-contained organism. It is seated in the hull of the vessel like a fort; it reaches from the armoured gun-house visible to all, 50 feet downwards to the very keel. Its intricate hydraulic machinery, its ammunition trunk communicating with the shell-rooms and magazines\u2014all turn together in whatever direction its twin guns may point. The shell of the _L\u00fctzow_ wrecked the turret and set the wreckage on fire. The shock flung and jammed one of the guns upwards, and twenty minutes later the cartridge which was in its breech slid out. It caught fire and ignited the other charges in the gun-cages. The flash from these passed down the trunk to the charges at the bottom. None but dead and dying remained in the turret. All had been finished by the original shell burst. The men in the switchboard department and the handling parties of the shell-room were instantly killed by the flash of the cordite fire. The blast passed through and through the turret in all its passages and foundations, and rose 200 feet above its gaping roof. But the doors of the magazines were closed. Major Hervey, shattered, weltering, stifled, seared, had found it possible to give the order down the voice tube: 'Close magazine doors and flood magazines.' So the _Lion_ drove on her course unconscious of her peril, or by what expiring breath it had been effectually averted. In the long, rough, glorious history of the Royal Marines there is no name and no deed which in its character and its consequences ranks above this.\n\nMeanwhile the Vice-Admiral, pacing the bridge among the shell fragments rebounding from the water, and like Nelson of old in the brunt of the enemy's fire, has learned that the _Indefatigable_ and the _Queen Mary_ have been destroyed, and that his own magazines are menaced by fire. It is difficult to compare sea with land war. But each battle-cruiser was a unit comparable at least to a complete infantry division. Two divisions out of his six have been annihilated in the twinkling of an eye. The enemy, whom he could not defeat with six ships to five, are now five ships to four. Far away all five German battle-cruisers\u2014grey smudges changing momentarily into 'rippling sheets of flame'\u2014are still intact and seemingly invulnerable. 'Nevertheless,' proceeds the official narrative, 'the squadron continued its course undismayed.' But the movement of these blind, inanimate castles of steel was governed at this moment entirely by the spirit of a single man. Had he faltered, had he taken less than a conqueror's view of the British fighting chances, all these great engines of sea power and war power would have wobbled off in meaningless disarray. This is a moment on which British naval historians will be glad to dwell; and the actual facts deserve to be recorded. The _Indefatigable_ had disappeared beneath the waves. The _Queen Mary_ had towered up to heaven in a pillar of fire. The _Lion_ was in flames. A tremendous salvo struck upon or about her following ship, the _Princess Royal_ , which vanished in a cloud of spray and smoke. A signalman sprang on to the _Lion's_ bridge with the words: ' _Princess Royal_ blown up, sir.' On this the Vice-Admiral said to his Flag Captain, 'Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our\u2014\u2014\u2014ships to-day. Turn two points to port,' i.e., two points nearer the enemy.\n\nThus the crisis of the battle was surmounted. All the German damage was done in the first half-hour. As the action proceeded the British battle-cruisers, although reduced to an inferiority in numbers, began to assert an ascendancy over the enemy. Their guns became increasingly effective, and they themselves received no further serious injury. The deterioration in the accuracy and rate of the German fire during the next hour and a half was obvious. Each side in turn man\u00e9uvred nearer to or farther from the enemy in order to frustrate his aim. And from ten minutes past four the 5th Battle Squadron had begun to fire, at the long range of 17,000 yards, upon Admiral von Hipper's last two ships. The influence of this intervention, tardy but timely, is somewhat lightly treated by the British official narrators. It receives the fullest testimony in the German accounts. The four mighty ships of Admiral Evan-Thomas threw their 15-inch shells with astonishing accuracy across the great distances which separated them from the German rear. If only they had been 5,000 yards closer, the defeat, if not the destruction, of Hipper's squadron was inevitable. That they were not 5,000 yards closer was due entirely to their slowness in grasping the situation when the first contact was made with the enemy. However, they now came thundering into battle; and their arrival within effective range would, in less than an hour, have been decisive\u2014if no other German forces had been at sea that day. The battle-cruisers continued to fire at one another with the utmost rapidity at varying ranges. But from 4.30 onward the approaching and increasing fire of the 5th Battle Squadron, and the development by both sides of fierce destroyer attacks and counter-attacks, sensibly abated the intensity of their action.\n\nENEMY BATTLESHIPS IN SIGHT 4.40 p.m.\n\nAdmiral Scheer, advancing with the whole High Sea Fleet, had received the news of the first contact between the light cruisers at 2.28 p.m., almost immediately after it had occurred. At 3.25 he learned of the presence of the British battle-cruisers. A message received at 3.45 from the 'Chief of Reconnaissance' showed that Admiral von Hipper was engaged with six enemy battle-cruisers on a south-easterly course. Scheer understood clearly that Hipper was falling back upon him in the hopes of drawing the British battle-cruisers under the guns of the main German Fleet. He accordingly steered at first so as to take the pursuing British if possible between two fires. But when he heard a few minutes later that the _Queen Elizabeths_ had also appeared upon the scene, he conceived it his duty to hasten directly to the support of his now outnumbered battle-cruisers. Leaving his older battleships to follow at their best pace, he therefore steamed north in line at 17 knots shortly after four o'clock. The opposing forces were now approaching each other at 43 miles an hour.\n\nTHE TURN TO THE NORTH 5.0 p.m.\n\nThe 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron, heralding Beatty's advance and guarding him from surprise, was the first to see the hostile fleet. At 4.33 the _Southampton_ , carrying Commodore Goodenough's broad pennant, sighted the head of the long line of German battleships drawing out upon the horizon, and signalled the magic words 'Battleships in sight.' Almost as soon as the reports of the light cruisers had reached the _Lion_ , Beatty himself sighted the High Sea Fleet. He grasped the situation instantly. Without losing a moment he led his remaining four ships round in a complete turn, and steamed directly back along his course towards Jellicoe. Hipper, now in touch with Scheer, turned immediately afterwards in the same direction. The situation of the two Admirals was thus exactly reversed; Beatty tried to lead Hipper and the German battle fleet up to Jellicoe; Hipper pursued his retreating foe without knowing that he was momentarily approaching the British Grand Fleet. In this phase of the action, which is called 'The Run to the North,' firing was continued by the battle-cruisers on both sides. The light was now far more favourable to the British, and the German battle-cruisers suffered severely from their fire.\n\nOn sighting the main German Fleet, Beatty had turned about so swiftly that his ships soon passed the 5th Battle Squadron coming up at full speed and still on their southerly course. As the two squadrons ran past each other on opposite courses, the _Lion_ signalled to the _Barham_ to turn about in succession. The _Lion's_ signal of recall was flown at 4.48. She passed the _Barham_ two miles away, with this signal flying, at 4.53; and Rear-Admiral Evan-Thomas responded to the signal three or four minutes later. Perhaps the Rear-Admiral, having been slow in coming into action, was inclined to be slow in coming out. Brief as was this interval, it was sufficient at the speed at which all the ships were moving to expose the 5th Battle Squadron to action with the van of the German Battle Fleet. The van was formed by the German 3rd Squadron, comprising the _K\u00e9nigs_ and the _Kaisers_ , the strongest and newest vessels in the German Navy The four _Queen Elizabeths_ were now subjected to tremendous fire concentrated particularly upon the point where each turned in succession. The two leading ships, the _Barham_ and the _Valiant_ , were engaged with the enemy's battle-cruisers; the rear ships, the _Warspite_ and the _Malaya_ , fought the whole of the finest squadron in the German Fleet. This apparently unequal conflict lasted for over half an hour. All the ships except the _Valiant_ were struck repeatedly with the heaviest shells, the _Warspite_ alone receiving thirteen hits and the _Malaya_ seven. Such, however, was the strength of these vessels that none of their turrets were put out of action and their speed was wholly unaffected.\n\nAll the main forces were now fast drawing together, and all converged and arrived upon the scene in one great movement. Every ship was moving simultaneously, and after an almost unperceived interval, the duel of the battle-cruisers merged in the preliminaries of a general Fleet action.\n\n# CHAPTER VI\n\n# JUTLAND: THE ENCOUNTER\n\n' _Courage and Conduct: Rooke and Toulouse!_ '\n\n[ _Old Naval Ballad._ ]\n\nThe Decisive and the Unknown\u2014The Line of Battle\u2014Jellicoe's System of Command\u2014Admiral Scheer's Point of View\u2014With the _Iron Duke_ \u2014Method of Deployment\u2014Vital Information\u2014Scouting Cruisers\u2014The Meeting\u2014Admiral Hood in Action\u2014The _Defence_ sunk\u2014Need to Deploy the Fleet\u2014Jellicoe's Decision\u2014A Third Course\u2014Neglect of the _Queen Elizabeths_ \u2014Progress of the Deployment\u2014Destruction of the _Invincible_ \u2014Scheer turns away\u2014The Second Opportunity\u2014Scheer turns away again\u2014Beatty renews the Action\u2014Darkness falls\u2014Scheer's Relief\u2014Jellicoe's Problem\u2014The Balance of Probability\u2014The British Flotillas\u2014The Admiralty's Decisive Message\u2014Scheer's Escape\u2014Nobody's Victory\u2014The German Sortie of August 19\u2014The Achievement of U-52\u2014Some Conclusions\u2014The Battle-cruiser Type\u2014The Flash Danger\u2014British and German Shell\u2014Tactics\u2014The Future.\n\nUp to this moment we have been moving through events which, although terrific, were nevertheless within the region of previous experience. The battle-cruisers had fought each other before, and their Admirals knew the character of the conflict, the power of the weapons and what the ordeal was like. Moreover, as has been said, on neither side did the battle-cruiser force amount to a vital stake. But the Battle Fleets themselves are now approaching each other at a closing speed of over thirty-five miles an hour, and with every minute we enter the kingdom at once of the Decisive and of the Unknown.\n\nThe supreme moment on which all the thought and efforts of the British and German Admiralties had been for many years concentrated was now at hand. On both sides nearly the whole naval effort of the nation had been devoted to the Battle Fleets. In the British Navy, at any rate, the picture of the great sea battle had dominated every other thought, and its needs had received precedence over every other requirement. Everything had been lavished upon the drawing out of a line of batteries of such a preponderance and in such an order that the German Battle Fleet would be blasted and shattered _for certain_ in a very short space of time. Numbers, gun power, quality, training\u2014all had been provided for the Commander-in-Chief to the utmost extent possible to British manhood and science. Unless some entirely unforeseen factor intervened or some incalculable accident occurred, there was no reason to doubt that thirty minutes' firing within ten thousand yards between two parallel lines of battle would achieve a complete victory.\n\nTherefore for years Jellicoe's mind had been focussed upon the simplest form of naval battle: the single line and the parallel course; a long-range artillery conflict; and defensive action against torpedo attack. Everything beyond this opening phase was speculative and complicated. If the opening phase were satisfactory, everything else would probably follow from it. The Admiralty could not look beyond providing their Commander-in Chief with an ample superiority in ships of every kind. The method and moment of joining battle and its tactical conduct could be ruled by him alone. It is now argued that it would have been better if, instead of riveting all attention and endeavour upon a long-range artillery duel by the two fleets in line on roughly parallel courses, the much more flexible system of engaging by divisions, of using the fastest battle-ships apart from the slower, and of dealing with each situation according to the needs of the moment, had been employed. It may well be so; and had there been several battles or even encounters between the British and German fleets in the war, there is no doubt that a far higher system of battle tactics would have developed. But nothing like this particular event had ever happened before, and nothing like it was ever to happen again. The 'Nelson touch' arose from years of fighting between the strongest ships of the time. Nelson's genius enabled him to measure truly the consequences of any decision. But that genius worked upon precise practical data. He had seen the same sort of thing happen on a less great scale many times over before the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson did not have to worry about under-water damage. He felt he knew what would happen in a fleet action. Jellicoe did not know. Nobody knew. All he knew was that a complete victory would not improve decisively an already favourable naval situation, and that a total defeat would lose the war. He was prepared to accept battle on his own terms; he was not prepared to force one at a serious hazard. The battle was to be fought as he wished it or left unfought.\n\nBut while we may justify on broad grounds of national policy the general attitude of the Commander-in-Chief towards the conditions upon which alone a decisive battle should be fought, neither admiration nor agreement can adhere to the system of command and training which he had developed in the Fleet. Everything was centralized in the Flagship, and all initiative except in avoiding torpedo attack was denied to the leaders of squadrons and divisions. A ceaseless stream of signals from the Flagship was therefore required to regulate the movement of the Fleet and the distribution of the fire. These signals prescribed the course and speed of every ship as well as every man\u00e9uvring turn. In exercises such a centralization may have produced a better drill. But in the smoke, confusion and uncertainty of battle the process was far too elaborate. The Fleet was too large to fight as a single organization or to be minutely directed by the finger of a single man. The Germans, following the Army system of command, had foreseen before the war that the intelligent co-operation of subordinates, who know thoroughly the general views and spirit of their chief, must be substituted in a fleet action for a rigid and centralized control. At this moment the line in which they were approaching was in fact three self-contained independently man\u00e9uvring squadrons following one another. But Jellicoe's system denied initiative not only to his battle squadrons, but even to the flotillas. Throughout the battle he endeavoured personally to direct the whole Fleet. He could, as his own account describes, only see or know a small part of what was taking place; and as no human mind can receive more than a limited number of impressions in any given period of time, his control disappeared as a guiding power and only remained as a check on the enterprise of others.\n\nLet us now take the position of Admiral Scheer. He had no intention of fighting a battle against the whole British Fleet. He was under no illusions about the relative strength of the rival batteries. Nothing could be more clownish than to draw up his fleet on parallel courses with an opponent firing twice his weight of metal and manned by a personnel whose science, seamanship and fortitude commanded his sincere respect. He had not come out with any idea of fighting a pitched battle. He had never intended to fight at a hopeless disadvantage. If he met weaker forces or equal forces, or any forces which gave a fair or sporting chance of victory, he would fight with all the martial skill and courage inseparable from the German name. But from the moment he knew that he was in the presence of the united Grand Fleet and saw the whole horizon bristling with its might, his only aim was to free himself as quickly as possible without dishonour from a fatal trap. In this he was entirely successful.\n\nHe had sedulously practised the turn-about movement by which under cover of torpedo attacks and smoke screens every ship in the line could circle about individually and steam in the opposite direction without fail even if the line was itself a curve or marred by the 'kinks' and disorder of heavy action. To this man\u00e9uvre and to its thorough comprehension by his captains the German Fleet was twice to owe its triumphant escape.\n\nHaving regard to the moods and intentions of the two Commanders, to their respective strategic problems, to their geographical position, to their relative speeds and to the three hours' daylight that alone remained when they met, it will be seen that the chances of a general fleet action being fought out on May 31 were remote.\n\nThe reader must now take his mental station on the bridge of the _Iron Duke_ which all this time has been steaming forward leading the centre of the British Battle Fleet. Sir John Jellicoe has read every signal made by Admiral Beatty's light cruisers and battle-cruisers. He has therefore been able to follow on the chart the course of events from the first report of the suspicious vessels by the _Galatea_ to the momentous announcement of Commodore Goodenough that the High Sea Fleet was in sight. The forces at his disposal are moving in a vast crescent. Its southern horn consists of Beatty's detached command, a fleet in itself. On the north or less-exposed flank is Admiral Hood with a force similar to, but smaller than Beatty's, and consisting of the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron with two light cruisers and destroyers. The immediate front of the Battle Fleet is screened by eight pre-Dreadnought armoured cruisers followed by four of the latest light cruisers ( _Carolines_ ).\n\nThe Commander-in-Chief knows that all his powerful advanced scouting forces of the southern flank are engaged and that a heavy battle-cruiser action has been in progress for nearly two hours. From the first moment of the alarm he has been working his fleet up to its highest combined speed, and the whole of his twenty-four battleships are now steaming at 20 knots. As soon as he heard that the German battle-cruisers were at sea, he had ordered Admiral Hood with the _Invincibles_ and other vessels to reinforce Beatty. He finds time to telegraph to the Admiralty the solemn message, 'Fleet action imminent'; and far away around the indented coasts of Britain arsenals, dockyards, hospitals spring into a long-prepared intense activity.\n\nThe task is now the deployment of the Fleet. And here, while the armadas are closing, we must step aside for a few moments from the narrative to enable the lay reader to appreciate some of the technical issues involved.\n\nThe evolutions of cavalry in the days of shock tactics and those of a modern fleet resemble each other. Both approach in column and fight in line; and cavalry and fleet drill consist primarily in swift and well-executed changes from one formation to the other. The Grand Fleet was now advancing in a mass of six columns of four ships, each column a mile apart. The Fleet Flagship, the _Iron Duke_ , led the fourth column from the right. Although the breadth of this array was over ten thousand yards, it was completely under the control of the Commander-in-Chief. His ideal at the moment of contact would be to meet the enemy's fleet in front of him, and he could for this purpose use his power of changing direction within certain limits, exactly as a skilful rider sets his horse squarely at a fence. But though the mass formation is so handy for approach or man\u00e9uvre, it is, alike to a cavalry division or a great fleet, fatal to be caught in such order by an enemy who has already deployed into line.\n\nBefore the British Battle Fleet could fight, it must deploy into line. The nearer the Commander-in-Chief could bring his fleet to the enemy in mass, the more certain he would be of being able to lead it squarely in the right direction; but the longer he waited and the nearer he got before deploying, the greater his risk of being caught at a terrible disadvantage. It is a task, like the landing of an aeroplane, of choosing the right moment between two opposite sets of dangers. If the Commander-in-Chief has been skilful or lucky in guiding his mass of battleships in the true direction of the enemy's fleet and finds them exactly ahead of him, his deployment will be swift and easy. He has only to turn the leading ships of his columns to the right or to the left as the case may be, and the whole fleet in four minutes will draw up in one long line of battle, firing at its fullest strength. If, however, owing to facts beyond human control or judgment, he has not been able to point his mass in exactly the right direction, or if he is still uncertain as to the true position of the enemy he has an alternative method of deployment. He can make either of his flank columns steam onwards and the others follow in succession until the long single file which constitutes the line of battle is fully formed. This second method has the advantage of being much more likely to fit an unexpected situation. The moment the enemy appears out of the horizon the leading ship of either flank division can be ordered to take up any course which is in good relation to the hostile line, and all the other ships will follow it in succession. But whereas to deploy into line by the first method would take the British Grand Fleet of that day only four minutes, the deployment in the wake of one of the flank columns, or as it is called 'deployment on the wing,' requires twenty-two minutes before its full fire can be developed. Meanwhile the whole of the enemy's fleet might be in action with only such a portion of ours as had drawn out into line of battle.\n\nTo deploy correctly, accurate and instantaneous information of the position of the hostile fleet is all-important. For this reason the Commander-in-Chief is protected by cruisers and light cruisers under his direct control, who strive to watch the enemy's fleet continuously and tell him every few minutes where it is going and how it is formed. In the quarter of an hour which precedes the moment of deployment these scouts, or several of them, ought to be both in sight of the enemy and of their own flagship. Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge. Nothing ought to be trusted at such a crisis except direct visual signalling by searchlight flashes. This is almost like men speaking to each other. To trust in so cardinal a matter to the wireless reports of cruisers which are out of sight is to run a needless risk. Such reports are highly important and may sometimes disclose the exact situation. But if ever certainty is required, it is at the moment of fleet deployment; and certainty cannot be obtained from cruisers which are beyond the Commander-in-Chief's sight or not linked visually to vessels which he can see.\n\nBoth the Fleets and all the cruisers are moving fast and momentarily altering their whole relation to one another. The cruisers which are out of sight are very likely in heavy action, clinging on to the hostile fleet, zigzagging and turning suddenly to avoid gunfire or torpedo. They are sure to be out of their reckoning. Their reports have to be written, ciphered, dispatched, received, decoded before they reach the Commander-in-Chief. Ten minutes easily elapse in this process; and there are not ten minutes to spare. Moreover, the reports from different scouting ships may not agree. Three or four different versions may simultaneously reach the Commander-in-Chief, and not one of them will be absolutely accurate. Therefore the fateful act of deployment should invariably be founded upon the visual signal of a scout who is actually in sight of the enemy's fleet. The only sure method of knowing exactly where the hostile fleet is at the moment of deployment is the primitive plan of having light cruisers of your own which you can see and which can themselves see the enemy and each other. Such a network of lines of sight alone ensures exact knowledge of a vital matter.\n\nThe duty of clinging to the German High Sea Fleet and continually reporting its whereabouts by wireless which could be read simultaneously by Beatty and by Jellicoe belonged in the first instance to the light cruisers of Beatty's scouting force; and admirably did Commodore Goodenough and his squadron discharge it. There is no ground for criticizing the _Lion_ for not transmitting signals from the light cruisers while in heavy action herself. The _Iron Duke_ read simultaneously everything that passed by wireless. But signals from light cruisers sixty, fifty, forty or even thirty miles away proved to be conflicting and erroneous. We now know that Goodenough was four miles out of his reckoning, and the _Iron Duke_ was more than six. Reports from any of Beatty's vessels, all of which were out of sight and beyond the horizon, were an invaluable means by which Jellicoe could learn the general course of events and approach of the enemy. But they were not, and ought never to have been relied on as a substitute for the reports of scouting cruisers of his own.\n\nNor was the Commander-in-Chief unprovided with the necessary vessels. Apart from the fourteen light cruisers detached with Beatty's advance force, Jellicoe had reserved for his own special use four of the very latest ' _Caroline_ ' class of light cruiser. He had besides the eight armoured cruisers of the pre-Dreadnought era ( _Defence, Warrior_ , etc.). At the first alarm he had ordered these old vessels to increase to full speed and cover his front; but as they could not steam more than twenty knots and he was himself making eighteen and rising to twenty, they did not appreciably draw ahead of him in these important two hours. The _Carolines_ , however, were designed for twenty-nine knots. Knowing that Beatty's force was committed to battle beyond the horizon, the Commander-in-Chief would have been prudent to use his four _Carolines_ for the sole purpose of securing him early and exact information on which to base his deployment. His own battle orders declared that with less than 15 miles' visibility references to the enemy's latitude and longitude were quite useless, and emphasized the extreme importance of maintaining visual touch by means of linking cruisers.\n\nIn two hours the _Carolines_ in a fan-shaped formation could have easily gained fifteen miles upon the _Iron Duke_ in the general direction of the enemy. They would then have been in sight of the British armoured cruisers, which were themselves fully visible from the Grand Fleet. The _Carolines_ themselves at this time could see at least seven miles. Thus the Commander-in-Chief could, had he so wished, have had more than twenty miles' accurate notice by visual signal of the position and line of advance of the German Fleet. This would have been an additional precaution to enable him to bring his fleet safely in mass formation to the exact position from which he could deploy on to the right course of battle by the four-minute method.\n\nAll the ships in both the Fleets were in the half-hour preceding the British deployment drawing together into a tremendous concourse. In that period the following principal events were taking place for the most part simultaneously. Beatty's battle-cruisers, with the 5th Battle Squadron behind them, were hurrying northward to make contact with, and draw the enemy on to, the Grand Fleet. Hipper and Rear-Admiral Boedicker, with the German 1st and 2nd Scouting Groups, were also running north, covering the advance of the German High Sea Fleet. Beatty and Hipper were engaging each other on roughly parallel courses, and the 5th Battle Squadron was in heavy action with the leading German battleships as well as with Hipper's battle-cruisers. Meanwhile Admiral Hood in the _Invincible_ with the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron, and preceded by the light cruisers _Chester_ and _Canterbury_ , was advancing on the northern flank of the British array. Thus at about 5.40 both German Scouting Groups were plunging into the centre of the British crescent (it had now become a horseshoe), of which the southern horn (Beatty) was rapidly retiring and the northern horn (Hood) was rapidly advancing.\n\nHipper with the 1st Scouting Group was in renewed action to the south-west, when at 5.36 the _Chester_ , reconnoitring for Admiral Hood, encountered the German and Scouting Group. At 5.40 three of the four light cruisers of which it consisted emerged swiftly from the haze, and the _Chester_ was 'almost immediately smothered in a hail of fire.' Nearly all her guns were broken up, and her deck became a shambles. But the centre of the British crescent was also in rapid advance; and at 5.47 the _Defence_ (Flagship of Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot) and the _Warrior_ , the centre ships of the line of armoured cruisers directly covering the advance of the Grand Fleet, sighted the 2nd Scouting Group from the opposite direction and opened a heavy fire upon them. Boedicker's light cruisers, glad to pursue the stricken _Chester_ , turned away from the fire of these powerful though middle-aged vessels, only to meet a far more formidable antagonist.\n\nAdmiral Hood with his three battle-cruisers, swinging round towards the cannonade, came rushing out of the mist, and at 5.55 fell upon the German light cruisers with his 12-inch guns, crippling the _Wiesbaden_ and badly damaging the _Pillau_ and the _Frankfort_ in a few minutes. The apparition of capital ships to the northward 'fell on Admiral Boedicker like a thunderbolt.' From far in his rear came the reverberation of Beatty's cruiser action. This new antagonist must be the head of the main British Fleet. Boedicker instantly turned to escape from the closing jaws, leaving the wounded _Wiesbaden_ to crawl out of danger as fast as she could. The explosion of Hood's guns carried\u2014as will be seen\u2014a similar warning to Hipper.\n\nMeanwhile Arbuthnot in the _Defence_ , followed by the _Warrior_ , was pursuing the 2nd Scouting Group. He found the _Wiesbaden_ dragging herself away. Determined to destroy her, he 'came rushing down on her at full speed.' The _Lion_ , heading the British battle-cruisers again in action with Hipper, had also converged. Arbuthnot in impetuous ardour pressed across her bows, forcing her off her course, throwing out the fire of her squadron and blanketing their target with his funnel smoke. He was within 6,000 yards of the _Wiesbaden_ , and had turned to starboard to bring his whole broadside to bear, when the again advancing Hipper swung his guns upon him, as did some of the German battleships now also coming into range. In a moment the _Defence_ , struck by a succession of shells from the heaviest guns, blew up in a terrific explosion and at 6.19 p.m. vanished with nearly 800 men in a huge pillar of smoke. The _Warrior_ , grievously smitten, seemed about to share her fate. But meanwhile greater events were happening. The Grand Fleet's deployment had begun at 6.15.\n\nDuring these events the run to the north had come to an end. At 5.25 Beatty had resumed his action with Hipper. The light was now favourable to the British. The 15-inch guns of the _Barham_ and the _Valiant_ were also firing upon the German battle-cruisers, who began to suffer severely. In the midst of this, at 5.42, came the sound of the _Invincible's_ guns attacking the 2nd Scouting Group to the north-eastward; and thereupon, having good reason to feel himself being surrounded by superior forces as well as being mastered in the actual fire-fight, Hipper turned his ships swiftly about and fell back on the High Sea Fleet. As his opponent turned away to starboard Beatty first conformed, then curled round him due east in the natural movement of the action, and also with the object of preventing Hipper, however he might turn, from discovering the British Battle Fleet. It was at this moment that the _Lion_ came in sight of the _Iron Duke._ Her appearance was a surprise to Jellicoe. The reckoning from Beatty's wireless signals had led the _Iron Duke_ to expect him a good deal farther to the eastward. The cumulative error of the two ships was no less than eleven miles. Fact now instantaneously superseded estimate. There was the _Lion_ six miles away and nearly four points more to starboard of the _Iron Duke_ than had been supposed. It was reasonable to assume that the enemy's Battle Fleet was also and to an equal degree more to the westward; and this meant that Jellicoe would not meet them ahead, or nearly ahead, but obliquely on the starboard bow.\n\nThe situation was critical, urgent and obscure. The Commander-in-Chief could feel the enemy's breath all round his right cheek and shoulder, and he now evidently wanted very much to point his fleet to the new direction. But this partial wheel required fifteen minutes, and he had not got them. As soon as he saw Beatty steaming across his bows in action and at full speed, he flashed the question: 'Where is the enemy's Battle Fleet?' (6.01). And a minute later, in consequence of Beatty's appearance and position, and not having time to wheel, he turned the leading ships of his divisions southward to improve his line of approach to the enemy by gaining ground in that direction. This movement lost no time and was absolutely right in conception, but it brought his fleet into an \u00e9chelon formation of divisions which was not at all convenient for deployment, and the German fleet might be very near. At any minute it might emerge from the mist six or seven miles away, and forthwith open fire. And at 6.06 the Commander-in-Chief reverted to his previous formation, which though not pointing true still gave him the largest options for deployment.\n\nMeanwhile Beatty, now only two miles ahead of the _Marlborough_ (the right-hand corner vessel of the battleship mass), answered: 'Enemy's battle-cruisers bearing south-east.' On which the Commander-in-Chief repeated, 'Where is the enemy's Battle Fleet?' To this the _Lion_ could give no answer. Hipper had for the moment vanished, and the _Lion_ had no enemy in sight.\n\nAnxiously peering at the menacing curtains of the horizon or poring over the contradictions and obscurities of the chart, Jellicoe held on his course in tense uncertainty for another eight minutes. Then at last came illumination. At 6.10 the _Barham_ had sighted Scheer's battleships to the S.S.E., and as her wireless had been shot away, the _Valiant_ passed the news. Jellicoe received it at 6.14. Almost simultaneously the _Lion_ reported the High Sea Fleet in sight S.S.W. These two reports placed the enemy four points on the starboard bow or, in military parlance, half right. The direction was correct. But the leading German battleship _K\u00f6nig_ was placed three miles nearer than she actually was. On this view further delay seemed impossible. The moment of decision had come. 'It became,' says the Admiralty Narrative, 'urgently necessary to deploy the Fleet.'\n\nThe meeting having taken place at this unsatisfactory angle, a swift deployment of the Fleet by divisions to port or starboard was not open. It would have brought the Fleet into a line out of proper relation to the enemy's potential battle front. There remained only the twenty-two minutes' method of deployment on the wing. Jellicoe conceived himself limited to two alternatives: either he could let his right-hand column nearest the enemy go ahead and make the others follow it, or he could let his left-hand column farthest from the enemy take the lead. If he chose the former, he ran the risk of the enemy concentrating their fire on his leading ships while the rest of the Fleet could not reply. If he chose the latter, he drew out his line of battle 10,000 yards farther away from the enemy. Instead of deploying into action and opening fire at once, he would deploy outside effective gun range; and his opening movement in the battle would be a retirement.\n\nOur present knowledge leads to the conclusion that he could have deployed on the starboard wing without misadventure. The 5th Battle Squadron, with its unequalled guns, armour and speed, was in fact about to take the van ahead of the _Marlborough's_ division of older Dreadnoughts. Beatty's battle-cruisers were already ahead steaming upon the exact course. Still farther ahead in front of all Hood in lively comprehension was about to wheel into the line. The whole Fleet would have drawn out harmoniously into full battle at decisive ranges, with all its fast heavy ships at the right end of the line for cutting the enemy from his base. The Commander-in-Chief chose the safer course. No one can say that on the facts as known to him at the moment it was a wrong decision. There are ample arguments on either side, and anyhow he was the man appointed to choose. If he had deployed on the wing towards the enemy, and if the leading British squadrons had been overwhelmed by the fire of the German Battle Fleet, or if a heavy torpedo attack had developed on the van of the Fleet and if our whole line had thereby been checked and disordered in its deployment, and four or five ships sunk (as might have happened in as many minutes), there would have been no lack of criticism upon the imprudence of the Admiral's decision. And criticism would have been the least of the consequences.\n\nBut there was surely a third course open to Sir John Jellicoe which had none of the disadvantages of these hard alternatives. Although it involved a complicated evolution, it was in principle a very simple course. In fact it was the simplest and most primitive of all courses. He could have deployed on his centre and taken the lead himself. There is a very old and well-known signal in the Royal Navy which would have enabled the Commander-in-Chief to lead his own division out of the mass and make the others follow after him in any sequence he might choose. It was only necessary to hoist the pennant 'A' above a succession of numerals indicating the order in which the various divisions should follow. It involved every ship in the two port divisions either reducing speed or making a complete left-handed circle to avoid losing speed, while the starboard divisions were taking their places behind the Commander-in-Chief. But the Fleet was not under fire, and the man\u00e9uvre was practical. It meant in short, 'Follow me.' Out of a tangle of uncertainties and out of a cruel dilemma here was a sure, prudent and glorious middle course. By adopting it Sir John Jellicoe would have retained the greatest measure of control over his Fleet after deployment. He would have had three miles and ten minutes more to spare than if he had deployed on the wing towards the enemy. He would have avoided any retirement from the advancing foe. He would have led his Fleet, and they would have followed him.\n\nIt may seem strange that he should have never attempted to deal with this alternative in any of his accounts and explanations of his actions. It is perhaps easily explained. Sir John Jellicoe was working on a definite preconceived system. In the thunder and mystery of the preliminaries of what might be the greatest sea battle of the world, he held as long as he could rigidly to his rules. All his dispositions for battle had contemplated a deployment either on the port or starboard column of battleships. As a consequence the routine system of signals in the Grand Fleet battle orders did not contemplate any such deployment on the Admiral's flag. The old signal was well known. If hoisted, it would have been instantly comprehended. But it had fallen into desuetude, and it never seems to have occurred to the Commander-in-Chief at the time.\n\nEqually it did not occur to him to take an obvious precaution against the escape of the enemy which could not have risked the safety of his Fleet. His cautious deployment on the outer wing made it the more imperative to make sure the enemy was brought to battle. To do this he had only to tell the four _Queen Elizabeths_ of the 5th Battle Squadron, instead of falling tamely in at the tail of the line and thus wasting all their unique combination of speed and power, to attack separately the disengaged side of the enemy. These ships would not have been in any danger of being overwhelmed by the numbers of the enemy. They were eight or nine knots faster than Scheer's Fleet as long as it remained united. They could at any moment, if too hard pressed, break off the action. Thus assured, what could be easier than for them to swoop round upon the old _Deutschland_ squadron and cripple or destroy two or three of these ships in a few minutes? It would have been almost obligatory for Scheer to stop and rescue them; and taken between two fires, he would have been irrevocably committed to battle. This was exactly the kind of situation for which the division of fast super-Dreadnoughts, combining speed, guns and armour in an equal degree, had been constructed at such huge expense and trouble as one of the main acts of my administration of the Admiralty. But neither the Commander-in-Chief nor their own Admiral could think of any better use for them than to let them steam uselessly along in rear of the Fleet at seventeen knots, their own speed being over twenty-four.\n\nTherefore at 6.15 p.m. precisely the order was given by signal and wireless to deploy on the port wing. The fateful flags fluttered in the breeze, and were hauled down. The order became operative, and five-sixths of the immense line of British battleships turned away and began to increase their distance from the enemy. The first move of the Battle Fleet at Jutland had been made.\n\nBoth Beatty and the 5th Battle Squadron had been conveniently placed for a deployment on the starboard wing. The deployment to port forced Beatty to steam at full speed across the front of the line of battle in order to take his position in the van. Hood wheeled into the line ahead of Beatty. The smoke of the battle-cruisers obscured the vision of the battleships, and at 6.26 Jellicoe reduced the Fleet speed to fourteen knots in order to let the battle-cruisers draw ahead. The signal did not get through quickly, and bunching and overlapping began to occur, particularly at the turning-point. The 5th Battle Squadron, too far behind to cross the front of Jellicoe's deployment and receiving no orders to act independently, decided to take station in rear, and executed a left-handed turn under the concentrated fire both of the German battle-cruisers and the leading German battleships. Once more the 15-inch guns and 13-inch armour of the fast battleships came into heavy action against greatly superior forces, and ponderous blows were given and received. The _Warspite_ , with her helm temporarily jammed, fell out of the squadron and made a sweeping circle out of control and under intense fire. The circle carried her round the half-wrecked _Warrior_ , who in the confusion, blessing her saviour's involuntary chivalry, struggled into safety.\n\nAt 6.25, while the deployment was proceeding, the Fleet began to fire, about one-third of the ships finding targets either on the unfortunate _Wiesbaden_ , which lay between the lines a flaming wreck, or on the German 3rd Squadron ( _K\u00f6nigs_ ) at the head of the hostile fleet. The range was fouled by smoke, and the visibility poor. But Jellicoe's man\u00e9uvre had procured the most favourable light for the British, and only the flashes of their guns could be seen by the enemy. When half the Fleet had turned the corner, Jellicoe seems to have thought of coming to closer quarters by altering course by sub-divisions towards the enemy. The L-shape in which the Fleet was then formed probably made him feel that this movement was impracticable, and the signal was cancelled before it was begun. Half the British Fleet was firing by the time the deployment was completed (6.47 p.m.); and the German 3rd Squadron was repeatedly hit, no British battleship being touched in return.\n\nMeanwhile Hood with the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron had been engaging Hipper's battle-cruisers with good effect. But at 6.31 a salvo from the _Derfflinger_ smote the _Invincible._ In the words of the Official Narrative,\n\n'Several big explosions took place in rapid succession; masses of coal dust issued from the riven hull; great tongues of flame played over the ship; the masts collapsed; the ship broke in two, and an enormous pall of black smoke ascended to the sky. As it cleared away the bow and stern could be seen standing up out of the water as if to mark the place where an Admiral lay.' Of her crew of 1,026 officers and men, six only survived.\n\nWe will now follow for a moment the German movements. Scheer found himself under fire from the British line of battle from 6.25 onwards. He mistook Hood's battle-cruisers for the van of the British line. He thus thought himself about to be enveloped. Instead of executing upon the British the man\u00e9uvre of 'crossing the T,' it seemed that they were about to do this to him. He therefore at 6.35, with the utmost promptitude, turned his whole Fleet about, every ship turning simultaneously, and made off to the westward, _towards England_ , launching at the same time a flotilla to cover his retirement by a torpedo attack and smoke screens. This thoroughly practised evolution was performed with success and even precision, in spite of the pressure and disarray of battle. The fleets fell rapidly apart, the Germans faded into a bank of mist, and Scheer found himself alone again.\n\nBut now ensued one of those astounding events utterly outside the bounds of reasonable expectation, which have often been the turning-points of history. No sooner did Scheer, after steaming for about twenty minutes to the westward, find himself free, than he turned each ship about right-handed and again steamed eastward. What was his purpose? After getting back to harbour he declared that it was to seek further conflict with the British Fleet. 'When I noticed that the British pressure had quite ceased and that the fleet remained intact in my hands, I turned back under the impression that the action could not end in this way, and that I ought to seek contact with the enemy again.' This explanation is endorsed by the German official history. Nevertheless it seems more likely that he calculated that this movement would carry him across the British rear, and that he hoped to pass astern punishing the rear ships and getting again on the homeward side of the battle. We know that he was under the impression that the British battle-cruisers were the van of the British line of battle. From this the conclusion inevitably presented to his mind would be that the British Battle Fleet was five miles ahead of its position. On these assumptions his movement would have carried him very nicely across the British tail. Instead of this he ran right into the centre of the whole British fleet, which was certainly the last thing he sought. This mistake might well have been fatal to the Germans. It would have been impossible to have chosen a situation of greater peril. Jellicoe's fleet was also no doubt somewhat inconveniently arranged. He was steaming south with his divisions in \u00e9chelon. In fact he now, at 7.12 p.m., was caught by the Germans while he was in the very posture he had so disliked before his original deployment. But nevertheless in practice no serious difficulty arose. As the German ships one after another emerged from the mist, all the British battleships whose range was clear opened a terrific fire upon them. The German van, the formidable _K\u00f6nigs_ , saw the whole horizon as far as eye could reach alive with flashes. About six minutes' intense firing ensued. The concussion of the shell storm burst upon the German vessels. Hipper's long-battered but redoubtable scouting group once more bore the brunt. The _Seydlitz_ burst into flames; the _L\u00fctzow_ reeled out of the line. This was the heaviest cannonade ever fired at sea.\n\nSCHEER'S FIRST TURNAWAY  \n6.35 P.M.\n\nIt did not last long. The moment Scheer realized what he had run into, he repeated\u2014though less coolly\u2014the man\u00e9uvre he had used at 6.35; and at 7.17 he again turned the battlefleet about to the westward, launched another series of flotilla attacks, threw up more smoke screens, ordered the gasping battle-cruisers to attack at all costs to cover his retreat (a 'Death ride'), and sped again to the west. Jellicoe, obedient to his long-resolved policy, turned away from the torpedo stream, first two points and then two points more. Here at any rate was a moment when, as a glance at the map will show, it would have been quite easy to divide the British Fleet with the 5th Battle Squadron leading the starboard division, and so take the enemy between two fires. But the British Commander-in-Chief was absorbed in avoiding the torpedo attack by turning away. The range opened, the Fleets separated, and Scheer vanished again from Jellicoe's view\u2014this time for ever.\n\nBetween 6.0 and 7.30 the German flotillas had delivered no fewer than seven attacks upon the British Battle Fleet. The true answer to these attacks was the counter-attack of the British flotillas and Light Cruiser Squadrons, of which latter two were available and close at hand. These should have been ordered to advance and break up the enemy's torpedo craft, as they were fully capable of doing. Instead of using this aggressive parry, Jellicoe turned his battleships away on each occasion; and contact with the enemy ceased. The German flotillas in the whole of this phase lost only a single boat, but they effectively secured the safe withdrawal of their Fleet from the jaws of death.\n\nBeatty however still sought to renew the action. It was above all things important to drive the Germans westward away from home. The _Lion_ was in sight of the enemy; but the British Battle Fleet was drawing no nearer to her, and it was not possible for the battle-cruisers to engage Scheer single-handed. At 7.45 he signalled the bearing of the enemy through the _Minotaur_ to the leading British battleship; and at 7.47 sent the much-discussed message to the Commander-in-Chief, 'Submit that the van of the battleships follow me; we can then cut off the enemy's fleet.' Almost immediately thereafter he altered course to close the enemy. Meanwhile Scheer homeward bent had gradually brought the High Sea Fleet from a westerly on to a southerly course. The fleets were once again converging. Light cruisers and destroyers on both sides began to fire. The British battle-cruisers would soon be engaged. Where was the van of our Battle Fleet? A quarter of an hour was allowed to pass after Jellicoe received Beatty's signal before he sent the necessary order\u2014and that in no urgent terms\u2014to the 2nd Battle Squadron. Vice-Admiral Jerram commanding that squadron did not increase his speed, did not draw ahead of the main fleet, and did not ask the _Minotaur_ for the _Lion's_ position. He merely held on his course, in much uncertainty of the general situation. Thus the _Lion_ and her consorts were alone in the last as in the first encounter of great ships at Jutland and in the war. The German battle-cruisers, grievously wounded, were scarcely in a condition to fight, and the light was still favourable to the British. Firing began from the _Tiger_ on different ships at ranges from 9,000 to 13,000 yards. One of the two remaining turrets of the _Derfflinger_ was put out of action. The _Seydlitz_ and _L\u00fctzow_ could scarcely fire a shot. Suddenly the old Deutschland battleships came to the rescue of Hipper's gallant battered vessels; and the last salvoes of the big guns were exchanged with them in the twilight. After 15 minutes the Germans turned off again to the westward and disappeared in the gathering gloom.\n\nNight had now come on, and by nine o'clock darkness had fallen on the sea. Thereupon the conditions of naval warfare underwent profound changes. The rights of the stronger fleet faded into a grey equality. The far-ranging cruisers were blinded. The friendly destroyers became a danger to the ships they guarded. The great guns lost their range. Now, if ever, the reign of the torpedo would begin. The rival Navies, no more than six miles apart, steamed onwards through the darkness, silent and invisible, able to turn about in five minutes or less in any direction, no man knowing what the other would do or what might happen next.\n\nBut Admiral Scheer had made up his mind, and his course, though perilous, was plain. He was a man of resolution based on reasoned judgment. He knew that a superior hostile fleet lay between him and home. To be found in that position by the light of another day meant, in all probability, total destruction. The night was short. At half-past two dawn would be breaking. He must act without a moment's delay. His plan was simple: to go home as fast as possible by the shortest route, at all risks and at all costs. If he found the British Fleet in his path, he would crash through it. Many ships would be sunk on both sides, but the bulk of the German Navy would escape to harbour. Anything was better than being caught at sea by an overwhelming force with eighteen hours of battle light before it. At 9.14 he issued the following order by wireless: 'Our own main body is to proceed in. Maintain course S.S.E. \u00bc E.; speed 16 knots.' Accordingly the High Seas Fleet turned from its southerly course, and preceded by its flotillas and light cruiser squadrons, steamed at its fastest united speed straight for the Horn Reef. No one can doubt that he acted rightly.\n\nSir John Jellicoe's problem was more complicated. He now had the enemy in a position which certainly was no part of any prearranged German plan. He rightly rejected the idea of a night action. Any battle brought on at daybreak would be free from all apprehensions of traps or elaborately prepared ambuscades. It would be a straightforward fight to a finish in blue water; and he was more than twice as strong. His obvious and supreme duty was to compel such a battle. But how?\n\nTwo minefields had been laid in the Heligoland Bight since the beginning of the war by the Germans to impede an attack by the British Fleet. The Germans had been aided in this task, for reasons requiring more explanation, by the British Admiralty; and in consequence of the exertions of both sides large parts of the Bight were closed by British and German mines. Through these the Germans had swept three broad channels: one to the north by the Horn Reef, one rather more in the centre by Heligoland, and one to the south by the Ems River. Both sides knew a great deal about each other's minefields. They were marked on their charts as clearly as rocks or shoals, and could be avoided with almost equal certainty. But the British Admiralty knew not only the minefields, but all the three German channels through them. Sir John Jellicoe therefore had on his chart all the three passages open to Admiral Scheer marked out before him.\n\nThere was also a fourth alternative. Scheer might avoid the Heligoland Bight altogether, and turning northward as soon as darkness fell, steer homewards through the Kattegat and into the Baltic. Which of these four would he choose? No one in the position of the British Commander-in-Chief could expect to achieve certainty. Whatever decision Jellicoe had taken must have left a number of chances unguarded. All that could be expected of him was to act in accordance with reasonable probability, and leave the rest to Fate. The final question which this chapter must examine is whether he acted upon reasonable probability or not.\n\nIt was possible immediately to eliminate the least likely alternatives open to the enemy. Retreat into the Baltic by the Kattegat gave Scheer no security against being brought to battle in daylight. It involved a voyage of nearly 350 miles, giving the faster British a long day to chase in the open sea. Jellicoe could have provided for this route by the simple process (which he did not however adopt) of sending a few light cruisers to watch the area, and thus ensure timely information at dawn. The Ems route, which was long and roundabout, might also have been dismissed as improbable. Thus the four alternatives could have been reduced to two, i.e. the Horn Reef channel and the Heligoland channel; and these two were not far apart. Sir John Jellicoe would have been justified in considering both the Horn Reef and Heligoland channels as open and likely. On this dual basis however a good movement presented itself. By steering for a point about ten miles to the south-westward of the Horn Reef light he would have been at daybreak in a favourable position to bring Scheer to battle whether he made for the Horn Reef or Heligoland channel. The British Fleet was at least three knots faster than the Germans and was nearer this point when darkness fell.\n\nBut Jellicoe seems to have formed the opinion that the alternative lay between the Heligoland channel and the Ems, and he nowhere mentions the possibility of the Horn Reef which was _prima facie_ the most likely. 'I was loth,' he says, 'to forgo the advantage of position, which would have resulted from an easterly or westerly course, and I therefore decided to steer to the southward, where I should be in a position to renew the engagement at daylight, and should also be favourably placed to intercept the enemy should he make for his base by steering for Heligoland or towards the Ems and thence along the north German coast.' This was hardly the most reasonable assumption, and did not gather, but on the contrary excluded, the major favourable chances. To continue on such a course until dawn broke at 2.30 a.m. would carry the British Fleet 43 miles to the south-westward of Horn Reef and 25 miles to the westward of Scheer's direct course to Heligoland, thus failing to procure action in either case. Scheer was left free to retreat by the Horn Reef, Heligoland, or, if he chose, the Kattegat; and only the much less likely route by the Ems was barred.\n\nAt 9.1 p.m. the British Battle Fleet turned by divisions and proceeded almost due south at a speed of seventeen knots. At 9.17 p.m. it had assumed its night organization of three columns in close array, and at 9.27 p.m. the destroyer flotillas were told to take station 5 miles astern. This order served a double purpose. It freed the Battle Fleet during the darkness from the proximity of its own flotillas, and thus enabled it to treat all torpedo craft as foes and sink at sight any that appeared. It also prolonged the British line and thereby increased the chances of intercepting the enemy. No orders to attack the enemy were however given to the flotillas, and they therefore steamed passively along their course without instructions or information. Jellicoe's signal to his flotillas was picked up by the German listening station at Neum\u00fcnster, which reported to Scheer at 10.10 p.m., 'Destroyers have taken up position five sea miles astern of enemy's main fleet.' At about 10.50 p.m. the German 7th Flotilla reported that it had sighted British destroyers. Thus the German Admiral, if the Neum\u00fcnster message reached him, had from this time forward a fairly clear idea of the relative positions of the two fleets. Here ends the first phase of the night operations. The British Fleet is steaming southward at seventeen knots, and opening to the enemy every moment his two nearest and most likely lines of retreat. The Germans are making for the Horn Reef at sixteen knots, and are about to cut across Jellicoe's tail against which their destroyers have already brushed. There is still time to retrieve the situation.\n\nAt about 10.30 p.m. the 4th German Scouting Group came in contact with the British 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron which was following our Battle Fleet. There was a violent explosion of firing. The _Southampton_ and the _Dublin_ suffered heavy losses, and the old German cruiser _Frauenlob_ was sunk by a torpedo. The gun flashes and searchlights of this encounter were noted in the log of nearly every vessel in the Grand Fleet. Firing in this quarter, though it was no proof, at least suggested that the enemy was seeking to pass astern of the British Fleet on the way to the Horn Reef. But confirmation of a decisive character was at hand.\n\nFar away in Whitehall the Admiralty have been listening to the German wireless. They have heard and deciphered Admiral Scheer's order of 9.14 p.m. to the High Sea Fleet. At 10.41 the _Iron Duke_ , and at about 11.30, after it had been decoded, Sir John Jellicoe, received the following electrifying message: 'German Battle Fleet ordered home at 9.14 p.m. Battle-cruisers in rear. Course S.S.E. \u00be east. Speed 16 knots.' If this message was to be trusted, it meant, and could only mean, that the Germans were returning by the Horn Reef. Taken in conjunction first with the general probabilities and secondly with the firing heard astern, the Admiralty message, unless wholly erroneous, amounted almost to certainty. Had Jellicoe decided to act upon it, he had only to turn his fleet on to a course parallel to the Germans in order to make sure of bringing them to battle at daybreak. By so doing he would neither have risked a night action nor increased the existing dangers of torpedo attack.\n\nBut could the Admiralty message be trusted? Sir John Jellicoe thought not. He no doubt remembered that earlier in the day, a few minutes before the enemy's battle-cruisers were sighted, the same authoritative information had told him that the German High Sea Fleet was probably not at sea as its flagship was speaking from harbour. When Scheer's course as given by the Admiralty was plotted on the _Iron Duke's_ chart, it appeared, owing to a minor error, to bring the Germans into almost exactly the position occupied by his own flagship at that moment. This was absurd. Moreover, he had received a report from the _Southampton_ timed 10.15 which suggested that the enemy was still to the westward. Generally he considered the position was not clear. He therefore rejected the Admiralty information and continued to steam southward at seventeen knots.\n\nIt is difficult to feel that this decision was not contrary to the main weight of the evidence. Certain it is that if Sir John Jellicoe had acted in accordance with the Admiralty message, he would have had\u2014even if that message had proved erroneous\u2014a justification for his action which could never have been impugned. He was leaving so many favourable chances behind him as he sped to the south, and guarding against so few, that it is difficult to penetrate his mind. Full weight must, however, be assigned to the elements of doubt and contradiction which have been described.\n\nAt 11.30 the High Sea Fleet, after some minor alterations in course, crashed into the 4th British Flotilla, and a fierce brief conflict followed. The destroyers _Tipperary_ and _Broke_ were disabled. The _Spitfire_ collided with the battleship _Nassau_ , and the _Sparrowhawk_ collided with the injured _Broke._ The German cruiser _Elbing_ was rammed and disabled by the _Posen._ The _Rostock_ was torpedoed. The rest of the British flotilla made off into the night, and turning again on their course, ran a second time into the enemy, when the destroyers _Fortune_ and _Ardent_ were both sunk by gunfire. A little after midnight the armoured cruiser _Black Prince_ , which had become detached from the Fleet and was endeavouring to rejoin, found herself within 1,600 yards of the German super-Dreadnought Squadron, and was instantly blown to pieces; and her crew of 750 men perished without survivors. At 12.25 the head of the German line, which was by now on the port quarter of the British Fleet, cut into the 9th, 10th and 13th British Flotillas and sank the destroyer _Turbulent._ In these unexpected clashes the British flotillas following dutifully in the wake of the Grand Fleet suffered as severely as if they had been launched in an actual attack. The last contact was 2.10, when the 12th Flotilla sighting the enemy who had now worked right round to port, and led by Captain Stirling with an aggressive intention and definite plan of attack, destroyed the _Pommern_ with her entire crew of 700 men, and sank the German destroyer V 4. This was the end of the fighting.\n\nUp till half an hour after midnight there was still time for Jellicoe to reach the Horn Reef in time for a daylight battle. Even after that hour the German rear and stragglers could have been cut off. The repeated bursts of heavy firing, the flash of great explosions, the beams of searchlights\u2014all taking place in succession from west to east\u2014was not readily capable of more than one interpretation. But the Grand Fleet continued steadily on its course to the south; and when it turned northward at 2.30 a.m. the Germans were for ever beyond its reach. The Northern course also carried the British Fleet away from the retreating enemy; and it is clear that from this time onward the Commander-in-Chief had definitely abandoned all expectation of renewing the action. It remained only to collect all forces, to sweep the battle area on the chance of stragglers, and to return to harbour. This was accordingly done.\n\nSo ended the Battle of Jutland. The Germans loudly proclaimed a victory. There was no victory for anyone; but they had good reason to be content with their young Navy. It had fought skilfully and well. It had made its escape from the grip of overwhelming forces, and in so doing had inflicted heavier loss in ships and men than it had itself received. The British Battle Fleet was never seriously in action. Only one ship, the _Colossus_ , was struck by an enemy shell, and out of more than 20,000 men in the battle ships only two were killed and five wounded. To this supreme instrument had been devoted the best of all that Britain could give for many years. It was vastly superior to its opponent in numbers, tonnage, speed, and above all gun power, and was at least its equal in discipline, individual skill and courage. The disappointment of all ranks was deep; and immediately there arose reproaches and recriminations, continued to this day, through which this account has sought to steer a faithful and impartial passage. All hoped that another opportunity would be granted them, and eagerly sought to profit by the lessons of the battle. The chance of an annihilating victory had been perhaps offered at the moment of deployment, had been offered again an hour later when Scheer made his great miscalculation, and for the third time when a little before midnight the Commander-in-Chief decided to reject the evidence of the Admiralty message. Three times is a lot.\n\nNevertheless one last chance of bringing the German Fleet to action was offered. Within six weeks of Jutland, on the evening of August 18, Admiral Scheer again put to sea. His object was to bombard Sunderland; and his hope, to draw the British Fleet, if it intervened, into his U-boat flotillas. His main flotilla of seventeen U-boats was disposed in two lines on the probable tracks of the British Fleet; one off Blyth and one off the Yorkshire coast; while twelve boats of the Flanders flotilla were stationed off the Dutch Coast. Four Zeppelins patrolled between Peterhead and Norway: three off the British coast between Newcastle and Hull, and one in the Flanders Bight. The German Second Battle Squadron, composed of the slow _Deutschlands_ , was on this occasion not allowed to accompany the Fleet. Thus protected by the airships, bristling with U-boats, and unencumbered by their older vessels, the Germans steamed boldly on their course.\n\nThe preliminary German movements had not passed unnoticed by the Admiralty; and during the forenoon of the 18th the Grand Fleet battle squadrons were ordered to rendezvous in the 'Long Forties,' the battle-cruisers to join further south, and the Harwich force to rendezvous to the eastward of Yarmouth. Twenty-six British submarines\u2014five in the Heligoland Bight, eight in the Flanders Bight, one off the Dutch coast and twelve off Yarmouth and the Tyne\u2014were in their turn spread to intercept the enemy.\n\nThe movements of the two Fleets during the 19th are shown in broad outline on the chart. The day's operations were heralded by submarine attacks on both sides. At 5.5 a.m. the German battleship _Westfalen_ was hit by a torpedo from the British submarine E.23, and she turned for home at 7.22. Admiral Scheer held steadily on his course with the remainder of the Fleet. About 6 a.m. the _Nottingham_ , one of Beatty's advanced line of cruisers, was struck by two torpedoes from U-52, was hit again at 6.25, and sank at 7.10. At first there was some doubt whether she had been sunk by mine or torpedo. But at 6.48 a report from the _Southampton_ was received by the Flagship, the _Iron Duke_ , making it certain that the _Nottingham_ had been sunk by a torpedo. About the same time a signal was received from the Admiralty, fixing the position of the German Fleet. Sir John Jellicoe however appears to have remained under the impression that the _Nottingham_ had been destroyed by a mine. He consequently suspected a trap; and at 7 a.m. he turned the Grand Fleet about and steamed to the northward for over two hours, until 9.8 a.m.\n\nIt is not clear, even on the assumption that the _Nottingham_ had been sunk by a mine, why this man\u0153uvre was necessary. A comparatively slight alteration of course would have carried the Grand Fleet many miles clear of the area of the suspected mine fields, and the possibility of getting between the German Fleet and home presented itself. Such a situation had been foreseen in the Note which, with the concurrence of the First Sea Lord, I had sent to Sir John Jellicoe at the beginning of the war (August 8, 1914).\n\n'Their Lordships would wish to emphasize that it is not part of the Grand Fleet's duty to prevent such raids, but to deal with the enemy's Battle Fleet.... They [the enemy] may expect you to come direct to prevent the raid, and therefore may lay one or more lines of mines across your expected course or use their submarines for the same purpose; whereas if you approached them from an eastward or a north-eastward direction, you would cut the whole Fleet from its base... and you would approach by a path along which the chance of meeting mines would be sensibly reduced. In our mind therefore you should ignore the raid or raids and work by a circuitous route so as to get between the enemy's Fleet or covering force and home.'\n\nU-52 had however struck harder than she knew. It took two hours after the Grand Fleet turned again towards the enemy to recover the lost ground. So that in all four hours were lost and the chance of cutting off the High Sea Fleet seriously reduced. It cannot however be said that this was the cause of preventing battle. An accident of a different character was to intervene. Admiral Tyrwhitt with the Harwich force was meanwhile cruising near the southern rendezvous. During the afternoon Scheer received five air-ship reports\u2014one of the Grand Fleet and four of the Harwich force. He also received three submarine reports about the Grand Fleet. The British forces to the northward all seemed to be steaming away from him as if some concentration were taking place in that direction. At 12.35 p.m. however the German air-ship L13 reported strong British forces about seventy miles to the southward, and that these had been seen coming north at 11.30 a.m. This was of course the Harwich force. Admiral Scheer jumped to the conclusion that it was the Grand Fleet and that his retreat was compromised. He thereupon turned completely about at 1.15 and after waiting for his battle-cruisers to get ahead of him steamed for home. Meanwhile Sir John Jellicoe, having recovered his lost distance, and having received at 1.30 p.m. a signal from the Admiralty fixing the position of the German Flagship at 12.33, was now proceeding at nineteen knots towards the area which Scheer had just vacated. The chart on board the _Iron Duke_ seemed to indicate that a fleet action was imminent, and every preparation was made by Sir John Jellicoe to engage the enemy. After advancing for nearly two hours in full readiness for action, with the battle-cruisers on his starboard and the 5th Battle Squadron on his port bow, he still saw nothing of the enemy. At 3.57 all hope of meeting the Germans was abandoned and the Grand Fleet turned again homeward, losing on the way another light cruiser, the _Falmouth_ , by a U-boat torpedo. At about 6 o'clock the Harwich force sighted the German Fleet. But the Grand Fleet was too far off to offer them any support, and at 7 p.m. Admiral Tyrwhitt turned for his base, and thus the operations of August 19 came to an end.\n\nI feel it unfitting to end this chapter without drawing some conclusions from the events it has attempted to describe. First: Material. What was the cause of the swift destruction of the three British battle-cruisers? The side armour of the _Invincible_ was only from 6 to 7 inches thick. She was in action at under 10,000 yards range, and her magazines may well have been exploded by heavy shells which directly pierced her armour belt. But the _Queen Mary_ was fighting at over 18,000 yards range When the fatal salvo struck her. She was in her place in the line undamaged, steaming 25 knots and firing from all her guns, a minute or two before she blew up. The _Indefatigable_ succumbed at the same extreme range as easily. There can be only two possible explanations. Either the magazines had been penetrated by a shell, or a shell bursting in the turret had ignited the ammunition there, and the flash and flame had roared down the 60-foot hoist into the magazines. There is no doubt that the magazines of British battle-cruisers were not sufficiently protected against long-range fire. The ranges at which the sea battles of the Great War were fought were vastly greater than any contemplated before the war. Our Naval Constructors had not therefore taken sufficient account of the plunging character of the fire to which the decks and turret roofs would be subjected. The German battle-cruiser armour was better distributed. Moreover, the British battle-cruisers, as developed by Fisher and to a large extent by Jellicoe, though more heavily gunned were less strongly armoured than their German compeers. Casting a new eye on naval architecture in 1911, I had recoiled from the battle-cruiser type. To spend in those days two million pounds upon a vessel of the greatest power and speed which could not face a strong battleship seemed to me a fruitless proceeding. I therefore opposed the increase of the battle-cruiser class in which we already had superiority, and succeeded in persuading the Board of Admiralty to cancel the battle-cruiser projected for the programme of 1912, and to build instead of one battle-cruiser and four slow battleships the five fast battleships of the _Queen Elizabeth_ design. I also excluded the annual battle-cruiser from the programmes of 1913 and 1914. These matters have been fully set forth in Volume I.\n\nNevertheless it is more likely that the _Queen Mary_ and _Indefatigible_ were destroyed by flash down the turret ammunition hoists than by penetration of their decks. The roofs of the gun-houses directly exposed to plunging fire were only 3 inches thick. From the working chambers of these turrets the ammunition tube led directly to the handing-room outside the magazine 60 feet below. The danger of the flash of an explosion passing down this tube had from the earliest days of modern ironclads always been recognized. Competition in gunnery practices between ships in peace time had however led to the omission of various precautions. The magazine doors at the bottom of the tube were not doubled. One of them could not therefore be kept always closed in action. Nor were they even shrouded by thick curtains of felt. The shutter which closed the hoist in which the charge was lifted had in some cases been removed for the sake of greater rapidity in loading. A free and easy habit of handling cordite in large quantities had grown up. The silk coverings of the British charges did not give the same security against fire as did the German brass cartridge cases, albeit that these had other disadvantages. All down the tube from the breech of the gun to the magazine, at least four double cordite charges made a complete train of explosive. The flash of a heavy shell exploding in the gun house, or of a fire starting in the cordite charges there, might in these circumstances be carried almost simultaneously into the very magazine itself. Here is the most probable cause of the destruction both of the _Queen Mary_ and the _Indefatigable_ , and we know how nearly the _Lion_ shared their fate.\n\nAgainst this danger the Germans were forewarned and forearmed by an incident in the Dogger Bank action of January, 1915. A 13\u00b75-inch shell had penetrated the after turret of the _Seydlitz_ , setting fire to the charges and to a small 'ready magazine.' A vast flame enveloped the turret and spread through the passages to the next, gutting both turrets completely and killing over two hundred men. This lesson led to drastic changes in the protection of the German ammunition supply and in drill, similar to those introduced into British ships after Jutland.\n\nIt was always argued by the Naval experts that although the later German battle-cruisers\u2014about which we were not ill-informed\u2014carried more armour than their British opposite numbers, this advantage was more than counter-balanced by our having far heavier guns and shells. It was however proved by the test of battle that the British heavy armour-piercing shell was inferior to the German shell _of equal size_ in carrying its explosion through the armour. Such a result should for ever banish complacency from the technical branches of our Naval Ordnance Department, and should lead successive Boards of Admiralty repeatedly to canvass and overhaul the scientific data with which they are presented and to compare them in an open-minded mood with foreign practices.\n\nWhat bearing had these deficiencies upon the chances of a general fought-out Fleet battle? This question is at once fundamental and capable of decisive answer.\n\nOn no occasion either at the Dogger Bank or Jutland did even the heaviest German shell succeed in penetrating British armour over 7\u00bd inches thick. All hits made on 9-inch armour were effectually resisted by the plate. The vitals of all British battleships engaged at Jutland were protected by 13-inch, 12-inch, 11-inch, or at the very least 9-inch armour. It follows that if the main British Battle Fleet had been seriously engaged at Jutland\u2014apart from the ill-luck of an occasional flash carried down an ammunition hoist\u2014it would not have suffered severely from German shell fire. We know that the main armaments and engines of the four _Queen Elizabeths_ were undamaged after coming under a heavy fire from all the strongest vessels of the German Battle Fleet as well as from the German battle-cruisers. Out of five hits of 12-inch shell on their heavy armour, none penetrated. The roof of one of the _Malaya's_ turrets (4\u00bd inches) was hit by a heavy projectile without any damage being done. It may therefore be concluded that the armoured protection of the British Battle Fleet was ample to resist the 12-inch shell of the heaviest German guns afloat at Jutland.\n\nOn the other hand, at the Dogger Bank a British 13\u00b75-inch shell pierced and burst inside the 9-inch armour of one of the _Seydlitz's_ turrets; and at Jutland a British 15-inch shell penetrated the 10-inch armour on the front of the _Seydlitz's_ \"D\" turret, and a 13.5-inch shell penetrated her 9-inch armour. In these two latter cases however the force of the explosion was expended outside. The _L\u00fctzow_ at Jutland showed similar results. At least one 13.5-inch shell penetrated and burst inside 8-inch or 12-inch armour, while another drove in a 10-inch turret plate, causing a fire in the turret. At least one 15-inch shell penetrated and burst inside a 10-inch or 12-inch turret plate on the _Derfflinger_ , causing a terrific fire which completely gutted the turret. Such were the results obtained in the two Fleets engaging at long range. It would be easy to add to these examples. Had the battle been fought to a conclusion at medium or shorter range, the penetration of the guns on both sides would have increased; but the superior relation of the heavier British shell would at every stage have been maintained.\n\nIt is upon this basis of ascertained fact that the numerical strength of the rival Fleets must be considered. The British superiority in the line of battle of 37 Dreadnought ships to 21 German similar units and the double weight of the British broadside were factors which may justly be described as overwhelming. The margin of safety both in numbers and in gun power was so large as to reduce the important defects mentioned to a minor scale, and to make full allowance against accidents.\n\nIn the sphere of tactics it is evident that the danger of underwater damage by mine or torpedo, the danger of 'losing half the fleet before a shot is fired,' dominated the mind of the British Commander-in-Chief. This danger, though less great than was supposed at the time, was nevertheless real and terrible. Coupled with a true measure of the disproportionate consequences of battle to the rival navies, it enforced a policy of extreme caution upon Sir John Jellicoe. This policy was deliberately adopted by him after prolonged thought, and inflexibly adhered to, not only before and during the encounter at Jutland but afterwards. The policy cannot be condemned on account of the unsatisfying episodes to which it led, without due and constant recognition of the fatal consequences which might have followed from the opposite course or from recklessness. Admitting this however to the full, it does not cover several of the crucial Jutland situations, nor that which arose in the German sortie of August 19. Tactical movements lay open on these occasions to the Grand Fleet for gripping the enemy without in any way increasing the risk of being led into an under-water trap. A more flexible system of fleet training and man\u0153uvring would have enabled these movements to be made. The attempt to centralize in a single hand the whole conduct in action of so vast a fleet failed. The Commander-in-Chief, with the best will in the world, could not see or even know what was going on. No attempt was made to use the fast division of battleships ( _Queen Elizabeths_ ) to engage the enemy on the opposite side and hold him up to the battle. The British light cruiser squadrons and flotillas were not used as they ought to have been to parry and rupture hostile torpedo attacks, but these were dealt with merely by the passive turn away of the whole Fleet. The sound and prudent reasoning of the Commander-in-Chief against being led into traps did not apply to situations where the enemy was obviously himself surprised, separated from his harbours, and dealing with utterly unforeseen and unforeseeable emergencies. Praiseworthy caution had induced a defensive habit of mind and scheme of tactics which hampered the Grand Fleet even when the special conditions enjoining the caution did not exist.\n\nThe ponderous, poignant responsibilities borne successfully, if not triumphantly, by Sir John Jellicoe during two years of faithful command, constitute unanswerable claims to the lasting respect of the nation. But the Royal Navy must find in other personalities and other episodes the golden links which carried forward through the Great War the audacious and conquering traditions of the past; and it is to Beatty and the battle-cruisers, to Keyes at Zeebrugge, to Tyrwhitt and his Harwich striking force, to the destroyer and submarine flotillas out in all weathers and against all foes, to the wild adventures of the Q-ships, to the steadfast resolution of the British Merchant Service, that the eyes of rising generations will turn.\n\n# CHAPTER VII\n\n# THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME\n\n' _Pray God that you may never know_\n\n_The Hell where youth and laughter go._ '\n\nSIEGFRIED SASSOON.\n\nInevitability\u2014Strength of the German Line\u2014Absence of Surprise\u2014Objective of July 1\u2014Opening of the Battle\u2014The 8th Division\u2014Through German Eyes\u2014Tragedy\u2014The Greatest British Loss in History\u2014The Battle sinks to a Minor Scale\u2014Its Obstinate Prolongation\u2014The Anatomy of the Battlefield\u2014Conditions become more Equal\u2014The Strain on the Enemy\u2014The Exposure of the Tanks\u2014Their Effect\u2014My Memorandum of August 1, 1916\u2014The Question of Relative Losses\u2014Accuracy of its Figures\u2014Actual British and German Losses\u2014Criticism of Results\u2014Soothing Information\u2014Inexorable Forces\u2014Glory of the Troops.\n\nA sense of the inevitable broods over the battlefields of the Somme. The British armies were so ardent, their leaders so confident, the need and appeals of our Allies so clamant, and decisive results seemingly so near, that no human power could have prevented the attempt. All the spring the French had been battling and dying at Verdun, immolating their manhood upon that anvil-altar; and every chivalrous instinct in the new British armies called them to the succour of France, and inspired them with sacrifice and daring. Brusiloff's surprising successes redoubled, if that were possible, the confidence of the British Generals. They were quite sure they were going to break their enemy and rupture his invading lines in France. They trusted to the devotion of their troops, which they knew was boundless; they trusted to masses of artillery and shells never before accumulated in war; and they launched their attack in the highest sense of duty and the strongest conviction of success.\n\nThe military conceptions underlying the scheme of attack were characterized by simplicity. The policy of the French and British Commanders had selected as the point for their offensive what was undoubtedly the strongest and most perfectly defended position in the world.\n\n'During nearly two years' preparation' (writes Sir Douglas Haig) 'he (the enemy) had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable. The first and second systems each consisted of several lines of deep trenches, well provided with bomb-proof shelters and with numerous communication trenches connecting them. The front of the trenches in each system was protected by wire entanglements, many of them in two belts forty yards broad, built of iron stakes interlaced with barbed wire, often almost as thick as a man's finger.\n\n'The numerous woods and villages in and between these systems of defence had been turned into veritable fortresses. The deep cellars usually to be found in the villages, and the numerous pits and quarries common to a chalk country, were used to provide cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The existing cellars were supplemented by elaborate dug-outs, sometimes in two storeys, and these were connected up by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground. The salients in the enemy's line, from which he could bring enfilade fire across his front, were made into self-contained forts, and often protected by mine-fields; while strong redoubts and concrete machine-gun emplacements had been constructed in positions from which he could sweep his own trenches should these be taken. The ground lent itself to good artillery observation on the enemy's part, and he had skilfully arranged for cross-fire by his guns.\n\n'These various systems of defence, with the fortified localities and other supporting points between them, were cunningly sited to afford each other mutual assistance and to admit of the utmost possible development of enfilade and flanking fire by machine guns and artillery. They formed, in short, not merely a series of successive lines, but one composite system of enormous depth and strength.\n\n'Behind his second system of trenches, in addition to woods, villages and other strong points prepared for defence, the enemy had several other lines already completed; and we had learnt from aeroplane reconnaissance that he was hard at work improving and strengthening these and digging fresh ones between them, and still farther back.'\n\nAll these conditions clearly indicated to the Staffs a suitable field for our offensive, and it was certain that if the enemy were defeated here, he would be more disheartened than by being overcome upon some easier battleground.\n\nSir Douglas also describes his own preparations, which were thorough and straightforward.\n\n'Vast stocks of ammunition and stores of all kinds had to be accumulated beforehand within a convenient distance of our front. To deal with these many miles of new railways\u2014both standard and narrow gauge\u2014and trench tramways were laid. All available roads were improved, many others were made, and long causeways were built over marshy valleys.... Scores of miles of deep communication trenches had to be dug, as well as trenches for telephone wires, assembly and assault trenches, and numerous gun-emplacements and observation posts.'\n\nThus there was no chance of surprise. Nothing could be introduced to obscure the plain trial of strength between the armies, or diminish the opportunities for valour on the part of the assaulting troops. For months the Germans had observed the vast uncamouflaged preparations proceeding opposite the sector of attack. For a week a preliminary bombardment of varying but unexampled intensity had lashed their trenches with its scourge of steel and fire. Crouched in their deep chalk caves the stubborn German infantry, short often through the cannonade of food and water, awaited the signal to man their broken parapets. The lanes which the British shrapnel had laboriously cut through their barbed-wire entanglements were all carefully studied, and machine guns were accurately sited to sweep them or traverse the approaches with flanking fire. Even one machine gun in skilled resolute hands might lay five hundred men dead and dying on the ground; and along the assaulted front certainly a thousand such weapons scientifically related in several lines of defence awaited their prey. Afar the German gunners, unmolested by counter-battery, stood ready to release their defending barrages on the British front lines, on their communication trenches and places of assembly.\n\nColonel Boraston's account is studiously vague as to the objectives sought for by his chief on July 1. The plan of the British and French was admittedly to pierce the whole German trench system on a front of many kilometres, and then by wheeling outwards\u2014the British to the north-east and north and the French to the south-east\u2014to roll up from the flanks the exposed portions of the German line; and British and French cavalry divisions were held ready to be pushed forward through the gap so made. The French objective was to gain the rising ground east of the Somme south of P\u00e9ronne, while 'the corresponding British objective' was 'the semicircle of high ground running from the neighbourhood of Le Transloy through Bapaume to Achiet-le-Grand.' But these objectives, says Colonel Boraston, were not expected to be reached in the first assault. 'These Somme positions were objectives for the armies concerned rather than for the troops from time to time engaged in the attack. They marked the stage at which it was thought that the penetration would be deep enough... to enable the Allied armies to turn their attention to the second stage of the battle, that is to say, the rolling up of the German forces on the flank of the point of rupture.' It was certainly contemplated from the beginning that the battle would be long and hard fought; but it will be seen that the time factor is thus left altogether indefinite. One remains under the impression that it was comparatively immaterial whether this penetrating advance and outward movement were to be effected in a few days, a week, a fortnight, or even longer. But this argument cannot be sustained. The whole effectiveness of the plan depended on the speed of its execution. If for instance an interval of two or three days intervened between the penetration and the outward wheel, the enemy's line would be switched back on both sides of the gap and a whole new web of fortifications would obstruct a further advance. All prospect of a great rupture followed by rolling up the flanks was dependent upon a rate of progress so rapid as to preclude the construction and organization by the enemy of fresh defensive lines. If the Joffre-Haig plan was to achieve any success apart from mere attrition, progress must be continuous and rapid, and the objectives specified must be attained at the latest in two or three days. If this were not secured, the great attack would have failed. Other attacks might subsequently be planned and might be locally successful, but the scheme of a grand rupture was definitely at an end.\n\nIt is easy to prove that rapid progress was in fact contemplated and resolutely bid for. The use by Haig of his artillery clearly indicates the immediate ambitions which were in view. Instead of concentrating the fire on the first lines which were to be assaulted, the British artillery was dispersed in its action over the second and remoter lines and on many strong points far in the rear, the hope clearly being that all these would be reached in the course of the first day's or two-days' fighting. The position of the British and French cavalry in close proximity to the battle front also reveals indisputably the hopes and expectations of the commanders.\n\nAt seven o'clock in the morning of July 1 the British and French armies rose from their trenches steel-helmeted, gas-masked, equipped with all the latest apparatus of war, bombs, mortars, machine-guns light and heavy, and, supported by all their artillery, marched against the enemy on a front of 45 kilometres. Fourteen British divisions and five French divisions were almost immediately engaged. South of the Somme on the French front the Germans were taken completely by surprise. They had not believed the French capable after their punishment at Verdun of any serious offensive effort. They expected at the most only demonstrations. They were not ready for the French, and the French attack, though unfortunately on a needlessly small scale, captured and overwhelmed the German troops throughout the whole of their first system of trenches.\n\nVery different were the fortunes of the British. Everywhere they found the enemy fully prepared. The seven-days' bombardment had by no means accomplished what had been expected. Safely hidden in the deep dugouts, the defenders and their machine guns were practically intact. From these they emerged with deadly effect at the moment of assault or even after the waves of attack had actually passed over and beyond them. Though the German front line was crossed at every point, the great advance into his position failed except on the right. The three British divisions on that flank captured Montauban and Mametz and an area 4\u00bd miles wide by 1\u00bd miles deep, thus isolating Fricourt on the south. The 21st Division north of this village also made progress and gained nearly a mile. But though the defenders of Fricourt were thus almost cut off, the attempt to storm the village failed. Northwards again the two divisions of the Third Corps, though they advanced a thousand yards, failed in spite of repeated efforts to capture La Boiselle or Ovillers on the long spurs of the Pozi\u00e8res plateau. By nightfall the gain in this part of the field comprised only two pockets or bulges in the enemy's position. The attack of the X Corps with three divisions broke down before the immense defences of the Thiepval spur and plateau. Although two of its great supporting points, the Leipzig and Schwaben redoubts, were captured, all attacks on Thiepval failed, and the failure to take Thiepval entailed the evacuation of the Schwaben. Opposite Beaumont-Hamel, on the extreme left, the VIII Corps, after reaching the German front line, was driven back to its own trenches. The subsidiary attack made by the Third Army against Gommecourt completely failed, practically no damage to the German defences having been done in the long bombardment.\n\nLet us descend from this general viewpoint into closer contact with a single Division. The 8th Division, with all its three brigades in line, was to assault the Ovillers spur: the centre brigade up the ridge; the others through the valleys on each side. Both the valleys were enfiladed from the German positions at La Boiselle and in front of Thiepval. Against these three brigades stood the German 180th Infantry Regiment with two battalions holding the front defences, and the third battalion in reserve north of Pozi\u00e8res. After allowing for battalion reserves, there were ten Companies comprising about 1,800 men to oppose the three brigades, together about 8,500 bayonets, of the 8th Division.\n\nAt 7.30 the British artillery barrage lifted. The trench mortars ceased fire, and the leading battalions of all three brigades rose and moved forward, each battalion extended on a frontage of 400 yards. A violent machine-gun and rifle fire opened immediately along the whole front of the German position, particularly from the machine-gun nests of La Boiselle and Ovillers; and almost simultaneously the German batteries behind Ovillers placed a barrage in No Man's Land and along the British front line and support trenches. Here let the German eyewitness speak.\n\n'The intense bombardment was realized by all to be a prelude to the infantry assault at last. The men in the dugouts therefore waited ready, a belt full of hand grenades around them, gripping their rifles and listening for the bombardment to lift from the front defence zone on to the rear defences. It was of vital importance to lose not a second in taking up position in the open to meet the British infantry who would be advancing immediately behind the artillery barrage. Looking towards the British trenches through the long trench periscopes held up out of the dugout entrances, there could be seen a mass of steel helmets above their parapet showing that their storm-troops were ready for the assault. At 7.30 a.m. the hurricane of shells ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dugouts to daylight and ran singly or in groups to the nearest shell craters. The machine guns were pulled out of the dugouts and hurriedly placed into position, their crews dragging the heavy ammunition boxes up the steps and out to the guns. A rough firing line was thus rapidly established. As soon as in position, a series of extended lines of British infantry were seen moving forward from the British trenches. The first line appeared to continue without end to right and left. It was quickly followed by a second line, then a third and fourth. They came on at a steady easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front trenches.... The front line, preceded by a thin line of skirmishers and bombers, was now half-way across No Man's Land. \"Get ready!\" was passed along our front from crater to crater, and heads appeared over the crater edges as final positions were taken up for the best view and machine guns mounted firmly in place. A few minutes later, when the leading British line was within 100 yards, the rattle of machine gun and rifle fire broke out from along the whole line of craters. Some fired kneeling so as to get a better target over the broken ground, while others in the excitement of the moment, stood up regardless of their own safety to fire into the crowd of men in front of them. Red rockets sped up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and immediately afterwards a mass of shells from the German batteries in rear tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines. Whole sections seemed to fall, and the rear formations, moving in closer order, quickly scattered. The advance rapidly crumpled under this hail of shells and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing their arms into the air and collapsing never to move again. Badly wounded rolled about in their agony, and others less severely injured crawled to the nearest shell-hole for shelter. The British soldier, however, has no lack of courage, and once his hand is set to the plough he is not easily turned from his purpose. The extended lines, though badly shaken and with many gaps, now came on all the faster. Instead of a leisurely walk they covered the ground in short rushes at the double. Within a few minutes the leading troops had reached within a stone's throw of our front trench, and while some of us continued to fire at point-blank range, others threw hand grenades among them. The British bombers answered back, while the infantry rushed forward with fixed bayonets. The noise of battle became indescribable. The shouting of orders and the shrill British cheers as they charged forward could be heard above the violent and intense fusillade of machine guns and rifles and the bursting bombs, and above the deep thundering of the artillery and the shell explosions. With all this were mingled the moans and groans of the wounded, the cries for help and the last screams of death. Again and again the extended lines of British infantry broke against the German defence like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back.\n\n'It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage and bull-dog determination on both sides.'\n\nAt several points the British who had survived the awful fire storm broke into the German trenches. They were nowhere strong enough to maintain their position; and by nine o'clock the whole of the troops who were still alive and unwounded were either back in their own front-line trenches, or sheltering in the shell-holes of No Man's Land, or cut off and desperately defending themselves in the captured German trenches. A renewed attack was immediately ordered by Divisional Headquarters. But the Brigadiers reported they had no longer the force to attempt it. A fresh brigade was sent from the III Corps Headquarters. But before it could share the fate of the others, all signs of fighting inside the German trenches by the British who had entered them had been extinguished; and the orders to renew the assault were cancelled. Here are some of the losses:\n\n| officers | other ranks  \n---|---|---  \n2\/Middlesex | 22 | 592  \n2\/Devons | 16 | 418  \n2\/West Yorks | 16 | 490  \n2\/Berkshire | 20 | 414  \n1\/Lincoln | 20 | 434  \n1\/Irish Rifles | 17 | 411  \n8\/K.O.Y.L.I. | 25(all) | 522  \n8\/York and Lancaster | 23 | 613  \n9\/York and Lancaster | 23 | 517  \n11\/Sherwood Foresters | 20 | 488\n\nIn all, the Division lost in little more than two hours 218 out of 300 officers and 5,274 other ranks out of 8,500 who had gone into action. By the evening of July 1, the German 180th Infantry Regiment was again in possession of the whole of its trenches. Its losses during the day's fighting had been 8 officers and 273 soldiers killed, wounded and missing. Only two of its three battalions had been engaged. It had not been necessary to call the reserve battalion to their aid.\n\nNight closed over the still-thundering battlefield. Nearly 60,000 British soldiers had fallen, killed or wounded, or were prisoners in the hands of the enemy. This was the greatest loss and slaughter sustained in a single day in the whole history of the British Army. Of the infantry who advanced to the attack, nearly half had been overtaken by death, wounds or capture. Against this, apart from territory, we had gained 4,000 prisoners and a score of cannon. It needs some hardihood for Colonel Boraston to write:\n\n'The events of July 1... bore out the conclusions of the British higher command and amply justified the tactical methods employed.'\n\nThe extent of the catastrophe was concealed by the Censorship, and its significance masked by a continuance of the fighting on a far smaller scale, four divisions alone being employed. The shattered divisions on the left were placed under General Gough, whose command, originally designated the 'Reserve Corps' and intended to receive resting divisions, was renamed the 'Reserve Army' and given orders to maintain 'a slow and methodical pressure' on the enemy's front. Henceforward the battle degenerated into minor operations which proceeded continuously on a comparatively small front. The losses were however in this phase more evenly balanced, as the Germans delivered many vigorous counter-attacks.\n\n'To sum up the results of the fighting of these five days' (says Haig with severe accuracy) 'on a front of over six miles... our troops had swept over the whole of the enemy's first and strongest system of defence.... They had driven him back over a distance of more than a mile, and had carried four elaborately fortified villages.'\n\nThese gains had however been purchased by the loss of nearly a hundred thousand of our best troops. The battle continued. The objectives were now pulverized villages and blasted woods, and the ground conquered was at each stage so limited both in width and depth as to exclude any strategic results. On July 14 a dawn attack towards Bazentin-le-Grand led to a local success, and the world was eagerly informed that a squadron of the 7th Dragoon Guards had actually ridden on their horses as far as High Wood, whence they were withdrawn the next day.\n\n'The enemy's second main system of defence' (writes Sir Douglas) 'had been captured on a front of over three miles. We had forced him back more than a mile.... Four more of his fortified villages and three woods had been wrested from him by determined fighting, and our advanced troops had penetrated as far as his third line of defence.'\n\nUnfortunately the enemy 'had dug and wired many new trenches, both in front and behind his original front lines. He had also brought up fresh troops, and there was no possibility of taking him by surprise. The task before us was therefore a very difficult one.... At this juncture its difficulties were increased by unfavourable weather.'\n\nAs the divisions which had been specially prepared for the battle were successively shot to pieces and used up, their remnants were sent to hold the trenches in the quiet portions of the front, thus setting free other divisions, not previously engaged, for their turn in the furnace. It was not until July 20 that the battle again expanded to the proportions of a great operation. On this day and the two days following a general attack was organized by seventeen British and French Divisions on the front Pozi\u00e8res-Foucaucourt. The losses were again very heavy, particularly to the British. Only a few hundred yards were gained upon the average along the front.\n\nThe conflict sank once more to the bloody but local struggles of two or three divisions repeatedly renewed as fast as they were consumed, and consumed as fast as they were renewed. By the end of July an advance of about two and a half miles had been made on a front which at this depth did not exceed two miles. For these gains 171,000 British soldiers had fallen\u2014killed or wounded. 11,400 German prisoners had been captured, but more than double that number of British prisoners and wounded had fallen into the hands of the enemy, of whom many had under the terrible conditions of the battle perished between the fighting lines beyond the aid of friend or foe.\n\nThe anatomy of the battles of Verdun and the Somme was the same. A battlefield had been selected. Around this battlefield walls were built\u2014double, triple, quadruple\u2014of enormous cannon. Behind these railways were constructed to feed them, and mountains of shells were built up. All this was the work of months. Thus the battlefield was completely encircled by thousands of guns of all sizes, and a wide oval space prepared in their midst. Through this awful arena all the divisions of each army, battered ceaselessly by the enveloping artillery, were made to pass in succession, as if they were the teeth of interlocking cog-wheels grinding each other.\n\nFor month after month the ceaseless cannonade continued at its utmost intensity, and month after month the gallant divisions of heroic human beings were torn to pieces in this terrible rotation. Then came the winter, pouring down rain from the sky to clog the feet of men, and drawing veils of mist before the hawk-eyes of their artillery. The arena, as used to happen in the Coliseum in those miniature Roman days, was flooded with water. A vast sea of ensanguined mud, churned by thousands of vehicles, by hundreds of thousands of men and millions of shells, replaced the blasted dust. Still the struggle continued. Still the remorseless wheels revolved. Still the auditorium of artillery roared. At last the legs of men could no longer move; they wallowed and floundered helplessly in the slime. Their food, their ammunition lagged behind them along the smashed and choked roadways.\n\nAs the battle progressed the conditions of offence and defence became more equal. Trenches were obliterated and barbed wire pulverized. The combats tended increasingly to become field actions in a wilderness of shell holes. The enemy's losses grew as the weeks wore on. The battle flared up again into a great operation on September 25 and the following days; and November 13 saw large scale attacks along the Ancre tributary and the brilliant storm of Beaumont-Hamel.\n\nAlthough the Germans used and risked at almost every stage much smaller numbers of men than the attacking British, the experiences of defence for these smaller numbers were probably even more terrible than for the attack, and the moral effect upon the Germany Army of seeing position after position, trench after trench, captured and its defenders slaughtered or made prisoners, was undoubtedly deeply depressing. While the British, in spite of their far greater losses, felt themselves to be constantly advancing, and were cheered by captures of trophies and prisoners, the steadfast German soldiery could not escape the impression that they were being devoured piecemeal by the stronger foe. The effect was lasting. German shock troops and assault divisions were in later campaigns to show the highest qualities, and achieve wonderful feats of arms. But never again did the mass of German rank and file fight as they fought on the Somme.\n\nThe German 27th Division which defended Guillemont was one of the best divisions here engaged.\n\nIts history says:\n\n'Incontestably a culminating point was reached (at the Somme) that was never again approached. What we experienced surpassed all previous conception. The enemy's fire never ceased for an hour. It fell day and night on the front line and tore fearful gaps in the ranks of the defenders; it fell on the approaches to the front line and made all movement towards the front hell; it fell on the rearward trenches and the battery positions and smashed up men and material in a manner never seen before or since; it repeatedly reached even the resting battalions far behind the front and there occasioned exceptionally painful losses, and our artillery was powerless against it.'\n\nAnd again:\n\n' _In the Somme fighting of_ 1916 _there was a spirit of heroism which was never again found in the division_ , however conspicuous it (the division) remained until the end of the war'... ' _the men in_ 1918 _had not the temper, the hard bitterness and spirit of sacrifice of their predecessors._ '\n\nAs the attackers became more experienced, the system of deep dugouts turned against the Germans. 'The Entente troops,' wrote Ludendorff. 'worked their way further and further into the German lines. We had heavy losses in men and material. At that time the front lines were still strongly held. The men took refuge in dugouts and cellars from the enemy's artillery fire. The enemy came up behind their barrage, got into the trenches and villages before our men could crawl out from their shelter. A continuous yield of prisoners to the enemy was the result. The strain on physical and moral strength was tremendous and divisions could only be kept in the line for a few days at a time.... The number of available divisions was shrinking... units were hopelessly mixed up, the supply of ammunition was getting steadily shorter.... The situation on the Western front gave cause for greater anxiety than I had anticipated. But at that time I did not realize its full significance. It was just as well, otherwise I could never have had the courage to take the important decision to transfer still more divisions from the heavily engaged Western front to the Eastern in order to recover the initiative there and deal Roumania a decisive blow.'\n\nThe increasing sense of dominating the enemy and the resolute desire for a decision at all costs led in September to a most improvident disclosure of the caterpillar vehicles. The first of these had early in January been man\u0153uvred in Hatfield Park in the presence of the King, Lord Kitchener and several high authorities. Lord Kitchener was sceptical; but Mr. Lloyd George was keen, and the British Headquarters mildly interested. Fifty of these engines, developed with great secrecy under the purposely misleading name of 'Tanks,' had been completed. They arrived in France during the early stages of the Battle of the Somme for experimental purposes and the training of their crews. When it was seen how easily they crossed trenches and flattened out entanglements made for trial behind the British line, the force of the conception appealed to the directing minds of the Army. The Headquarters Staff, hitherto so lukewarm, now wished to use them at once in the battle. Mr. Lloyd George thought this employment of the new weapon in such small numbers premature. He informed me of the discussion which was proceeding. I was so shocked at the proposal to expose this tremendous secret to the enemy upon such a petty scale and as a mere make-weight to what I was sure could only be an indecisive operation, that I sought an interview with Mr. Asquith, of whom I was then a very definite opponent. The Prime Minister received me in the most friendly manner, and listened so patiently to my appeal that I thought I had succeeded in convincing him. But if this were so, he did not make his will effective; and on September 15 the first Tanks, or 'large armoured cars' as they were called in the Communiqu\u00e9, went into action on the front of the Fourth Army attacking between the Combles ravine and Martinpuich.\n\nIn a memorandum drawn up by General Swinton several months before, when he was organizing the Tank Corps, it had been urged that the tanks should lead the attack, combined in as large numbers as possible, with large forces or infantry launched at once behind them. This advice was not accepted. The tanks\u2014what there were\u2014were dispersed in twos and threes against specified strong points or singly for special purposes. They were used as the merest makeweight. Of 59 tanks in France 49 reached the battlefield, and of these 35 reached their starting points, of which 31 crossed the German trenches. Although suffering from all the diseases of infancy, and with their crews largely untrained, it was immediately proved that a new factor had been introduced into the war. One single tank on this first occasion, finding the attacking infantry held up in front of Flers by wire and machine guns, climbed over the German trench, and travelling along behind it, immediately and without loss forced its occupants, 300 strong, to surrender. Only 9 tanks surmounted all the difficulties and pushed on ahead of the infantry. Wherever a tank reached its objective, the sight of it was enough, and the astounded Germans forthwith fled or yielded. Ten days later, on September 25, another tank, a female, followed by two companies of infantry, cleared 1,500 yards of the Gird Trench, and took 8 German officers and 362 men prisoners, apart from numerous killed and wounded, with a total loss to the British of only 5 men. Let these episodes be contrasted with the massacre of the 8th Division already described.\n\nMeanwhile, to achieve this miniature success, and to carry the education of the professional mind one stage further forward, a secret of war which well used would have procured a world-shaking victory in 1917 had been recklessly revealed to the enemy. Providentially however the scales of convention darkened also the vision of the German General Staff and clouded even the keen eye of Ludendorff. In the same way the Germans had exposed their secret plans of poison gas by its use on a small scale at Ypres in 1915, when they had no reserves ready to exploit the initial success. But their enemy did not in that instance neglect the knowledge they were given.\n\nI turn aside from the narrative to examine a once keen controversy in which I engaged myself.\n\nDuring the whole month of July the public and the Cabinet were continually assured that the losses of the Germans in the Somme Battle far exceeded our own. It is certainly necessary not to discourage by the publication of shocking figures an army or a nation during the progress of a great battle; but a Government is entitled to know the facts from its servants. I held no official position at this time; but applying my knowledge and judgment to all the information I could acquire, I formed my own opinion upon the reports with which I was told the Cabinet were being furnished. I said of course no word in public, but viewing with the utmost pain the terrible and disproportionate slaughter of our troops and the delusions that were rife, I felt it my duty to place on record my appreciation of the facts. I showed this appreciation when written to Sir Frederick Smith, a member of the Cabinet and Attorney-General, with whom I had been for many years on terms of the closest friendship. He thought it right to have it printed and circulated officially to his colleagues. I reprint it here with his covering note.\n\nIn the course of conversation with myself, Winston Churchill asserted his views with regard to the offensive now taking place in the West. I am by no means wholly in agreement with his standpoint, thinking, as I do, that he underrates the importance of our offensive as a contribution to the general strategical situation. I suggested, however, that he should embody his views in a memorandum.\n\nHe has done so. After careful consideration, I formed the view that the result would interest my colleagues and enable them to apply their minds to the situation which develops from day to day with both the official and a critical view before them.\n\nI therefore circulate the memorandum.\n\nF.S.\n\n# MEMORANDUM.\n\n1. The British attack on the 1st and 2nd July was upon a front of, say, 20,000 to _25,000_ yards. On nearly three-fifths of this distance it was repulsed. On rather more than two-fifths it advanced our lines about 2 miles. _Fourteen_ British divisions were engaged, exposing (at about 10,000 bayonets each) 140,000 infantry to the full severity of battle.\n\nOn the front attacked the Germans had _eight_ divisions, of which _five_ were in the line and _three_ in reserve. Of the 50,000 bayonets comprised in the five divisions in the line, 20,000 were probably in the first system of trenches, 20,000 more in support, and 10,000 in divisional reserve. The 20,000 in the first system of trenches would be the chief sufferers from the bombardment, because they cannot move away from the positions bombarded, and we may assume 50 per cent. loss to them along the whole front _plus_ prisoners taken on the section successfully assaulted\u201410,000 + 4,000. The supporting troops can be moved about to avoid the shelled localities, and 25 per cent. loss among them to cover bombardment casualties and losses incurred in reinforcement or counter-attack is a liberal estimate\u20145,000. Ten per cent. is sufficient for the divisional reserves\u20141,000. Total German loss in the first phase, 20,000, of which 4,000 prisoners and 8,000 killed, died of wounds, or disabled for the war (i.e. half the remainder) represent permanent loss\u201412,000.\n\nWhat were the British losses? They were certainly down to midnight on the 2nd July not less than 60,000, and of these more than 20,000 were missing, i.e. killed, wounded, or prisoners in the enemy's hands. The Cabinet should require precise figures. On the above basis, however, the permanent loss might be calculated roughly as follows:\n\nMissing | 20,000  \n---|---  \nDead or died of wounds in our own hands at 25 per cent, of the remainder | 10,000  \nDisabled for the war about ditto | 10,000  \n| Total British permanent loss | 40,000  \n| Total German permanent loss | 12,000\n\nIt is believed that both these totals are more favourable to us than the actual facts.\n\n2. Since the first attack the fighting has narrowed to a front of about 7,000 yards, and has become less one-sided owing to German counter-attacks. Our total loss to the end of July is probably _150,000._ This is equivalent to half the effective bayonets of thirty divisions. How many divisions have been engaged? How many have been deprived through losses of an offensive value within the next three months? How many fresh divisions are there left? These are serious considerations.\n\nWhat of the enemy? Out of roughly _120_ divisions west of the Rhine about thirty-five were, before the battle, opposite the British and the rest opposite the French and Belgians. The two main concentrations were on the British front and against Verdun. How many additional divisions have been concentrated against the British during the progress of this battle, and where have they come from?\n\nWe know that the whole front against us is firmly held. It has been tested at many points, and the enemy has himself shown enterprise and activity at many others. In particular the Australian attack south of Armenti\u00e8res met with most formidable resistance, and our troops were expelled from the German trenches with a loss said to be nearly 3,000. The line opposite the French has also been tested at many points in its 400-mile length, and the front is found everywhere to be effectively maintained by the enemy. The Germans usually hold their lines with the minimum numbers consistent with safety, and it is not likely they can have removed any appreciable force from any part of the ordinary front. There remain only out of the troops west of the Rhine their general reserves, and the concentration in front of Verdun, who could be drawn on. How many divisions have been moved opposite the British from these two sources? Statements that the Germans have brought up thirty divisions opposite to the British should be distrusted. Where can they have come from? The fact that units of thirty divisions have been identified by contact, if true, is no proof. _It may well be that individual regiments or battalions which were resting have been scraped from different parts of the line to meet the local emergency: but it is not seen how more than the equivalent six or seven additional divisions can have been brought to the sector under the British attack. If this be so, the total German force successively or simultaneously engaged in the battle with us cannot exceed fourteen or fifteen divisions._ It is probably less. The diaries of German officers published show how numbers and reserves are stinted, and how much is expected of every unit engaged. The impression which these diaries produce is of lavish use of superior numbers on the British side and rather callous sacrifice of very inferior forces on the German; in other words, they are maintaining their defence 'on the cheap,' and by minor expedients of reinforcement.\n\n3. Assuming however that as many as the equivalent of fifteen German divisions have at one time or another been engaged in this battle against, say, thirty British divisions, how has the proportion of loss fallen on the two armies after the first shock?\n\nIf out of thirty British divisions put through the mill we have lost in the second phase 90,000, the Germans _at the same rate_ would have lost on fifteen divisions engaged about 45,000. This would make the totals to date:\n\nBritish | 150,000  \n---|---  \nGermans | 65,000\n\nThis is probably more favourable to us than the truth.\n\n4. Leaving _personnel_ and coming to ground gained, we have not conquered in a month's fighting as much ground as we were expected to gain in the first two hours. We have not advanced 3 miles in the direct line at any point. We have only penetrated to that depth on a front of 8,000 or 10,000 yards. Penetration upon so narrow a front is quite useless for the purpose of breaking the line. It would be fatal to advance through a gap of this small size, which could be swept by a cross-fire of artillery. We are therefore now trying to broaden the gap by attacking sideways to the north. This is a very slow business. In four weeks we have progressed less than a mile. Unless a gap of at least 20 miles can be opened, no large force could be put through. Even then it would have to fight a 'man\u0153uvre battle' for which neither its training nor the experience of its staffs has prepared it, under adverse conditions.\n\nBut the month that has passed has enabled the enemy to make whatever preparations behind his original lines he may think necessary. He is already defending a 500-mile front in France alone, and the construction of extra lines about 10 miles long to loop in the small sector now under attack is no appreciable strain on his labour or trench stores. He could quite easily by now have converted the whole countryside in front of our attack into successive lines of defence and fortified posts. What should we have done in the same time in similar circumstances? Anything he has left undone in this respect is due only to his confidence. A very powerful hostile artillery has now been assembled against us, and this will greatly aggravate the difficulties of further advance.\n\n5. Nor are we making for any point of strategic or political consequence. Verdun at least would be a trophy\u2014to which sentiment on both sides has become mistakenly attached. But what are P\u00e9ronne and Bapaume, even if we were likely to take them? The open country towards which we are struggling by inches is capable of entrenched defence at every step, and is utterly devoid of military significance. There is no question of breaking the line, of 'letting loose the cavalry in the open country behind,' or of inducing a general withdrawal of the German armies in the West. No _local_ strategic advantages of any kind have been reaped or can be expected.\n\nThe tactical form of the attack seems open to comment. Surprise\u2014which played a vital part in the Russian victories and in the French attack\u2014was wholly lacking. Nor was there that _overwhelming_ concentration of artillery on particular points which characterized the German operations against Verdun. The sector selected for assault was one where the chalky ground enabled very deep entrenchments and dug-outs to be made, and was therefore far less adapted to the first employment of our new and very powerful artillery than some other portions of the front.\n\nIn _personnel_ the results of the operation have been disastrous; in _terrain_ they have been absolutely barren. And, although our brave troops on a portion of the front, mocking their losses and ready to make every sacrifice, are at the moment elated by the small advances made and the capture of prisoners and _souvenirs_ , the ultimate moral effect will be disappointing. From every point of view, therefore, the British offensive _per se_ has been a great failure. With twenty times the shell, and five times the guns, and more than double the losses, the gains have but little exceeded those of Loos. And how was Loos viewed in retrospect?\n\n6. It remains to consider the effects of this tremendous and most valiant effort on the general situation in the West and other theatres.\n\nIt is too early to say whether the British offensive had forced the enemy to suspend during its continuance his costly attacks on Verdun. As soon as our offensive is definitely mastered it will be open to him either to renew them or to use his successful defence against us as a cloak or an excuse for getting out of the job. No doubt the French are pleased. Having suffered so much themselves in blood, they think it is only fair we should suffer too. Their own attack on our right was a fairly profitable operation. This is the solitary advantage in the West.\n\nNor can it be claimed that our offensive was necessary to the Russian successes in the East. Their greatest success was gained largely by surprise before we had begun. We could have held the Germans on our front just as well by threatening an offensive as by making one. By cutting the enemy's wire, by bombardments, raiding and general activity at many unexpected points begun earlier and kept up later, we could have made it impossible for him to withdraw any appreciable force.\n\nIf the French were pressed at Verdun we could have taken over more line and thus liberated reinforcements.\n\n7. So long as an army possesses a strong offensive power, it rivets its adversary's attention. But when the kick is out of it, when the long-saved-up effort has been expended, the enemy's anxiety is relieved, and he recovers his freedom of movement. This is the danger into which we are now drifting. We are using up division after division\u2014not only those originally concentrated for the attack, but many taken from all parts of the line. After being put through the mill and losing perhaps half their infantry and two-thirds of their infantry officers, these shattered divisions will take several months to recover, especially as they will in many cases have to go into the trenches at once.\n\nThus the pent-up energies of the army are being dissipated, and if the process is allowed to go on, the enemy will not be under the need of keeping so many troops on our front as heretofore. He will then be able to restore or sustain the situation against Russia.\n\nW. S. C.\n\n_August_ 1, 1916.\n\nThe statements in this memorandum were resented and repudiated both in the Cabinet and at General Headquarters, to which a copy soon found its way. There is no doubt that I did not make sufficient allowance for the compulsion to an offensive exercised by the blind movement of events. The facts were however only too true.\n\nI have thought it right to thrash this controversy out in detail, to vindicate the claim which I make that I pass no important criticisms on the conduct of commanders in the light of after knowledge unless there exists documentary proof that substantially the same criticisms were put on record before or during the event and while every point was disputed and unknowable.\n\nSir Douglas Haig was not at this time well served by his advisers in the Intelligence Department of General Headquarters. The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy. An Emperor, a Commander-in-Chief, even a Prime Minister in peace or war, is in the main surrounded by smiling and respectful faces. Most people who come in contact with him in times of strain feel honoured by contact with so much power or in sympathy with the bearer of such heavy burdens. They are often prompted to use smooth processes, to mention some favourable item, to leave unsaid some ugly misgiving or some awkward contradiction. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decision fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.\n\nIn political life there are many correctives: there is no walk so crowded with candid friends as Parliament. Apart from this, there is in time of peace organized opposition which with tireless industry assembles all the worst possible facts, draws from them the most alarming conclusions, and imputes the most unworthy motives. But the head of a great army in time of war has no such balancing apparatus. His power over his subordinates is practically absolute. Their loyalty, their sense of discipline, lead them to try to win his favour, or at least to spare his feelings, on every occasion. A sign of displeasure on his part at some objectionable piece of news might easily be interpreted by a subordinate as a wish to be freed from such inflictions. The whole habit of mind of a military staff is based upon subordination of opinion. It is not every councillor who, like the Bastard in 'King John,' will say to his sovereign:\n\n'But if you be afeared to hear the worst,\n\nThen let the worst unheard fall on your head.'\n\nYet when events are surveyed in retrospect, it does not seem just to throw the reproach of this battle upon Sir Douglas Haig. The esoteric Buddhists believe that at the end of each life a new being is created, heir to the faults or the virtues of his forerunner. The tragedies of 1916 had been decreed by the events of 1915. The failure of the Allied Governments in that year to effect the destruction of Turkey and the union of the Balkans against the Central Powers left open no favourable means of action. The French agony at Verdun compelled a British relieving counter-attack in France, before the new British armies, and particularly their vastly expanded artillery, were sufficiently trained to save the assaulting troops the heaviest loss. The Tanks, though already conceived, had yet to be born and reared. Resources did not exist sufficient to mount simultaneously several offensives along the battle front, thus leaving the enemy uncertain to the last moment of the true point of attack. Indispensable preparation destroyed equally indispensable surprise. Yet the call to attack was peremptory. Delay was impossible. Sir Douglas Haig, like all the Commanders on the Western Front, would no doubt, had he been responsible, have opposed the great turning movement in the south-east of Europe which was possible in 1915 and the consequences of which alone could have yielded decisive results in 1916. He was also confident and convinced of breaking the German front upon the Somme. But had he been as reluctant as he was ardent to attack the German positions, he could not have remained idle. Inexorable forces carried rulers and ruled along together as the wheels of Fate revolved.\n\nNevertheless the campaign of 1916 on the Western Front was from beginning to end a welter of slaughter, which after the issue was determined left the British and French armies weaker in relation to the Germans than when it opened, while the actual battle fronts were not appreciably altered, and except for the relief of Verdun, which relieved the Germans no less than the French, no strategic advantage of any kind had been gained. The German unwisdom in attacking Verdun was more than cancelled in French casualties, and almost cancelled in the general strategic sphere by the heroic prodigality of the French defence. The loss in prestige which the Germans sustained through their failure to take Verdun was to be more than counterbalanced by their success in another theatre while all the time they kept their battle front unbroken on the Somme.\n\nBut this sombre verdict, which it seems probable posterity will endorse in still more searching terms, in no way diminishes the true glory of the British Army. A young army, but the finest we have ever marshalled; improvised at the sound of the cannonade, every man a volunteer, inspired not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny, they grudged no sacrifice however unfruitful and shrank from no ordeal however destructive. Struggling forward through the mire and filth of the trenches, across the corpse-strewn crater fields, amid the flaring, crashing, blasting barrages and murderous machine-gun fire, conscious of their race, proud of their cause, they seized the most formidable soldiery in Europe by the throat, slew them and hurled them unceasingly backward. If two lives or ten lives were required by their commanders to kill one German, no word of complaint ever rose from the fighting troops. No attack however forlorn, however fatal, found them without ardour. No slaughter however desolating prevented them from returning to the charge. No physical conditions however severe deprived their commanders of their obedience and loyalty. Martyrs not less than soldiers, they fulfilled the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener's Army. The flower of that generous manhood which quitted peaceful civilian life in every kind of workaday occupation, which came at the call of Britain, and as we may still hope, at the call of humanity, and came from the most remote parts of her Empire, was shorn away for ever in 1916. Unconquerable except by death, which they have conquered, they have set up a monument of native virtue which will command the wonder, the reverence and the gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among men.\n\n# CHAPTER VIII\n\n# THE ROUMANIAN DISASTER\n\nRoumania declares War\u2014Fall of Falkenhayn\u2014Hindenburg and Ludendorff\u2014The Usurpation of the German General Staff\u2014The Roumanian Opportunity gone\u2014Rash Precautions\u2014The Salonica Factor\u2014Sarrail's Offensive\u2014Jeopardy of Roumania\u2014Disposition of her Armies\u2014Russian Misgivings\u2014Turturkai\u2014The Closing Jaws\u2014The Common Woe\u2014The Autumn at Verdun\u2014Nivelle and Mangin\u2014Douaumont, October 24.\n\nWe have seen how easily at the beginning of 1916 Roumania in her isolated position could have been induced or compelled to join the Teutonic Powers. We have seen how Falkenhayn, by turning to the west towards France and allowing Austria to do the same towards Italy, had relieved Roumania from adverse pressure and enabled her to preserve for another six months her attitude of ambiguous watchfulness. Events of a decided character were now to take place.\n\nAt the end of August the second of the two great catastrophes which Falkenhayn's unwisdom had prepared fell upon the Central Empires. Roumania declared war. Although this danger had been approaching since Brusiloff's victory at the beginning of June, and important precautionary measures taken to guard against it, the actual declaration came much sooner than the German Government had expected, and fell as a shock upon German public opinion. A spontaneous movement of anger and disgust swept across the German Empire. The position of Germany was indeed more critical at this juncture than at any other period of the war until the final collapse. The Battle of Verdun was still making enormous inroads upon German resources, and a most serious moral defeat impended there. The Battle of the Somme was in full blast. The British, undeterred by their losses, continued to throw fresh divisions into the struggle, and to launch their formidable attacks at brief intervals. The strain upon the Germans in the West was intense. The sense of failure at Verdun, and of being slowly overpowered and worn down by superior forces on the Somme, had affected the morale of their troops. Physical exhaustion and battle losses had reduced the German reserves to the slenderest proportions, and many more weeks of crisis and uncertainty lay between the hard-pressed front and the shield of winter. Meanwhile the failure of Austria was glaring. The whole Southern front in the East was still in a state of flux. The Russian tide rolled forward; no limits could yet be assigned to its advance. Scores of thousands of Czech troops had eagerly surrendered to the enemy, and were being enrolled bodily as a separate army corps in the Russian ranks. The Italian counter-offensive on the Isonzo was developing. The whole resisting power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire quivered on the verge of collapse. At this moment a fresh, brave and well-trained army of 500,000 Roumanians was thrown into the adverse scale, and entered the conflict in that very theatre where the Teutonic Powers were weakest and most vulnerable. The vital granaries and oil-fields of Roumania were lost, and even the great Hungarian Plain itself was in dire peril. All the time the pressure of the blockade sapped the vitality of the German masses, and hampered and complicated at a thousand points the manufacture of war material.\n\nIn this dark and almost desperate hour the Emperor, interpreting the mood of the German people, turned to the great twin captains of war who had defended the Eastern marches so long against heavy odds, and on whose brows still shone the lustre of Tannenberg. On August 28, the morrow of the Roumanian declaration, Falkenhayn was notified by Count Von Lyncker, head of the Emperor's Military Cabinet, that His Majesty had decided to summon Hindenburg and Ludendorff to his presence. Rightly accepting this intimation as dismissal, Falkenhayn resigned forthwith; and that same evening Hindenburg as Chief of the Staff, and Ludendorff as First Quartermaster-General with equal powers, assumed the supreme direction of the Central Empires in the war.\n\nWhat are the relations between these two men? Hindenburg has described them as those of a happy marriage. 'In such a relationship,' he writes, 'how can a third party clearly distinguish the merits of the individuals? They are one in thought and action, and often what the one says is only the expression of the wishes and feelings of the other. After I had learnt the worth of General Ludendorff, and that was soon, I realized that one of my principal tasks was as far as possible to give free scope to the intellectual powers, the almost superhuman capacity for work and untiring resolution of my Chief of Staff, and if necessary clear the way for him, the way in which our common desires and our common goal pointed.... The harmony of our military and political convictions formed the basis for our joint views as to the proper use of our resources. Differences of opinion were easily reconciled, without our relations being disturbed by a feeling of forced submission on either side.'\n\nThe old Field-Marshal was uplifted by his patriotism and character above jealousy. His great age and the vast changes which had taken place in warfare since he had passed his military prime led him willingly to leave the initiative, the preparation and the execution almost entirely to his volcanic colleague, while he himself in full agreement on the largest decisions came in with ponderous weight to clear obstacles and opposition from the path. Throughout the struggle an absolute unity was presented.\n\nBut when we look beneath appearances to the facts, there can be no doubt that Ludendorff managed everything and that Hindenburg was chosen largely to enable him to manage everything. It was in Ludendorff's brain that the great decisions were taken. It was under his competent hand that the whole movement and control of the German armies, and of much more than the armies, proceeded. Ludendorff was the man of the German General Staff. This military priesthood was throughout the dominating and driving power of Germany, not only through the fifty-two months of the war, but to a very large extent in the situation that preceded it and brought it about. The representatives of the General Staff were bound together by the closest ties of professional comradeship and common doctrine. They were to the rest of the Army what the Jesuits in their greatest period had been to the Church of Rome. Their representatives at the side of every Commander and at Headquarters spoke a language and preserved confidences of their own. The German Generals of Corps and Armies, Army-Group Commanders, nay, Hindenburg himself were treated by this confraternity, to an extent almost incredible, as figureheads, and frequently as nothing more. 'The General Staff,' writes General von Moser, 'established an underground control of operations behind the backs of the commanding Generals. It led one prominent General to declare, \"I am fighting the enemy and the General Staff.\"' On December 3, 1917, in the Cambrai battle, Moser himself relates that as Corps Commander he suggested to the Second Army the recapture of Bourlon Wood the next day. To his surprise his project was disapproved and the date fixed for the 9th. He subsequently ascertained that one of his own General Staff officers had spoken on the telephone to the Second Army and argued against the attack on the 4th and in favour of postponing it to the 9th.\n\nEvery one will remember the extraordinary incident of the visit of Colonel Hentsch to the various Army Headquarters during the Battle of the Marne in 1914 as General Staff representative of the Supreme Command; how on the morning of September 9 he settled all vital matters with B\u00fclow's Chief of the Staff while the old man was still in bed; and how at noon at Kluck's headquarters he gave his orders to the Staff Officer, Kuhl, and neither mentioned Kluck nor asked to see him. Similarly Generals von Lossberg (C.G.S. Sixth Army) and von Kuhl (C.G.S. Rupprecht's group of Armies) speak always, as the records show, in their own names and not those of Sixt von Armin or Rupprecht, whom they neither quote nor appear to consult. A British Staff Officer, whatever the facts, would at least have said, 'The Chief or Army Commander wishes.' But behind the scenes of the German General Staff all these formalities are dropped. The staffs arrange everything without a word about the authority, opinions or desires of their generals. It is the General Staff which conducts the operations, gives decisions and notifies them to the subordinate formations. Ludendorff throughout appears as the uncontested master. In his numerous conversations with the Chief of the Staff of the Fourth Army, the name of Hindenburg is never mentioned to justify or to support a decision.\n\nThis in no way detracts from the fame of Hindenburg, who yielded himself with magnanimity to a process which he was sure was in the best interests of his King and Country. But it is necessary to state what is believed to be the truth.\n\nThe golden opportunity for which Roumania had so long watched had not only come. It had gone.\n\nAs soon as the extent of the Russian victory was plainly apparent, the Cabinet of Bratiano definitely decided to enter the war. The long period of perplexity, hesitation, and bargaining had reached its conclusion. Now or never was the moment for Roumania to strike with all her strength for her national ambition and for the unity and integrity of the Roumanian peoples. Once this decision was taken, not a day should have been lost in acting upon it. While Brusiloff's armies were rolling forward in Galicia, while the Bohemian troops of Austria were eagerly surrendering by scores of thousands, while the enormous booty in prisoners, arms and material was being collected by the astonished Russian soldiery, and before the German troops could be drawn from the north and the west to re-establish the shattered front\u2014then was the hour for Roumanian intervention. A general mobilization of the Roumanian Army, if ordered about June 10, would have enabled considerable Roumanian forces to have come into action before the end of that month and while the whole south-eastern front of the Central Powers was in complete disorder. The consequences of this must have been far-reaching and might perhaps have proved decisive.\n\nThe habit of bargaining, of waiting upon events, of trying to make hazard sure and wild adventure prudent, had become so deeply engrained in Bratiano's policy that nearly two months were wasted in negotiations. Before they would commit themselves, the Roumanian Government must have everything settled, must be promised the highest reward and guaranteed a practically complete immunity. Military conventions regulating the contingent movements of Russian troops and of the Salonica armies, and the supply of arms and munitions, not less than the political, financial and territorial issues, were laboriously and meticulously debated by telegraph with the various Allied Cabinets. The British and French Governments\u2014high in their hopes of impending victory on the Somme\u2014were suddenly eager to secure Roumanian aid at almost any price. Russia, for reasons which will presently be understood, appeared less ardent. Yet it was with Russia that all the principal military arrangements had perforce to be settled. In these discussions the rest of June and the whole of July slipped rapidly away.\n\nMeanwhile Falkenhayn was not idle. Everywhere in the east the German troops stood immovable against the Russians, and from all parts of the German lines reinforcements were scraped together and hurried to the scene of Brusiloff's incursion. By the end of June the Russian advance had slackened, and by the middle of July the Austro-German front was again continuous and more or less stabilized. The gravest apprehensions upon the attitude of Roumania were justly entertained in Vienna, Berlin and Sofia. And during June and July Austrian and Bulgarian forces were steadily and to the fullest extent possible brought into precautionary positions near the Roumanian frontiers.\n\nIt was not until August 27 that Roumania declared war on Austria-Hungary, ordered general mobilization and prepared to launch her armies into Transylvania. She had exacted the following military stipulations from the Allies: first, energetic action by the Russians against the Austrians, particularly in the Bukovina; secondly, two Russian divisions and a cavalry division to be sent on the first day of mobilization into the Dobruja; and thirdly, an offensive by the Allies from Salonica simultaneously with the Roumanian entry into the war.\n\nNot all these measures and their political counterparts put together were worth the month or six weeks of precious time that had been lost in their discussion. Prudence had become imprudence, and safety had been jeopardized by care and forethought. The Teutonic Powers had escaped from the ruin with which the Brusiloff disaster had menaced them before they were called upon to bear the assault of a new antagonist. And this assault was no longer unexpected, but foreseen and so far as their resources allowed prepared against. Nevertheless the apparition in the field of Roumania with twenty-three organized divisions and with over 1,500,000 men capable of bearing arms, and the denial of the Roumanian supplies of corn and oil, seemed both to friend and foe to constitute at this moment one of the most terrible blows which Germany and her reeling partner had yet been called upon to encounter.\n\nWhile the German and Bulgarian storm-clouds are gathering around Roumania, we must examine the situation on the Salonica front, from which Roumania had been led to expect timely and immediate succour.\n\nThe presence of the Allied Army based on Salonica was one of the determining factors in the decision of Roumania. Nearly 400,000 men of five nations\u2014French, British and Serbian, an Italian division and a Russian Brigade\u2014were now scattered along and behind the front established at the foot of the Bulgarian mountain wall. Roumania had stipulated that this army should begin a general offensive against the Bulgarians, if possible a fortnight before, and at the worst simultaneously with, her entry into the war. Both the British and French Governments had agreed to this. Accordingly on Joffre had fallen the duty of ordering General Sarrail who commanded the Allied Army to set his forces in motion not later than August 10. 'At the moment which is judged opportune the Army of the Orient will attack, with all forces united, the Allied enemy along the Greek frontier, and in case of success will pursue them in the general direction of Sofia.' This ambitious command did not correspond with the realities. The British Commander-in-Chief, General Milne, reported that an offensive against the Bulgarians would not succeed. He thought that determined troops could hold the Bulgarian position for ever. The extent of the front, the lack of adequate forces, the difficulties of co-operation between three nationalities, the doubtful quality of the Serbians on the exposed left flank, and the inadequate heavy artillery were among the adverse points on which he dwelt. Sir William Robertson recorded his opinion that the Bulgarians were fine fighters in their own country, that the Serbians had not recovered from their disaster, and that not a single British officer was in favour of the enterprise. The British Government had no confidence in General Sarrail, and friction was continuous between him and his British colleagues.\n\nThese pessimistic views were not entirely justified by the subsequent facts. The Serbians, after reorganization, training and feeding, showed themselves when the time came implacable troops. But it is remarkable that the British Cabinet, in the face of the reports submitted to them, should nevertheless have joined with the French in encouraging Roumania to count upon an effective offensive by the Salonica Army. There was indeed no means by which the Allied forces in the Balkans could prevent Bulgaria from throwing her main strength against Roumania. In the upshot it was arranged that General Milne with the British should guard Sarrail's right flank in an active defensive, while Sarrail himself was forced to reduce the general offensive ordered by Joffre to demonstrations and an enveloping attack by the Serbians. Even so he had to feed eight divisions along a single line of railway. On the whole front he could muster no more than 14 divisions against 23 Bulgarian and German divisions fortified on strong mountain lines. The date even of these limited operations was retarded until the end of September. Meanwhile the German-Bulgarians struck first, and though repulsed elsewhere reached the sea and captured a Greek Division at Kavala on September 18. In the circumstances it was remarkable that Sarrail should have succeeded to the extent of taking Monastir. On the actual front of attack the forces were almost equal; each mustered 190,000 men and 800 or 900 guns. But the achievement in no way influenced the struggle in which the fate of Roumania was decided. Had all the faults of temperament and character which are charged against General Sarrail been replaced by equally undisputed virtues, no better result could have been obtained.\n\nThe perilous position of Roumania became apparent from the moment of her declaration of war. The main portion of the Kingdom consisted of a tongue of land about three hundred miles long and a hundred wide between the wall of the Transylvanian Alps on the north and the broad Danube on the south. About the centre of this tongue lay the capital, Bucharest. Beyond the mountains gathered the Austrians and the Germans; behind the Danube the Bulgarians crouched. Four months sufficed to crack Roumania like a nut between these pincers.\n\nA word may be said about each of the Roumanian frontiers. The Danube, which here flows for a great part of its course through a deep trough in the plain and is in many places nearly a mile wide, appeared a trusty barrier. The principal passages at Sistova, Turturkai and Silistria were guarded by fortresses reckoned formidable before the advent of the heavy howitzer. As the Danube descends to its mouth, it encloses between its waters and the Black Sea the province of the Dobruja which Roumania had at the end of the second Balkan war seized without fighting from prostrate Bulgaria. An advance into the Dobruja, left hand on the Danube, right hand on the seashore, stirred every Bulgarian ambition and cut at the very root of the Roumanian tongue.\n\nThe mountain range to the north was a more effective defence than the line of the Danube. The Transylvanian Alps rise to a height of six or seven thousand feet by three tiers of forest, of grassy upland and finally of rocky but rounded summits. This rampart is pierced from north to south by four major passes\u2014sudden clefts two or three thousand feet deep and many miles in length, traversed by inferior roads of which the most westerly is the one which follows the Vulkan pass. The Transylvanian Alps turn at their eastern extremity through more than a right angle into the Carpathians, between which and the Russian frontier on the river Pruth lies Moldavia, the northern province of Roumania. Such was the theatre of the new war.\n\nRoumania mobilized on August 27 twenty-three divisions, of which ten were well trained, five less well trained, and the remainder reserve formations, aggregating over 500,000 men. The Roumanian Army was however weak in artillery and ill supplied with ammunition. Her principal arsenal had exploded mysteriously a few days before her entry into the war. She was ill equipped with field telephones, and possessed very few aeroplanes, no trench mortars and no poison gas. Her Statesmen seem at first to have cherished the hope\u2014fantastic in view of the past\u2014that Bulgaria would not declare war upon her. When this hope was dispelled on September 1, Roumania continued to trust to the intervention of General Sarrail to hold the Bulgarian strength on the Salonica front. She also hoped that the Germans would be too hard pressed to spare any substantial forces, and she relied upon definite promises of strong and prompt Russian aid. The Roumanian forces were divided into four armies, of which the Third guarded the Danube and the Dobruja, the First and Second held the passes through the Transylvanian Alps, and the Fourth, hoping later for co-operation from the Second, invaded Transylvania through the Carpathians. A central Reserve of 50,000 men guarded Bucharest.\n\nAt the outset there were in Transylvania only five tired Austrian divisions, but in the early part of September four German divisions were already approaching. Of these troops Falkenhayn was himself placed in command on September 6. Beyond the Danube and towards the Dobruja three Bulgarian divisions and a cavalry division and part of a German division from the Salonica front were assembled under the redoubtable Mackensen.\n\nAlthough the Roumanians had a large numerical superiority, it was impossible to study the war map without anxiety. Mr. Lloyd George, then Secretary of State for War, explained to me fully the situation; and after we had mutually alarmed each other in a long talk at Walton Heath, he wrote a serious though belated warning to the Prime Minister. Sarrail and the Salonica army could not be got into motion. There remained only the Russian aid, and here again fortune was perverse. The treaty which the old King of Roumania had made before the war with Austria-Hungary had led Russia to regard Roumania as a potential enemy. In consequence the south Russian railway system withered away towards the Roumanian frontier, and there was actually a gap of twenty miles between the Russian railhead at Reni and the nearest Roumanian line at Galatz. It was therefore impossible for Russia to come with any speed to the succour of her new Ally. Alexeieff and the very able Russian Staff understood the Roumanian problem far better than the impatient western Allies, and their misgivings had been apparent in the lukewarm attitude of Russia towards Roumanian intervention.\n\nJubilation at the accession of a new Ally was still resounding through the French and British Press when startling news arrived. On September 1 Mackensen invaded the Dobruja. On September 6, with the Bulgarian Army and German howitzers he smashed the Danubian fortress of Turturkai and captured 25,000 Roumanians and 100 guns. Swiftly advancing through the Dobruja, Mackensen had by the end of September come almost abreast of Constanza on the Black Sea, taking the abandoned fortress of Silistria on his way. By the third week in October he had taken Constanza. Leaving half his army to defend the conquered territory by an entrenched line from the Danube to the sea, he brought the remainder, strengthened by a Turkish division and an additional Bulgarian division, across the Danube opposite Bucharest, which he threatened at a distance of barely forty miles. This menace was not without its object. While the Bulgarian invasion of the Dobruja had been proceeding, Falkenhayn was probing the passes of the Transylvanian Alps and seeking incessantly\u2014now here, now there\u2014to force his way through. The First and Second Roumanian armies however maintained a stout resistance, while the Fourth, which had debouched from the Carpathians, continued to drive the Austrians westward. But the disaster at Turturkai, the invasion of the Dobruja, and finally Mackensen's menace to Bucharest, had already absorbed the Roumanian central reserve of 50,000 men. General Averescu, placed in command of the southern front, peremptorily demanded that the Roumanian Fourth Army should be recalled from Transylvania, that the Second and Third Armies should be reduced to the minimum compatible with holding the passes, and that the whole strength of Roumania should be thrown against the Bulgarians. This at any rate was a military plan. It was resisted with equal vehemence by General Pr\u00e9san who commanded in the north. The controversy was acute, and the debate well balanced. In the end, as would be expected a compromise was reached whereby General Pr\u00e9san continued to invade Transylvania with forces too weak to be effective; and General Averescu obtained enough troops from the armies holding the passes to endanger the defence, but not enough to overcome the Bulgarians.\n\nRoumania had now been at war for two months, and by the beginning of November five additional German divisions and two cavalry divisions had joined Falkenhayn's army. Thus powerfully reinforced, he attacked the Vulkan pass in earnest. By November 26 he had forced his way through and entered the Roumanian plain, descending the valley of the Jiu and incidentally cutting off the Roumanian forces holding the tip of the tongue near Orsova. This movement compromised in succession the defence of the other passes. By the end of November, Falkenhayn had joined hands with Mackensen from across the Danube; and on December 6, after a well-contested three-days' battle between Falkenhayn's and Mackensen's armies, together amounting to fifteen divisions, and what was left of the Roumanian forces, he entered Bucharest in triumph. The Roumanians, defending themselves stubbornly, retreated eastward towards the considerable Russian Army which had now at last arrived. Notwithstanding torrential rains and winter conditions, Falkenhayn and Mackensen followed apace. The roads ceased to exist. The troops were short of food and every necessity. Ludendorff, according to Falkenhayn, sent 'floods of telegrams, as superfluous as they were unpleasant,' but neither winter clothing nor supplies. Still the Germans persevered, and after a series of stern battles mainly against Russian forces, reached the Sereth River on January 7. Here their advance ended. The tongue of Roumania had been torn out by its roots. There remained of that unhappy Kingdom only the northern province. In this narrow region around the town of Jassy what remained of the armies which four months before had entered the war so full of hope endured for many months privation and even famine, from which not only thousands of soldiers but far larger numbers of refugees perished lamentably. Thus did Roumania share in the end the hideous miseries of all the Balkan peoples.\n\nHow unteachable, how blinded by their passions are the races of men! The Great War, bringing tribulation to so many, offered to the Christian peoples of the Balkans their supreme opportunity. Others had to toil and dare and suffer. They had only to forgive and to unite. By a single spontaneous realization of their common interests the Confederation of the Balkans would have become one of the great Powers of Europe, with Constantinople, under some international instrument, as its combined capital. A concerted armed neutrality followed by decisive intervention at the chosen moment against their common enemies, Turkey and Austria, could easily have given each individual State the major part of its legitimate ambitions, and would have given to all safety, prosperity and power. They chose instead to drink in company the corrosive cup of internecine vengeance. And the cup is not yet drained.\n\nMeanwhile on the heights of Verdun new figures destined powerfully to sway the course of events began to emerge under the blast of the cannonade. P\u00e9tain's most successful commander was a certain General Nivelle, an Artillery officer who by courage and address had won his way from a modest station to the head of an Army Corps. Nivelle's fighting arm was a certain General Mangin, of whom some brief description is required. Mangin belonged to the French Colonial Army, and had made his name in Morocco and Tunis. He had led Marchand's advanced guard to Fashoda in 1898. Engaged at the head of a brigade in the opening days of the war, he had won distinction at Dinant and Charleroi. In the widespread breaking of incompetent leaders which followed the opening defeats of the French Army, Mangin succeeded to the command of a dispirited division from whose control a discredited figure had been removed. 'After having at our head,' wrote a young Royalist who served as a clerk on the staff of this division, 'a walking ruin, we actually possess one of the best generals of the French Army.' Mangin was not to belie this reputation. Bronzed and sombre, thick black hair bristling, an aquiline profile with gleaming eyes and teeth; alive and active, furious, luxurious, privileged, acquisitive\u2014a dozen motor-cars collected from all quarters, including the enemy, in his train as a simple Colonel of Brigade\u2014reckless of all lives and of none more than his own, charging at the head of his troops, fighting rifle in hand when he could escape from his headquarters, thundering down the telephone implacable orders to his subordinates and when necessary defiance to his superiors, Mangin beaten or triumphant, Mangin the Hero or Mangin the Butcher as he was alternately regarded, became on the anvil of Verdun the fiercest warrior-figure of France.\n\nDuring the spring P\u00e9tain entrusted the direction of the most important operations to Nivelle, and Nivelle confided their execution in the main to Mangin. When in April after three months of battle P\u00e9tain was promoted from Verdun to the command of a group of armies, Nivelle, Mangin still in hand, succeeded to the direction of the struggle.\n\nOne of the earliest decisions of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff r\u00e9gime had been to arrest the Verdun offensive; and from the end of August, to the intense relief of the Crown Prince, the German armies before the fortress adopted a purely defensive attitude. The decision, wise in the disastrous circumstances, presented nevertheless a fine opportunity to the French. The long months of battle had left the German line wedge-shaped. The fort of Douaumont, in actual contact at the very tip, was at once the greatest and the nearest trophy for France. Nothing would set the seal of defeat upon the German effort at Verdun more dramatically than the recapture of Douaumont, famous all over the world. It was on this that Nivelle and Mangin set their hearts.\n\nThe preparations were long and thorough. 530 heavy pieces, including a new 16-inch Creusot battery, in addition to the ordinary artillery of the Verdun army, were concentrated upon the German salient\u2014or a gun to every fifteen yards of the front to be attacked. The three divisions which were to make the assault were brought to the highest point of strength and efficiency and trained for more than a month behind the line in the exact parts each was to play. The bombardment began in the middle of October, and fell with fury on all the German defences and organizations. The chief target was the German artillery. By the 20th nearly a third of the German batteries had been put out of action. On the 22nd, at 2 p.m., the French fire on the German front lines was suddenly lifted and the range lengthened. The stratagem was successful. Here then, thought the Germans, was the moment of assault. 158 German batteries, hitherto concealed, opened fire, betraying alike their own position and their system of defensive barrages. Of these 158 batteries only 90 remained in action when the true moment arrived.\n\nThree fine days preceded the 24th of October, but on the day itself a dense fog overspread the ground. There was a moment of discussion at the French headquarters whether the attack should be postponed. But Mangin rightly judged that the fog hampered the defence at least as much as the attack. His view prevailed. The French trench mortars, secretly massed on an unprecedented scale\u2014a new feature\u2014opened a terrific fire on the German front line crouching in the shell holes to which their trenches were reduced; and after two hours the French infantry, in the cold passion of calculation and devotion, marched upon their ancient foe. In two hours more all was over. The German wedge was bitten off, the tricolour flew again upon Fort Douaumont, and 6,000 German prisoners were in Mangin's cages. The 'cornerstone' of Verdun, as the Germans had precipitately called it, had been regained; and the name of Verdun was registered in history as one of the greatest misfortunes of the German arms.\n\nIn this brilliant local victory there lay, as will soon be seen, the seeds of a memorable disappointment.\n\n# CHAPTER IX\n\n# THE INTERVENTION OF THE UNITED STATES\n\n_Whereas the Imperial German Government have committed repeated acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States of America: Therefore be it resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled: That a state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government which has been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and that the President be, and he is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States._ \u2014Congressional Resolution of April 6, 1917.\n\nThree Stupendous Events\u2014Three Cardinal Mistakes\u2014The U-boats and the Traditions of Sea Warfare\u2014The German Logic\u2014Tirpitz's Premature U-boat Attack\u2014Its Repulse and British Counter-measures\u2014The Chancellor restrains Tirpitz\u2014The Winter Situation in Germany\u2014Two Hundred U-boats\u2014The Dire Decision\u2014'If Victory Beckons'\u2014The Fate of Russia\u2014Her Amazing Recovery\u2014Nicholas II\u2014Limitations of the German Military Outlook\u2014The Value of American Intervention\u2014The American Standpoint\u2014The Rigid Constitution\u2014President Wilson\u2014His Problems\u2014His Efforts to abstain from War\u2014Increasing Provocation\u2014The final Rupture\u2014America at War.\n\nThe beginning of 1917 was marked by three stupendous events: the German declaration of unlimited U-boat war, the intervention of the United States, and the Russian revolution. Taken together these events constitute the second great climax of the war. The order in which they were placed was decisive. If the Russian revolution had occurred in January instead of in March, or if, alternatively, the Germans had waited to declare unlimited U-boat war until the summer, there would have been no unlimited U-boat war and consequently no intervention of the United States. If the Allies had been left to face the collapse of Russia without being sustained by the intervention of the United States, it seems certain that France could not have survived the year, and the war would have ended in a Peace by negotiation or, in other words, a German victory. Had Russia lasted two months less, had Germany refrained for two months more, the whole course of events would have been revolutionized. In this sequence we discern the footprints of Destiny. Either Russian endurance or German impatience was required to secure the entry of the United States, and both were forthcoming.\n\nThe total defeat of Germany was due to three cardinal mistakes: the decision to march through Belgium regardless of bringing Britain into the war; the decision to begin the unrestricted U-boat war regardless of bringing the United States into the war; and thirdly, the decision to use the German forces liberated from Russia in 1918 for a final onslaught in France. But for the first mistake they would have beaten France and Russia easily in a year; but for the second mistake they would have been able to make a satisfactory peace in 1917; but for the third mistake they would have been able to confront the Allies with an unbreakable front on the Meuse or on the Rhine, and to have made self-respecting terms as a price for abridging the slaughter. All these three errors were committed by the same forces, and by the very forces that made the military strength of the German Empire. The German General Staff, which sustained the German cause with such wonderful power, was responsible for all these three fatal decisions. Thus nations as well as individuals come to ruin through the over-exercise of those very qualities and faculties on which their dominion has been founded.\n\nHowever long the controversy may last, there will never be any agreement between the belligerent nations on the rights or wrongs of the U-boat warfare. The Germans never understood and never will understand, the horror and indignation with which their opponents and the neutral world regarded their attack. They believed sincerely that the outcry was only hypocrisy and propaganda. The law and custom of the sea were very old. They had grown up in the course of centuries, and although frequently broken in the instance, had in the main stood the stress of many bitter conflicts between nations. To seize even an enemy merchant ship at sea was an act which imposed strict obligations on the captor. To make a neutral ship a prize of war stirred whole histories of international law. But between taking a ship and sinking a ship was a gulf. The captor of a neutral ship at sea had by long tradition been bound to bring his prize into harbour and judge her before the Prize Courts. To sink her incontinently was odious; to sink her without providing for the safety of the crew, to leave that crew to perish in open boats or drown amid the waves was in the eyes of all seafaring peoples a grisly act, which hitherto had never been practised deliberately except by pirates. Thus old seagoing nations, particularly Britain, France, Holland, Norway and the United States, saw in the U-boat war against merchant ships, and particularly neutral merchant ships, depth beyond depth of enormity. And indeed the spectacle of helpless merchant seamen, their barque shattered and foundering, left with hard intention by fellow-mariners to perish in the cruel sea, was hideous.\n\nBut the Germans were new-comers on salt water. They cared little for all these ancient traditions of seafaring folk. Death for them was the same in whatever form it came to men. It ended in a more or less painful manner their mortal span. Why was it more horrible to be choked with salt water than with poison gas, or to starve in an open boat than to rot wounded but alive in No Man's Land? The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population\u2014men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound\u2014into submission. Suppose the issues had arisen on land instead of at sea; suppose large numbers of Americans and neutrals had carried food or shell into the zone of the armies under the fire of the German artillery; suppose their convoys were known to be traversing certain roads towards the front: who would have hesitated for a moment to overwhelm them with drum-fire and blast them from the face of the earth? Who ever hesitated to fire on towns and villages because helpless and inoffensive non-combatants were gathered there? If they came within reach of the guns, they had to take their chance, and why should not this apply to the torpedoes too? Why should it be legitimate to slay a neutral or a non-combatant on land by cannon if he got in the way, and a hideous atrocity to slay the same neutral or non-combatant by torpedo on the seas? Where was the sense in drawing distinctions between the two processes? Policy might spread its web of calculation, but in logic the path was clear. Yes, we will if necessary kill everyone of every condition who comes within our power and hinders us from winning the war, and we draw no distinction between land and sea. Thus the German Naval Staff. But the neutrals took a different view.\n\nThe original driving power behind the U-boat attack on merchant ships was the rasping and energetic personality of Admiral von Tirpitz. We have already seen in Volume I the fate of his first efforts. On February 4, 1915, he had proclaimed that from February 18 onward 'every allied merchant vessel found within the waters surrounding the British Isles would be destroyed without its being always possible to avoid dangers to the crews and passengers,' and that neutral ships would also be exposed to danger in the war zone. At that time Tirpitz had at his disposal no more than twenty to twenty-five suitable submarines, of which only one-third, say seven or eight, could be on duty at a time. Having regard to the enormous traffic and numerous harbours of the British Isles as well as to our defensive measures, we considered it certain that the effects of this attack would be comparatively unimportant to the volume of our trade. I therefore announced immediately that we would publish every week the sinkings of merchant vessels effected by the German submarines, together with the number of ships entering and leaving British ports. The result fully justified our confidence, and by May, 1915, Tirpitz's failure to impede sea traffic with such puny resources was apparent to all.\n\nThe anger of neutrals and the menacing attitude of the United States which the new form of sea warfare aroused, coupled with its feeble results in practice, convinced German Emperor, Chancellor and Foreign Office after the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and _Arabic_ that Tirpitz was wrong and must be restrained. The operations of the U-boats were accordingly restricted by successive orders and hampered by vacillations of policy, and by the autumn of 1915 they died away altogether. The premature exposure with inadequate forces of this method of warfare was of immense service to Great Britain. Counter-measures of every kind and on the largest scale were from the beginning of 1915 set on foot by the Admiralty under my direction. Armed small craft were multiplied to an enormous extent, both by building and conversion, the arming of merchantmen was pressed forward, the man\u0153uvres of decoy ships\u2014the 'Q-boats,' of which more hereafter\u2014were perfected, and every scientific device, offensive and defensive, against the submarines was made the object of ceaseless experiment and production. The first U-boat attack failed grotesquely, but the counter-measures which had been launched were continued at full speed by Mr. Balfour and his Board all through 1915 and 1916. To this perseverance after the danger had apparently passed away, we owe in great measure our ultimate salvation.\n\nIn a speech which I made in the House of Commons while on leave from the front (March 7, 1916) I endeavoured to stimulate these precautions by a definite warning.\n\n'In naval war particularly, you must always be asking about the enemy\u2014what now, what next? You must always be seeking to penetrate what he will do, and your measures must always be governed and framed on the basis that he will do what you would least like him to do. My right hon. Friend (Mr. Balfour) showed that the late Board had surmounted some of the very serious and difficult dangers at the beginning of the War; but one he did not mention, the menace of the submarine attack on merchantmen, was overcome by measures taken this time last year of an extraordinary scale and complexity. But although the German submarine campaign has up to date been a great failure, and although it will probably continue to be a failure\u2014here again you cannot afford to assume that it will not present itself in new and more difficult forms, and that new exertions and new inventions will not be demanded, and you must be ready with your new devices before the enemy is ready with his, and your resourcefulness and development must continually proceed upon a scale which exceeds the maximum you expect from him. I find it necessary to utter this word of warning, which for obvious reasons I should not proceed to elaborate.'\n\nAt this very time in the spring of 1916 Tirpitz renewed his pressure upon the German Chancellor to permit the resumption of the U-boat war. He marshalled all his forces for the assault on Bethmann-Hollweg. General von Falkenhayn was won over. Admiral von Holtzendorf was enthusiastic. Tirpitz himself in his memorandum of February, 1916, wrote:\u2014\n\n'Immediate and relentless recourse to the submarine weapon is absolutely necessary. Any further delay in the introduction of unrestricted warfare will give England time for further naval and economic defensive measures and cause us greater losses in the end, and endanger quick success. The sooner the campaign be opened, the sooner will success be realized, and the more rapidly and energetically will England's hope of defeating us by a war of exhaustion be destroyed. If we defeat England, we break the backbone of the hostile coalition.'\n\nTirpitz accosted the Emperor aggressively on February 23, 1916, and demanded a decision. The Emperor, who no doubt realized that pressure was being brought to bear upon him and his Chancellor from many quarters, summoned a meeting on March 6, from which he deliberately excluded Tirpitz. As the result of this meeting, at which the Chancellor, Falkenhayn and Holtzendorf were present, it was decided to postpone the opening of unrestricted U-boat war indefinitely. Orders which had been actually issued for beginning it on April 1 were cancelled. Tirpitz immediately requested his dismissal, which was accorded to him on March 17. The conflict was however maintained by the Naval Staff, and by Admiral Scheer.\n\nThere were available for a U-boat campaign in the spring of 1916 about fifty suitable vessels as against the twenty to twenty-five of the preceding year. Thus Tirpitz could have maintained less than twenty U-boats in constant action. Having regard to the progress of the British counter-measures, there is no reason to believe that this larger number would have imposed a serious strain upon our oversea supplies. But behind the fifty U-boats in commission no less than one hundred and fifty seven were building within the German financial year 1916. When these were completed by the beginning of 1917, the issue would for the first time be of a grave character. The attack of twenty-five U-boats in February, 1915, was absurd; the attack by fifty U-boats in February, 1916, would easily have been defeated; but the attack of two hundred U-boats in February, 1917, raised possibilities of a different order. If Tirpitz, exercising almost superhuman foresight and self-control, had made no submarine attack on commerce until at least two hundred U-boats were ready, and had not provoked us to counter-preparations in the meanwhile, no one can say what the result would have been. Happily the remedy increased with the danger. The U-boat menace was taking vast and terrible dimensions, but\n\n'The young disease which shall destroy at length\n\nGrows with its growth and strengthens with its strength.'\n\nNow however we are coming to the end of 1916, and in the breathing space which winter still affords to warring nations, the German Chiefs haggardly surveyed the deadly scene. In spite of the disasters which had followed Falkenhayn's decision to attack Verdun and to neglect the Eastern Fronts, Germany had survived. She had bled the French at Verdun; she had withstood the British upon the Somme; she had repaired the breach made by Brusiloff; she had even found strength to strike down Roumania, and had emerged from the year's welter with this trophy of victory. But the sense of frightful peril, of increasing pressure, of dwindling resources, of hard pressed fronts, of blockade-pinched populations, of red sand running out in the time-glass, lay heavily upon the leaders of Germany. In the West the Allies were preparing still more formidable blows for the spring; Russian resistance was unweakened; it was even reviving on a scale almost incredible. But for the first time two hundred U-boats were at hand. Would it be possible with these to starve Britain and so, even if war with the United States resulted, 'break the backbone' of the Allies?\n\n'Had we been able,' writes Tirpitz, 'to foresee in Germany the Russian revolution, we should perhaps not have needed to regard the submarine campaign of 1917 as a last resource. But in January, 1917, there was no visible sign of the revolution.'\n\nDuring November and December the German Chancellor and the Military and Naval leaders racked the Emperor with their contentions:\u2014Whether 200 U-boats in the hand were worth 120,000,000 Americans across the Atlantic: whether Britannia rules not only the waves but the waters underneath them too. Dire issue, exceeding in intensity the turning points in the struggles of Rome and Carthage!\n\nThere is no doubt that the responsibility for the decision rests upon Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Tirpitz was gone. He even argues that the moment for ruthless U-boat war had already passed, and records a somewhat hesitating comment of 'Too late.' But Main Headquarters had long been converted to the need of using the U-boat weapon at all costs to the full. In Ludendorff they had found a Chief who shrank from nothing, and upon whose mind supreme hazards exercised an evident fascination. The old Field-Marshal shared or adopted his resolve. He threw his whole weight against the Chancellor. The Admirals chimed in with promises of swift decisive success. The Civil Powers felt the balance turning against them. Their peace overtures had been unceremoniously rejected by the Allies. The stern interchange of telegrams between Hindenburg and Bethmann-Hollweg in the last week of the year marked the end of the Chancellor's resistance. On January 9 the decisive conference _\u00e1 trois_ was held at Pless. Ludendorff has published his notes in which the following passages occur:\u2014\n\n_The Chancellor._ When His Majesty orders the intensified submarine operations the Chancellor will endeavour to secure that America will still remain 'out.' Certain concessions\u2014which have been previously discussed with the Naval Staff\u2014must be made. We must, however, reckon on the entry of America into the war.... The decision to embark on the unrestricted U-boat campaign is therefore dependent upon the results we expect from it. Admiral von Holtzendorf offers us the prospect that we shall have England at our mercy by the next harvest. The experiences of the U-boats in recent months, the increased number of boats, the bad economic situation of England, certainly form a reinforcement for luck. Taking it all round the prospects of the unrestricted submarine campaign are very favourable. Of course those favourable prospects are not capable of proof. We must be quite clear that, judging by the military situation, great military blows are scarcely likely to bring us final victory. The U-boat campaign is the 'last card.' A very serious decision! _But if the military authorities regard the U-boat campaign as necessary I am not in a position to oppose them._\n\n_The Field-Marshal._ We are in a position to meet all eventualities, against America, Denmark, Holland and even Switzerland.\n\nThe submarine operations in cruiser form have hitherto brought us only a slightly greater measure of success. We need the most energetic and ruthless action possible. Therefore the U-boat war must begin not later than February 1, 1917. The war must be brought to a speedy end on account of our Allies, though _we_ could continue for some time longer.\n\n_The Chancellor._ It is to be remembered that the U-boat war may mean postponing the end of the war.\n\n_General Ludendorff._ The U-boat war will improve the situation even of our armies. The ammunition supply will suffer from the shortage of timber and coal. That means a relief for the troops on the Western Front. We must spare the troops a second Somme battle. Our own experience, the effect of the transport crisis, show that that relief is certain. Moreover, Russia's offensive capacity will be diminished by the shortage of ammunition due to the lack of tonnage. The Siberian Railway will not be enough for Russia by itself.\n\n_The Chancellor._ On America's eventual entry into the war, her help will consist in the delivery of food to England, financial assistance, the supply of aeroplanes and a force of volunteers.\n\n_The Field-Marshal._ We are already prepared to deal with that. The chances of the submarine operations are more favourable than they are ever likely to be again. We can and must begin them.\n\n_The Chancellor. Yes, we must act if victory beckons._\n\n_The Field-Marshal._ We shall be reproached later on if we let the moment slip.\n\n_The Chancellor._ The position is certainly better than last September.\n\n_General Ludendorff._ The measures we shall take against neutrals are in no way provocative. They are purely defensive.\n\n_The Chancellor._ And suppose Switzerland came into the war or the French marched through that country.\n\n_The Field-Marshal._ That would not be unfavourable, from the military point of view.\n\nOf the meeting at which the Emperor was present later on the same day, the Chancellor has himself left an account.\n\n'Early in January (1917) I was summoned to G.H.Q. When I arrived in Pless on the morning of the 9th, the decision had _de facto_ already been made. The Supreme Command and the Admiral Staff were determined on their part to have U-boat warfare. The Kaiser ranged himself on their side. Compared with the Spring and Summer of 1916, when I had prevented U-boat warfare, the situation had completely altered. Then my opinion had prevailed, because the authority of General von Falkenhayn, in view of the obviously insufficient number of U-boats, had not been great enough to impose a measure which, although it was popular in the circles influenced by the Conservatives, National Liberals and the Navy, was still regarded with scepticism by the majority of the Reichstag....\n\n'With all these considerations in my head, I went to the common audience with the Kaiser on the evening of the 9th January. There right away I found the general atmosphere just as laden as in a conference I had had alone with the Supreme Command at midday. I had the feeling that I had before me men who no longer had any inclination to be diverted by persuasion from their already settled decisions. Admiral Staff and O.H.L. put forward their demands. I declared that I could not throw doubt on the military opinion that the war could not be brought to a successful end by action on land alone. Certain success of the U-boat war, in my opinion, could be just as little proved as certain failure. If success was denied then the worst of all ends stood before us. I must appreciate American help higher than the O.H.L. put it. After the reply of the Entente to our Peace offer I could not for the moment indicate any prospect of peace negotiations. In view of the condition of affairs and of the declaration of Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, made with the full weight of responsibility, that our military situation permitted us to take the risk of the certain imminent breach with America, I was not in a position to advise H.M. to oppose himself to the vote of his military counsellors. The decision was then made. In about half an hour the audience with the Kaiser, which was no longer a council, came to an end. _Next day O.H.L. advised the Kaiser to change his Chancellor at once_.'\n\nHis capitulation had availed him nothing. It would have been better before history to have gone down with flag flying. No one can doubt what his convictions were, and we now know that they were right. Events forthwith began their new course.\n\nSurely to no nation has Fate been more malignant than to Russia. Her ship went down in sight of port. She had actually weathered the storm when all was cast away. Every sacrifice had been made; the toil was achieved. Despair and Treachery usurped command at the very moment when the task was done.\n\nThe long retreats were ended; the munition famine was broken; arms were pouring in; stronger, larger, better equipped armies guarded the immense front; the dep\u00f4ts overflowed with sturdy men. Alexeieff directed the Army and Koltchak the Fleet. Moreover, no difficult action was now required: to remain in presence: to lean with heavy weight upon the far-stretched Teutonic line: to hold without exceptional activity the weakened hostile forces on her front: in a word, to endure\u2014that was all that stood between Russia and the fruits of general victory. Says Ludendorff, surveying the scene at the close of 1916:\n\n'Russia, in particular, produced very strong new formations, divisions were reduced to twelve battalions, the batteries to six guns; new divisions were formed out of the surplus fourth battalions and the seventh and eighth guns of each battery. This reorganization made a great increase of strength.'\n\nIt meant in fact that the Russian Empire marshalled for the campaign of 1917 a far larger and better equipped army than that with which she had started the war. In March the Czar was on his throne; the Russian Empire and people stood, the front was safe, and victory certain.\n\nIt is the shallow fashion of these times to dismiss the Czarist r\u00e9gime as a purblind, corrupt, incompetent tyranny. But a survey of its thirty months' war with Germany and Austria should correct these loose impressions and expose the dominant facts. We may measure the strength of the Russian Empire by the battering it had endured, by the disasters it had survived, by the inexhaustible forces it had developed, and by the recovery it had made. In the Government of States, when great events are afoot, the leader of the nation, whoever he be, is held accountable for failure and vindicated by success. No matter who wrought the toil, who planned the struggle, to the supreme responsible authority belongs the blame or credit for the result.\n\nWhy should this stern test be denied to Nicholas II? He had made many mistakes, what ruler had not? He was neither a great captain nor a great prince. He was only a true, simple man of average ability, of merciful disposition, upheld in all his daily life by his faith in God. But the brunt of supreme decisions centred upon him. At the summit where all problems are reduced to Yea or Nay, where events transcend the faculties of men and where all is inscrutable, he had to give the answers. His was the function of the compass-needle. War or no war? Advance or retreat? Right or left? Democratize or hold firm? Quit or persevere? These were the battlefields of Nicholas II. Why should he reap no honour from them? The devoted onset of the Russian armies which saved Paris in 1914; the mastered agony of the munition-less retreat; the slowly regathered forces; the victories of Brusiloff; the Russian entry upon the campaign of 1917, unconquered, stronger than ever; has he no share in these? In spite of errors vast and terrible, the r\u00e9gime he personified, over which he presided, to which his personal character gave the vital spark, had at this moment won the war for Russia.\n\nHe is about to be struck down. A dark hand, gloved at first in folly, now intervenes. Exit Czar. Deliver him and all he loved to wounds and death. Belittle his efforts, asperse his conduct, insult his memory; but pause then to tell us who else was found capable. Who or what could guide the Russian State? Men gifted and daring; men ambitious and fierce; spirits audacious and commanding\u2014of these there was no lack. But none could answer the few plain questions on which the life and fame of Russia turned. With victory in her grasp she fell upon the earth, devoured alive, like Herod of old, by worms. But not in vain her valiant deeds. The giant mortally stricken had just time, with dying strength, to pass the torch eastward across the ocean to a new Titan long sunk in doubt who now arose and began ponderously to arm. The Russian Empire fell on March 16; on April 6 the United States entered the war.\n\nOf all the grand miscalculations of the German High Command none is more remarkable than their inability to comprehend the meaning of war with the American Union. It is perhaps the crowning example of the unwisdom of basing a war policy upon the computation of material factors alone. The war effort of 120,000,000 educated people equipped with science, and possessed of the resources of an unattackable Continent, nay, of a New World, could not be measured by the number of drilled soldiers, of trained officers, of forged cannon, of ships of war they happened to have at their disposal. It betokens ignorance of the elemental forces resident in such a community to suppose they could be permanently frustrated by a mechanical instrument called the U-boat. How rash to balance the hostile exertions of the largest, if not the leading, civilized nation in the world against the chance that they would not arrive in time upon the field of battle! How hard to condemn the war-worn, wearied, already outnumbered heroic German people to mortal conflict with this fresh, mighty, and once aroused, implacable antagonist!\n\nThere is no need to exaggerate the material assistance given by the United States to the Allies. All that could be sent was given as fast and as freely as possible, whether in manhood, in ships or in money. But the war ended long before the material power of the United States could be brought to bear as a decisive or even as a principal factor. It ended with over 2,000,000 American soldiers on the soil of France. A campaign in 1919 would have seen very large American armies continually engaged, and these by 1920 might well have amounted to 5,000,000 of men. Compared to potentialities of this kind, what would have been the value of, let us say, the capture of Paris? As for the 200 U-boats, the mechanical hope, there was still the British Navy, which at this period, under the \u00e6gis of an overwhelming Battle Fleet, maintained upwards of 3,000 armed vessels on the seas.\n\nBut if the physical power of the United States was not in fact applied in any serious degree to the beating down of Germany; if for instance only a few score thousand Germans fell by American hands; the moral consequence of the United States joining the Allies was indeed the deciding cause in the conflict.\n\nThe war had lasted nearly three years; all the original combatants were at extreme tension; on both sides the dangers of the front were matched by other dangers far behind the throbbing lines of contact. Russia has succumbed to these new dangers; Austria is breaking up; Turkey and Bulgaria are wearing thin; Germany herself is forced even in full battle to concede far-reaching Constitutional rights and franchise to her people; France is desperate; Italy is about to pass within an ace of destruction; and even in stolid Britain there is a different light in the eyes of men. Suddenly a nation of one hundred and twenty millions unfurls her standard on what is already the stronger side; suddenly the most numerous democracy in the world, long posing as a judge, is hurled, nay, hurls itself into the conflict. The loss of Russia was forgotten in this new reinforcement. Defeatist movements were strangled on the one side and on the other inflamed. Far and wide through every warring nation spread these two opposite impressions\u2014'The whole world is against us'\u2014'The whole world is on our side.'\n\nAmerican historians will perhaps be somewhat lengthy in explaining to posterity exactly why the United States entered the Great War on April 6, 1917, and why they did not enter at any earlier moment. American ships had been sunk before by German submarines; as many American lives were lost in the _Lusitania_ as in all the five American ships whose sinking immediately preceded the declaration of war. As for the general cause of the Allies, if it was good in 1917 was it not equally good in 1914? There were plenty of reasons of high policy for staying out in 1917 after waiting so long.\n\nIt was natural that the Allies, burning with indignation against Germany, breathless and bleeding in the struggle, face to face with mortal dangers, should stand amazed at the cool, critical, detached attitude of the great Power across the Atlantic. In England particularly, where laws and language seemed to make a bridge of mutual comprehension between the two nations, the American abstention was hard to understand. But this was to do less than justice to important factors in the case. The United States did not feel in any immediate danger. Time and distance interposed their minimizing perspectives. The mass of the people engaged in peaceful industry, grappling with the undeveloped resources of the continent which was their inheritance, absorbed in domestic life and politics, taught by long constitutional tradition to shun foreign entanglements, had an entirely different field of mental interest from that of Europe. World Justice makes its appeal to all men. But what share, it was asked, had Americans taken in bringing about the situation which had raised the issue of World Justice? Was even this issue so simple as it appeared to the Allies? Was it not a frightful responsibility to launch a vast, unarmed, remote community into the raging centre of such a quarrel? That all this was overcome is the real wonder. All honour to those who never doubted, and who from the first discerned the inevitable path.\n\nThe rigid Constitution of the United States, the gigantic scale and strength of its party machinery, the fixed terms for which public officers and representatives are chosen, invest the President with a greater measure of autocratic power than was possessed before the war by the Head of any great State. The vast size of the country, the diverse types, interests and environments of its enormous population, the safety-valve function of the legislatures of fifty Sovereign States, make the focusing of national public opinion difficult, and confer upon the Federal Government exceptional independence of it except at fixed election times. Few modern Governments need to concern themselves so little with the opinion of the party they have beaten at the polls; none secures to its supreme executive officer, at once the Sovereign and the Party Leader, such direct personal authority.\n\nThe accident of hereditary succession which bring a King or Emperor to the throne occurs on the average at intervals of a quarter of a century. During this long period, as well as in his whole life before accession, the qualities and disposition of the monarch can be studied by his subjects, and during this period parties and classes are often able to devise and create checks and counter-checks upon personal action. In limited monarchies where the responsibilities of power are borne by the Prime Minister, the choice of the nation usually falls upon Statesmen who have lived their lives in the public eye, who are moreover members of the Legislature and continuously accountable to it for their tenure. But the magnitude and the character of the electoral processes of the United States make it increasingly difficult, if not indeed already impossible, for any life-long politician to become a successful candidate for the Presidency. The choice of the party managers tends more and more to fall upon eminent citizens of high personal character and civic virtue who have not mingled profoundly in politics or administration, and who in consequence are free from the animosities and the errors which such combative and anxious experiences involve. More often than not the champion selected for the enthusiasms and ideals of tens of millions is unversed in State affairs, and raised suddenly to dazzling pre-eminence on the spur of the moment. The war-stained veterans of the party battle select, after many fierce internal convulsions, a blameless and honourable figure to bear aloft the party standard. They manufacture his programme and his policy, and if successful in the battle install him for four years at the summit of the State, clothed thenceforward with direct executive functions which in practical importance are not surpassed on the globe.\n\nLike all brief generalizations upon great matters, the foregoing paragraph is subject to numerous and noteworthy exceptions. But President Wilson was not one of them. In all his strength and in all his weakness, in his nobility and in his foibles, he was, in spite of his long academic record and brief governorship, an unknown, an unmeasured quantity to the mighty people who made him their ruler in 1912. Still more was he a mystery to the world at large. Writing with every sense of respect, it seems no exaggeration to pronounce that the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, upon the workings of this man's mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor; and that he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.\n\nIt is in this light that the Memoirs of Colonel House acquire their peculiar interest. In these pages we see a revelation of the President. Dwelling in the bosom of his domestic circle with the simplicity and frugality of Nicholas II, inaccessible except to friends and servitors\u2014and very sparingly to them\u2014towering above Congress, the Cabinet his mere implement, untempered and undinted in the smithy of public life, and guided by that 'frequent recurrence to first principles' enjoined in the American Constitution, Woodrow Wilson, the inscrutable and undecided judge upon whose lips the lives of millions hung, stands forth a monument for human meditation.\n\nFirst and foremost, all through and last, he was a Party man. His dominating loyalty was to the great political association which had raised him to the Presidency, and on whose continued prosperity he was sincerely convinced the best interests of mankind depended. We see him in the height of the American war effort, when all that the Union could give without distinction of class or party was lavished upon the Government of the day, using his natural position without scruple or apparent self-examination to procure the return to Congress of only those representatives whose names were on the Democratic ticket. Under his r\u00e9gime there were none of those temporary sacrifices of party rancour which were forced on European countries by their perils. The whole power and prestige of the American nation at war was politically impounded so far as possible by the office holders of the day and the party machine. This bred a hatred among political opponents whose sons were fighting, whose money was poured out, whose patriotism was ardent, which as soon as the fighting stopped, proved fatal to President Wilson and his hopes. Next he was a good American, an academic Liberal, and a sincere hater of war and violence. Upon these easily harmonized impulsions there had fallen in intense interplay such of the stresses of the European war as rolled across the Atlantic, and all the internal pressures of American policy. He was confronted with four separate successive questions which searched his nature to its depths. How to keep the United States out of the war? How to win the Presidential election of 1916? How to help the Allies to win the war? and lastly, How to rule the world at its close?\n\nHe would have been greatly helped in his task if he had reached a definite conclusion where in the European struggle Right lay. Events like the German march through Belgium, or the sinking of the _Lusitania_ , had a meaning which was apparent to friend and foe. They both proclaimed the intention to use force without any limit of forbearance to an absolute conclusion. Such a prospect directly affected the interests and indeed the safety of the United States. The victory of Germany and the concomitant disappearance of France and the British Empire as great Powers must, after an uncertain interval, have left the peaceful and unarmed population of the United States nakedly exposed to the triumph of the doctrine of Force without limit. The Teutonic Empires in the years following their victory would have been far stronger by land and sea than the United States. They could easily have placed themselves in a more favourable relationship to Japan than was open to the United States. In such a situation their views upon the destinies of South America could not have been effectively resisted. Immense developments of armed force would in any case have been required in the United States, and sooner or later a new conflict must have arisen in which the United States would have found herself alone.\n\nPresident Wilson did not however during the first two and a half years of the war allow his mind to dwell upon the German use of force without restraint, and still less upon the ultimate consequences of its success. He did not therefore feel that American interests were involved from the outset in the European struggle. He distrusted and repressed those sentiments of indignation which the scenes in Belgium or the sinking of the _Lusitania_ aroused in his breast. He did not truly divine the instinct of the American people. He underestimated the volume and undervalued the quality of the American feeling in favour of the Allies. Not until he was actually delivering his famous war message to Congress did he understand where, in the vast medley of American opinion, the dominant will-power of the nation lay and had always lain. Not until then did he move forward with confidence and conviction; not until then did he restate the cause of the Allies in terms unsurpassed by any of their own statesmen; not until then did he reveal to the American people where in his judgment world-right was founded, and how their own lives and material interests were at stake.\n\nThe desperate action of the German War-Leaders left him in the end no loophole of escape. On January 31, Germany informed the United States of her intention to begin the unrestricted submarine campaign. On February 3, the German Ambassador at Washington was given his passports, the United States representative at Berlin was recalled, and the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany was announced by the President to Congress. But Mr. Wilson had still another line of defence. He declined to believe that any 'overt act' would follow the declaration of the German intention. On February 26 the virtual arrest of United States shipping through fear of German attack forced him to ask Congressional authority to arm American merchant ships. On February 26, an American ship was sunk and eight Americans drowned. Meanwhile the British Intelligence Service had ascertained that Herr Zimmermann, the German Foreign Secretary, had instructed the German Minister in Mexico to make an alliance with Mexico in the event of war between Germany and the United States, and to offer as an inducement to the Mexicans the United States territories of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. This document, which dealt also with the possibilities of ranging Japan against the United States, was published by the American Government on March 1. During March four American vessels were sunk with the loss of twelve American lives. On April 1, the _Aztec_ was sunk and twenty-eight Americans drowned. On the 2nd, President Wilson demanded from Congress a declaration that a state of war existed between the United States and Germany.\n\nStep by step the President had been pursued and brought to bay. By slow merciless degrees, against his dearest hopes, against his gravest doubts, against his deepest inclinations, in stultification of all he had said and done and left undone in thirty months of carnage, he was forced to give the signal he dreaded and abhorred. Throughout he had been beneath the true dominant note of American sentiment. He had behind his policy a reasoned explanation and massive argument, and all must respect the motives of a statesman who seeks to spare his country the waste and horrors of war. But nothing can reconcile what he said after March, 1917, with the guidance he had given before. What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then what abridgement of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied to-day; how different would be the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!\n\nBut anyhow all was settled now. 'A drunken brawl,' 'Peace without victory,' where were these festering phrases on April 2? Amid the clink and clatter of a cavalry escort the President has reached the Senate. He is reading his message to Congress and to mankind. Out roll the famous periods in which the righteousness of the Allied cause was finally proclaimed.\n\n'Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe-conduct through the proscribed areas by the German Government itself, and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.... The peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.... The world must be made safe for Democracy.... The right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts\u2014for Democracy, for the rights of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.'\n\nIn response to all of this the House of Representatives on April 6 resolved that a state of war was formally declared, and that 'to bring the conflict to a successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.'\n\nFrom the Atlantic to the Pacific the call was answered and obeyed. Iron laws of compulsory service, reinforced by social pressures of mutual discipline in which the great majority of the population took part, asserted an instantaneous unity of opinion. No one stood against the torrent. Pacifism, indifference, dissent, were swept from the path and fiercely pursued to extermination; and with a roar of slowly gathered, pent-up wrath which overpowered in its din every discordant yell, the American nation sprang to arms.\n\n# CHAPTER X\n\n# A POLITICAL INTERLUDE\n\nThe Coalition Government in 1915\u2014The Conscription Issue\u2014The War Policy Committee's Report\u2014Mr. Asquith and Lord Kitchener\u2014Temporizing in Peace and War\u2014The Conscription Crises of January and April, 1916\u2014Lord Northcliffe and the Press\u2014The Balance destroyed\u2014Politicians v. Generals\u2014Lord Northcliffe's undue power\u2014Mr. Asquith's imprudent disdain\u2014The rejected remedy\u2014Discontent of the Conservative Party\u2014Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson\u2014A crucial Division\u2014The potential Triumvirate\u2014Lloyd George challenges Asquith\u2014Lloyd George Prime Minister\u2014My Exclusion\u2014The Secret Session\u2014My Survey of the War\u2014Deepening Peril\u2014Lloyd George undaunted\u2014His qualities, energy and resolution.\n\nIt is now necessary to return to those domains of British politics which we quitted after the formation of the Coalition Government at the end of May, 1915. It was then observed that the new Cabinet, although composed of a large number of eminent and upright men, was a cumbrous and unsatisfactory instrument for the waging of a great war. From the outset certain remarkable cleavages and personal currents were apparent. These cleavages and currents did not follow regular Party lines, but responded rather to the shades of temperament and opinion found in every Party. There was the old Liberal school gathered round the Prime Minister, which was reluctant to proceed to drastic domestic measures for the conduct of the war. They were not without their affinities among the Conservatives. This school was deeply impressed with the financial difficulties arising out of the enormous payments we were forced to make to the United States to equip ourselves and our Allies on the greatest scale. They were averse from proceeding to extremes in the industrial sphere in order to procure the greatest output of munitions. Above all, they were opposed to the principle of compulsory service to maintain the armies in the field. It was upon this issue that the main division of opinion and feeling crystallized.\n\nOf course, the counsel of perfection at the outbreak of a life-and-death struggle would have been for Parliament to decree Universal service. In this way the terrible burdens of war could have been justly apportioned throughout the whole nation, and the needs of the fighting services whether in men or material scientifically regulated from month to month. It would not have been necessary to keep hundreds of thousands of volunteers training with the Colours long before there was a rifle to put in their hands, for fear that at a later date their offer to serve might no longer be forthcoming. But these logical and symmetrical conceptions were not in harmony with the British habit of mind. The psychological moment of the first awful plunge into war was allowed to pass, and in a few weeks we reached a period in which compulsory military service was obviously unnecessary. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers overwhelmed the recruiting offices to fill the army and such military organizations as could be improvised beyond it. Before the first three months of the war were over, it was clear that whatever else Britain might lack, it was not citizens ready to fight in her defence. Indeed, the danger was lest too many should quit the vital industries of the nation for the firing line.\n\nThis condition continued until the middle of 1915, but in June and July of that year another phase supervened. The failure of Russia made it certain that the war would last for years. The delivery of rifles, equipment and munitions, and the advance in the training of the Kitchener armies, made possible a large and rapid increase of the British forces actually in the field. The wastage of men grew larger every day. Thirty-five British divisions were already serving on the various fronts, and as many more were steadily approaching readiness at home. Sending a division to the front was like lighting a new lamp which burned away its oil at a remorseless rate; it was like opening a new tap in a cistern. Soon there would be at least seventy such taps drawing unceasingly upon the accumulated store of voluntary effort. Over 3,000,000 men had already come forward freely. They represented all that was best and strongest in the patriotism of the British nation. By the summer of 1915 the outflow was already greater than the intake. The Cabinet Committee on War Policy which sat during June and July saw plainly that armies of seventy divisions, still less of one hundred divisions, could not be maintained in the field during 1916 without entirely new measures. The strict Liberal school, headed by the Prime Minister, favoured a further effort at voluntary recruiting. Most of the Conservative Ministers, supported by Mr. Lloyd George and myself, were convinced that immediate compulsion was unavoidable. It was in this sense that I drew up a report to the Cabinet in July, 1915, which was signed by Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Curzon, Lord Selborne and others. This report had concluded as follows:\n\n'We cannot afford, as in Germany or France, to sweep into the army the great mass of the military manhood of the country. Neither can we afford to take men indiscriminately for military service as they present themselves, without regard to their individual services or their usefulness in other spheres. With us the problem is more complex; the quality of the effort must be higher and more varied; the need for control and organization even more vital. Of all the belligerent nations we are the one which can least afford to take a married man of 40 while a bachelor of 25 is idle. It is not wise to take a skilled munition worker for the front while a private domestic remains at home. We ought not to let one district be depleted through its patriotism of the indispensable minimum of agricultural or unskilled labour, while in another the recruiters have made practically no headway. We cannot close whole industries to recruiting even the most suitable men, while in others we sweep every man, even up to the oldest father of a family, into the line of battle. We cannot afford to fill our marching battalions with an undue proportion of men past their prime. We cannot afford to let a military male needed for the army do work which could be done by a woman, a boy, or an older man. Greater efforts in national organization are required to remedy these defects, and thus ensure in all its various forms the maximum development of war energy among our people.'\n\nLord Kitchener, however, did not support these views. He was rightly proud of the wonderful response which had attended his successive appeals for volunteers. He indulged himself in the belief that his countrymen would give him personally whatever numbers he thought right to demand. He therefore leaned to the side of Mr. Asquith, and turned the balance against the adoption of compulsory service at this time. In September, after the losses of Loos had shown what the strain of 1916 would be, the tension between the two groups in the Cabinet became very acute. So grave indeed did it become that a thorough discussion in full Cabinet would have broken up the Government. Therefore, as sometimes happens, the topic which filled all minds became unmentionable in Council, and many weeks slipped away in deadlock. At last in the middle of October a gathering of nine Ministers, including Mr. Lloyd George and myself, met at Lord Curzon's house and resolved at all costs to bring the question to a head. Confronted with the crisis, the daily aggravation of which was apparent, Lord Kitchener and the Prime Minister together produced a new and far-reaching scheme for what was avowedly the final effort of voluntary enlistment. Lord Derby was brought forward to head this movement, and the scheme was presented to the Cabinet as a decision already taken. By this means the Cabinet crisis, with the long series of resignations threatened on both sides, was for the time being staved off.\n\nThere is an extraordinary contrast between the processes of thought and methods of management required in War and those which serve in Peace. Much is gained in Peace by ignoring or putting off disagreeable or awkward questions, and avoiding clear-cut decisions which if they please some, offend others. It is often better in Peace to persist for a time patiently in an obscure and indeterminate course of action rather than break up or dangerously strain a political combination. Under a popular and democratic form of government, where enormous numbers of people have a right to be consulted, and all sorts of personalities, forces and interests have their legitimate interplay upon the course of public affairs, compromise is very often not merely necessary but actually beneficial. The object in time of Peace is often to keep the Nation undisturbed by violent passions, and able to move forward in a steady progress through the free working of its native energies and virtues. Many an apparently insoluble political problem solves itself or sinks to an altogether lower range if time, patience and phlegm are used. British politicians and Parliamentarians, particularly those called upon to lead great parties, are masters in all these arts, and if after four or five years of power they have succeeded, without provoking crises in the State or divisions among their supporters, in achieving large national objects and enabling public opinion to carry in its own way and its own time important social or political reforms, they justly deserve their place in history.\n\nIn War everything is different. There is no place for compromise in War. That invaluable process only means that soldiers are shot because their leaders in Council and camp are unable to resolve. In War the clouds never blow over, they gather unceasingly and fall in thunderbolts. Things do not get better by being let alone. Unless they are adjusted, they explode with shattering detonation. Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decisions one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre. To humour a distinguished man, to avoid a fierce dispute, nay, even to preserve the governing instrument itself, cannot, except as an alternative to sheer anarchy, be held to justify half-measures. The peace of the Council may for the moment be won, but the price is paid on the battlefield by brave men marching forward against unspeakable terrors in the belief that conviction and coherence have animated their orders.\n\nIt was evident that the Derby scheme could only be a palliative. Although the response was considerable, the maintenance of the armies even on a seventy-division basis through 1916 and 1917, which must also be contemplated, was in no way provided for. Early in January, under the imperious force of events, the Cabinet crisis renewed itself with violent intensity. And now the grim necessity of facts was reinforced by a movement of a moral character exciting the passions of enormous masses of people. Three and a half million men had volunteered. They were not enough. Were they in virtue of their voluntary engagement to be sent back to the front no matter how often they were wounded? Were elderly, weakly, shattered volunteers to be pressed into the conflict while hundreds of thousands of sturdy youths lived as far as possible their ordinary life? Were the citizens of the Territorial Force or soldiers of the Regular Army whose engagements had expired to be compelled to continue, while others who had made no sacrifice were not even to be compelled to begin? From three and a half million families whose beloved breadwinner, whose hero, was giving all freely to the country's cause\u2014families representing the strongest elements on which the life of the nation depended\u2014arose the demand that victory should not be delayed and slaughter prolonged because others refused to do their duty. At last, at the end of January, Lord Kitchener changed sides and Mr. Asquith gave way. In the end only one Minister, Sir John Simon, resigned from the administration. A Conscription Bill was presented to Parliament and swiftly passed by overwhelming majorities.\n\nThe new Act was, however, as might be expected from the internal struggle which had produced it, an unsatisfying compromise. It neither secured the numbers of men that would be needed, nor did it meet the now fierce demand for equalization of sacrifice. In April a new crisis upon the extension of compulsion developed in the Cabinet. The previous struggle had left its marks on both sides, and differences of temperament of a profound character had been revealed between colleagues to all of whom the national cause was equally dear. This time it seemed certain that Mr. Lloyd George would resign and the Cabinet be broken up, and plans were elaborated to form a strong Opposition pledged to the enforcement of extreme war measures.\n\nIt was suggested that the Leaders of such an opposition in the House of Commons should be Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Edward Carson, and I was urged from many quarters to take my place at their side. The Scottish battalion I had been commanding for some months in Flanders having been disbanded through the lack of men, I was accorded leave to return to the Parliamentary sphere. In May, Parliament appointed by Statute two Committees of Inquiry into the operations in Mesopotamia and at the Dardanelles, and I found myself immediately involved for nearly a year in a continued and harassing defence of my own responsibilities as set forth on earlier pages of this account. It is from the standpoint of a private member not without information upon secret matters that I record the events of the next twelve months.\n\nThe career of the British newspaper Press in the Great War is a definite part of history. No account which excluded its influence would be true. The fortunes of the Press were also a romance centring round the extraordinary personality of Lord Northcliffe, and no story could present more vivid contrasts of strength and weakness. Never was Press control in any country so effective as in Great Britain during the first six months of the war. To a rigorous Government censorship was added an even more effective internal restraint exerted by the public spirit of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association. Criticism was mute and facts were selected and presented only in a spirit of confidence and hope.\n\nThe first idea of the military authorities was that the Press had ceased to exist with the declaration of war. Not a single Correspondent was permitted with the Fleet or in the zone of the Armies, and the anxious public was expected to be satisfied with the cryptic and jejune communiqu\u00e9s accorded them from time to time by General Headquarters. These conventions were soon shaken by defeat. The zone of the Armies became ragged at the edges. Facts and stragglers streamed backwards preceded and attended by clouds of rumour. Wounded arrived by the thousand from the front. The demand for knowledge of the events which were in progress became insistent. In view of Lord Kitchener's well-known dislike of newspaper Correspondents, I had suggested to him in September, 1914, the institution of an official 'eye-witness' at General Headquarters. The eye-witness plied his skilful pen; but it might have been Mrs. Partington's broom against the flood of truth and rumour which rolled continuously back across the Channel. In the beginning of 1915 a few selected Correspondents were as a great concession allowed with the Army. Meanwhile the nature of the struggle and the inevitable mistakes, misfortunes and losses which scarred its path, affected the position of every leading and responsible actor\u2014military, naval or political. The credit of Governments and Staffs, of Admiralty, War Office and Headquarters, tottered under the rude, violence of the Teutonic attack. Ministers and Commanders, and not less those who aspired to fill their places, became conscious of an enormous latent power capable alike of enforcing action, of deflecting policy, of explaining disaster and of proclaiming success. And behind all lay the nation through whose united strength the war could alone be waged, ready to give all, but demanding knowledge and guidance. Thus after a brief but total eclipse, the sun of newspaper power began in the spring of 1915 to glow with unprecedented and ever-increasing heat.\n\nIn the old Party days when the whole British Press was regimented on one side or the other, its function was healthy and its power modest. Each great Party had its organs, not only in the Metropolis but in every city and town throughout the land. Liberal or Conservative politicians stood on firm ground. To be praised by Press supporters was almost as useful as to be abused by Press opponents. For every act of Government there were a thousand journalistic critics and another thousand champions. But critics and champions alike preached mainly to the converted, and gave to faithful Party followers the music they wished to hear. Blare and counter-blare cancelled each other, and policy could pursue its path with composure.\n\nThe national unity which sprang from the war destroyed this equilibrium. All were on one side and the enemy on the other. The whole force of the Press could be thrown against any Government, Minister or policy smitten by fortune. Errors, failures, shortcomings, inevitable when puny men were confronted with the giant torrent of events, found no defenders. The governing instrument was loaded at once with the extremes of support and opposition; and although almost unswerving loyalty to the national cause and universal desire to escape from mortal peril compelled a general restraint, the position of every leading figure became precarious in the highest degree.\n\nMoreover, the truth could not be told; the case could not be argued. The Press, though its information flowed in through a thousand rills, possessed only a partial knowledge of the facts and operative causes as these were known to the Governments; and these Governments themselves only imperfectly apprehended the stupendous problem which they were attempting to solve. Half our mistakes and many of our misfortunes could have been avoided if the great issues of war policy and strategy could have been fought out across the floor of the House of Commons in the full light of day. But this was impossible while the Enemy was the auditor of every discussion and the student of every published report or article. Debate followed by division, that last security of every Minister or Government, was precluded. Arguments were used which could not be refuted, though refutation was easy. Charges were made of which the disproof could not in the national interest be adduced; and the physical carnage of the trenches was accompanied by an odious confusion at home.\n\nA series of absurd conventions became established, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The General no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the Admiral upon how to fight his ships, though even in this restricted field the limitations of their scientific knowledge when confronted with unforeseen conditions and undreamed-of scales became immediately apparent. But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the Statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required. The foolish doctrine was preached to the public through innumerable agencies that Generals and Admirals must be right on war matters, and civilians of all kinds must be wrong. These erroneous conceptions were inculcated billion-fold by the newspapers under the crudest forms. The feeble or presumptuous politician is portrayed cowering in his office, intent in the crash of the world on Party intrigues or personal glorification, fearful of responsibility, incapable of aught save shallow phrase-making. To him enters the calm, noble, resolute figure of the great Commander by land or sea, resplendent in uniform, glittering with decorations, irradiated with the lustre of the hero, shod with the science and armed with the panoply of war. This stately figure, devoid of the slightest thought of self, offers his clear far-sighted guidance and counsel for vehement action or artifice or wise delay. But his advice is rejected; his sound plans put aside; his courageous initiative baffled by political chatterboxes and incompetents. As well, it was suggested, might a great surgeon, about to operate with sure science and the study of a lifetime upon a desperate case, have his arm jogged or his hand impeded, or even his lancet snatched from him, by some agitated relation of the patient. Such was the picture presented to the public, and such was the mood which ruled. It was not however entirely in accordance with the facts; and facts, especially in war, are stubborn things.\n\nAlthough, as has been described, the Press played only a contributory part in the overturn of Mr. Asquith's Liberal Administration, its power was sensibly increased by the formation of the first Coalition Government. The British Commander-in-Chief had not scrupled to inform Lord Northcliffe of the shell shortage. Lord Northcliffe had not hesitated to publish the facts and to attack, not only the Prime Minister, but Lord Kitchener himself. The furious onslaughts of the Northcliffe Press had been accompanied by the collapse of the Administration. To the minds of the public the two events presented themselves broadly as cause and effect. Henceforward Lord Northcliffe felt himself to be possessed of formidable power. Armed with the solemn prestige of _The Times_ in one hand and the ubiquity of the _Daily Mail_ in the other, he aspired to exercise a commanding influence upon events. The inherent instability and obvious infirmity of the first Coalition Government offered favourable conditions for the advancement of these claims. The recurring crises on the subject of conscription presented numerous occasions for their assertion. He was in intimate relation with some of the most powerful Ministers. General Headquarters, both under Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, treated him with deference. A spacious chateau\u2014monument of their triumph\u2014accommodated the once-banned War Correspondents, and the group of brilliant writers who represented the British Press were recognized and accepted as an indispensable part of the military machine.\n\nThere can be no doubt that Lord Northcliffe was at all times animated by an ardent patriotism and an intense desire to win the war. But he wielded power without official responsibility, enjoyed secret knowledge without the general view, and disturbed the fortunes of national leaders without being willing to bear their burdens. Thus a swaying force, uncertain, capricious, essentially personal, potent alike for good and evil, claiming to make or mar public men, to sustain or displace Commanders, to shape policies, and to fashion or overthrow Governments, introduced itself in the absence of all Parliamentary correctives into the conduct of the war.\n\nNo public man was more unaffectedly and consistently disdainful of this new development than Mr. Asquith. Relying on his control of the Liberal Party machine, he believed himself as independent of the Northcliffe Press during the war as Liberal Prime Ministers and Governments had been throughout the political struggles which preceded it. He disliked Lord Northcliffe, despised his activities, and ignored his influence. However majestic this attitude may have been, it did not take sufficient account of the realities of the time. The Liberal forces on which the Prime Minister was wont to rely had been gravely dissipated by the war. Parliament, the necessary counterpoise of the Press, was largely in abeyance. The Platform was occupied solely by propaganda and recruiting. Public opinion was thus deprived of two out of the three great educative influences on which it depends in normal times. A policy of tireless detraction of certain Ministers and the ceaseless favouring of others, pursued month after month amid the convulsive episodes of war and the zealous passions of the agonized nation, was bound eventually to produce results in action.\n\nIn these circumstances a Dictator would have offered Lord Northcliffe the alternative of high and responsible office or honourable captivity until the conclusion of hostilities. Mr. Asquith was no Dictator, but even as a Constitutional Prime Minister he possessed two great and decisive means of self-defence. The first, suggested by Lord Rosebery, was the compulsory conversion of _The Times_ by the Government into an official Monitor till the end of the war; the second was the Secret Session of the House of Commons. Both these measures would greatly have strengthened the hands of the Administration. The former would have afforded them a sure and authoritative means of guiding public opinion; the second would have bound them to the House of Commons in a comprehending and sympathetic unity. On agreeing to take office in the first Coalition I pressed both these courses upon Mr. Asquith. He did not however adopt either. He took no steps to acquire _The Times_ , and only once in his tenure did he resort most reluctantly and half-heartedly to the process of Secret Session. There remained therefore, as the reply to remorseless depreciation, only victory in the field. Victory would have carried all before it, but victory was unprocurable.\n\nTo the patriotic vagaries of Lord Northcliffe were added the Party vendettas of the _Morning Post._ This famous newspaper, though at that time possessing only a limited circulation, played an appreciable part in public affairs. Written with extreme brilliancy, sincerely and consistently animated by Party spirit, this organ of the extreme Right persevered in its campaign of detraction, which never rested till it had contributed to driving successively from office every public man, Liberal or Conservative, not associated with its particular school of opinion.\n\nThe conscription crisis of April, 1916, was however averted by further concessions on the part of Mr. Asquith. A new National Service Bill was passed, and Mr. Lloyd George remained in the Government.\n\nDuring the summer and autumn the Coalition Government had hung uneasily together, racked by many stresses and strains. In these circumstances Mr. Bonar Law, the Leader of the Conservative Party, held the key position and was himself exposed to peculiar difficulties. Opposite to him in the House of Commons sat Sir Edward Carson, with a deeper personal hold in some respects upon the Conservative Party than its titular leader. As the pressure of the war grew, the discontent of the Conservatives with its conduct under a Liberal Prime Minister became steadily more serious, and all this dissatisfaction was focused and directed on the Government by Sir Edward Carson, who though himself at that time devoid of any administrative record seemed to typify the most vehement and uncompromising war policy in every sphere. Mr. Bonar Law, like Mr. Asquith, was essentially a party man. After joining the coalition he had declared that he would not continue to hold office in the Government if at any time a majority of the Conservative members of the House of Commons voted against it: he would not, that is to say, retain his position in virtue of Liberal votes. Thus the growth of support behind Sir Edward Carson clearly indicated an approaching change. On November 8, Sir Edward Carson raised a debate on the seemingly trivial and irrelevant issue of the sale conditions of some small enemy properties in Nigeria. A resolution was moved declaring that 'such properties and businesses should be sold only to natural-born British subjects or companies wholly British.' The debate, which dealt chiefly with Nigerian Palm Kernels, was marked by the utmost acerbity. A large number of the most influential members of the Conservative party including particularly the Protectionists evinced a marked hostility to the Government. Mr. Bonar Law, as Colonial Secretary, was the Minister directly concerned, and not even his position as a party leader saved him from marked expressions of displeasure renewed in speech after speech with a curious persistency. Stung by this attack from his own friends and supporters, Mr. Bonar Law declared bluntly that the matter was one of direct confidence in the Government, and that Sir Edward Carson no doubt realized the seriousness of the course he was taking. Notwithstanding this the dispute was pressed to a division in which only 73 Conservative Members voted for the Government out of a total of 286, while 65 flatly rejected the appeal of Mr. Bonar Law. This debate and division revealed a depth of hostility to Mr. Asquith's Administration in the Conservative ranks which could not be restrained by the presence of the Conservative leaders in the Cabinet. It was in consequence a danger-signal of the plainest kind. But a complication had arisen. The consistent support which Mr. Bonar Law gave to the Prime Minister had brought him into differences on various occasions with Mr. Lloyd George, the most prominent member of the drastic war-policy group. These differences were exacerbated by the debate and division on Nigerian Palm Kernels. It happened that on that night Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Edward Carson were dining together, and by an accident Mr. Lloyd George was not in the House to support the Colonial Secretary when the division was taken. Thus the two principal personages whose common action was necessary to any decisive change in the Administration were for the time out of touch with each other.\n\nThe general misfortune in which the year 1916 closed produced feelings of disappointment and vexation in the Cabinet which overcame this personal misunderstanding. The failure to break the German line in the Somme battle in spite of the enormous losses incurred, the marvellous recovery of the Germanic powers in the East, the ruin of Roumania brought as it seemed so incontinently into the war, and the first beginnings of a renewed submarine warfare, strengthened and stimulated all those forces which insisted upon the need of still greater vigour in the conduct of affairs. Mr. Bonar Law became increasingly convinced as the rifts in the Cabinet deepened that Mr. Lloyd George's resignation would destroy the prospects of a successful conduct of the war. Forced to choose between Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith, he had no doubts where his duty lay. Through the offices of Sir Max Aitken, Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Lloyd George came together in the closing days of November in a decision to secure a new and more effective instrument of war direction. The main principle uniting the two Ministers was that the existing Cabinet system whereby the executive heads of the various Departments, each with his special point of view, formed the supreme directing authority, was not adapted to the unprecedented peril of the times. In this view they were of course in full accord with Sir Edward Carson, and thus formed a potential Triumvirate.\n\nBut while these general bases of agreement were laid between the two Ministers, no specific method or occasion of bringing the issue to a head presented itself. There was general ferment and unrest in both the schools of policy into which the Government was divided, and an atmosphere of uncertainty and instability betokened the approaching storm. Early in December, Mr Lloyd George, then Secretary of State for War, formally raised the question of the withdrawal of the Prime Minister from the Presidency of the War Committee. He suggested that the political control of the Government and the task of directing the war could not be combined in the hands of a single man, however able or commanding. He proposed that the War Committee should be strengthened by the constant attendance of the Chiefs of the fighting services, that its presidency should be confided to another Minister whose name was not mentioned, but who could in the circumstances clearly be no other than himself; and that the Prime Minister should exercise a general supervision over affairs and retain the supreme political control.\n\nThis arrangement was at first not unfavourably entertained by Mr. Asquith. Indeed, if it is studied with attention, it will appear to have contained many features of great advantage to him. Viewing the issue from a detached standpoint, I reached the conclusion, as did Sir Edward Carson, that the position of the Secretary of State for War under it would become one both of difficulty and weakness. On him would fall all the brunt of battling with the naval and military Chiefs, afloat, in the field and at home\u2014now restraining the Generals from their costly offensives, now stimulating the Admirals to make a greater and more aggressive contribution to the waging of the war. Acute differences were certain to develop in both directions between the political and the professional views. The appeal in all cases would have been to the Prime Minister who, free from the friction of the discussions of the War Committee, yet fully informed on every point, would have been able to decide with final authority. On the other hand, Mr. Lloyd George, publicly appointed to preside over the Committee actually directing the conduct of the war, would have been held responsible for every misfortune that occurred, and they were bound to be many. I warned the Secretary of State for War, when he told me what was passing, of these obvious dangers, but he was determined to persist in his course. Friendly interviews with the Prime Minister led to an almost complete settlement. But at the last moment the personal antagonisms which had been latent in the Liberal section of the Cabinet asserted themselves. A leading article in _The Times_ , erroneously attributed to Lord Northcliffe, led Mr. Asquith to consider the proposed arrangement derogatory to himself and to his position. He thereupon withdrew his provisional assent, and the Secretary of State for War resigned.\n\nThe resignation of Mr Lloyd George led immediately to the fall of the Government. The kaleidoscopic groupings and re-groupings of the Ministerial personages which accompanied this event, will some day form a profoundly instructive chapter in British constitutional history. Mr. Bonar Law felt it would be impossible for him to remain in an Administration from which Mr. Lloyd George had resigned on the ground that the war direction was unsatisfactory. He and\u2014after considerable heart-searchings\u2014most of his friends therefore associated themselves with the Secretary of State for War. The intense passions which the distress and perplexity of the hour aroused on every side made all hope of accommodation impossible. On December 5, Mr. Asquith tendered to the King his resignation and that of his Ministry. Mr. Bonar Law, summoned by the Sovereign, advised that Mr. Lloyd George was the only possible successor. Every effort to induce Mr. Asquith to associate himself with the new Administration was made without success. Followed by all his Liberal colleagues, with the exception of Mr. Lloyd George, he retired into patriotic opposition, and the new Triumvirate of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson assumed, with what were in practice dictatorial powers, the direction of affairs. These decisions were not challenged by Parliament, were accepted by the nation, and were acclaimed by the Press.\n\nThe new Prime Minister wished to include me in his Government; but this idea was received with extreme disfavour by important personages whose influence during this crisis was decisive. Lord Northcliffe was animated at this time by a violent hostility to me. He made haste to announce in _The Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ that it had been firmly resolved to exclude from office those who had been responsible for the failures of the war, and that the public would 'learn with relief and satisfaction that Mr. Churchill would not be offered any post in the new Administration.' He also endeavoured\u2014though happily without success\u2014to veto the appointment of Mr. Balfour as Foreign Secretary. Four prominent Conservatives, judged indispensable to the new combination, signed or made a statement stipulating as a condition of taking office that neither I nor Lord Northcliffe should be Ministers. To this extent therefore\u2014though perhaps in a manner scarcely complimentary to himself\u2014Lord Northcliffe received a powerful reinforcement in his view. It could certainly be adduced with validity that my conduct while First Lord was _sub judice_ until the Dardenelles Commission had presented its report. Mr. Lloyd George was in no position in these circumstances to resist this oddly combined but formidable cabal. He therefore sent me a message a few days later, through a common friend, Lord Riddell, that he was determined to achieve his purpose, but that the adverse forces were too strong for the moment. I replied through the same channel with a verbal declaration of political independence.\n\nI was of course bitterly disappointed at finding no sphere of action in a Ministry with whose aims and temper I was in the most complete accord. In time of peace political office is often a doubtful blessing, and a man is not seldom happier out than in. But in this World War a great official place, especially one connected with the fighting Services, was perhaps equal in scope to the command of an Army or even a group of armies; and loaded with my special knowledge and share in the whole series of events with which this story is concerned, I found a sentence of continued and indefinite inactivity almost unendurable. I realized however that the Parliamentary situation had been materially changed by the expulsion of Mr. Asquith and the official Liberal Party from the Government. The Opposition benches were now crowded with Members, patriotic and earnest for victory, but nevertheless filled with resentment at the summary manner in which their Leader and their Party had been treated. As a Privy Councillor I still had my seat on the front Opposition bench, with all the opportunities of intervention in debate which it confers on anyone, and which it confers in special measure on one who has no relations except those of personal courtesy with its other occupants.\n\nMy opportunity came in May. Feelings of anxiety and distrust boiled up against the new Government. It must be remembered that apart from Mr. Lloyd George's personal following, which might have amounted to one hundred but was an uncertain quantity, the House of Commons still contained a Liberal, Labour and Irish Nationalist majority of nearly one hundred and fifty. The bulk were definitely hostile to him\u2014for the most part not without reason. A series of appreciable tremors heralded a phase of acute political tension. I therefore advised Mr. Lloyd George, as on a former occasion I had vainly advised Mr. Asquith, to hold a secret Session and take the House fully into the confidence of the Government. It was impossible in public debates, of which the enemy a few days later were readers, either for well-grounded criticisms to be expressed or for the Executive to lay even the outline of their case before the House. I was sure that the Government would emerge from a secret debate in an improved relation to the House as a whole. The absurd rumours and charges with which the Lobbies, the Clubs and the dinner-tables buzzed would be dissipated. Whatever the difficulties, whatever the mistakes, a Government which is sincerely trying its best and is swayed by no Party bias has everything to gain from the fullest statement of its case which the public interest renders possible.\n\nI expressed these views to the Prime Minister through his Whip, Captain Guest, and learned a few days later that he had decided to accept them. A secret Session was announced for May 10. Mr. Asquith and the official Opposition had not asked for such a procedure. They maintained a neutral and a passive attitude in regard to it. It fell therefore to me to open the Debate.\n\nThe day came. The Members' and Strangers' Galleries were cleared, but every other part of the House was densely crowded with anxious Members. I was listened to for an hour and a quarter with strained attention, at first silently but gradually with a growing measure of acceptance and at length approval. At the end there was quite a demonstration. A summary of the argument will here serve the purpose of the general narrative.\n\n'A new campaign is about to open. Since the beginning of the year two events have occurred, each of which has changed the whole situation and both of which must be taken into account in the policy of the Allies. The United States has entered the war, and Russia has collapsed. On the one hand, an Ally Empire whose standing Army comprised over seven million soldiers has been crushed by the German hammer. On the other, a nation comprising one hundred and twenty millions of the most active educated and wealthy citizens, commanding intact and almost limitless resources of every kind, has engaged itself in our cause. But this nation is not ready. It has no large armies and no munitions. Its manhood is untrained to war. Its arsenals and factories, except in so far as they are engaged in producing munitions for the Allies, are unorganized. If time is given, nothing can stand against Great Britain and the United States together. If every Ally fails except these two, they could alone together carry the war against the Teutonic Empires to a victorious conclusion. But a long time will be needed\u2014a time measured not by months but by years\u2014before this mighty force can be brought to bear.\n\n'There is one other factor besides time which is vital: Sea Communications. And in this sphere a third new situation of decisive consequence has also developed. When the Germans decided upon the unrestricted submarine campaign, they must have known that they would bring the United States into the war against them. Must they not also have believed that by this same means they would prevent her effective intervention? We do not know, we do not wish to know how many ships are being sunk each week by submarines. We know that the number and proportion is most serious and is still increasing. Here then is the fatal crux. Here then is the first and decisive danger to master. Let the whole energies of Britain be directed upon this point. Let the Navy make of it its great victory in the war. Let every resource and invention be applied. Let the anti-submarine war claim priority and dominance over every other form of British effort. Let us make sure that we can bring the American Armies to Europe as soon as they are fit to come.\n\n'Meanwhile what should be our policy on land? Is it not obvious, from the primary factors which have been described, that we ought not to squander the remaining armies of France and Britain in precipitate offensives before the American power begins to be felt on the battlefields? We have not the numerical superiority necessary for such a successful offensive. We have no marked artillery preponderance over the enemy. We have not got the numbers of tanks which we need. We have not established superiority in the air. We have discovered neither the mechanical nor the tactical methods of piercing an indefinite succession of fortified lines defended by German troops. Shall we then in such circumstances cast away our remaining man power in desperate efforts on the Western Front before large American forces are marshalled in France? Let the House implore the Prime Minister to use the authority which he wields, and all his personal weight, to prevent the French and British High Commands from dragging each other into fresh bloody and disastrous adventures. Master the U-boat attack. Bring over the American millions. And meanwhile maintain an active defensive on the Western Front, so as to economize French and British lives, and so as to train, increase and perfect our armies and our methods for a decisive effort in a later year.'\n\nThe Prime Minister replied after a short interval. He accepted in principle my general statement of the main factors. He expressed a great measure of agreement with the argument I had used. But he declined to commit himself against a renewed offensive. Indeed, he gave the impression that such a decision was beyond his power. (Alas, as we shall see, he was already deeply and personally committed.) He then proceeded to lead a captivated assembly over the whole scene of the war, gaining the sympathy and conviction of his hearers at every stage. When he sat down the position of the Government was stronger than it had been at any previous moment during his Administration.\n\nShortly after his speech we met fortuitously behind the Speaker's chair. In his satisfaction at the course the Debate had taken, he assured me of his determination to have me at his side. From that day, although holding no office, I became to a large extent his colleague. He repeatedly discussed with me every aspect of the war and many of his secret hopes and fears. On the submarine war he was always undaunted. Week by week as April advanced the horrible curve of sinkings crept upwards. To me, then a spectator only, without the anodyne of constant grinding toil, it was torture. If this thin red line plotted on the blue squared paper mounted during May and June at the rate of April, very definite limits would be fixed to our power to continue the war. If it rose at the same or an increasing rate in July, August and September, a peace by negotiation, while enough time and power remained, loomed upon the mind. The position of the British islands and Empire was such that effectual and final interruption of sea communications by any agency meant, not defeat, but destruction. Impotence, starvation, SUBJUGATION, stalked across the mental screen. At the worst of course we had many months of fighting time and strength before us. Had we enough time and enough strength to bring the American armies into France? The more one knew about the struggle, the more tormenting was the experience.\n\nAs the reader has perceived, these pages reveal, no doubt, my unceasing condemnation of the offensives in France in 1917; and I cannot acquit the Prime Minister of his responsibility for not having stopped them. But tragic and costly as were those episodes, they lay in a field of smaller proportions than the struggle with the U-boats. If there was no hope of victory in 1917 for the Allies on land, neither was there any reason to suppose they could themselves be overcome. The great combatants were too equally matched to be able to inflict mortal injury upon each other. Follies, slaughters, heartbreaks\u2014these were the stakes. Ruin was not on the board in France. Her haunt was in the seas.\n\nAnd it was in facing with unquailing eye these awful contingencies during the opening months of his prime responsibility, that Mr. Lloyd George's greatest service to his countrymen will, I believe, be found by history to reside. Not only undaunted in the face of peril, but roused by each deepening manifestation to fresh energy, he drove the engine of State forward at increasing speed. The War Cabinet shared his burdens. If sometimes this loyal and capable group of men hampered him when he was right, they also furnished him with that environment of sound opinion and solid argument without which his own remarkable qualities of initiative could never have attained full power. They invested him also with a collective authority which rose high and dominating above the fierce pressures of the time.\n\nThe new Prime Minister possessed two characteristics which were in harmony with this period of convulsion. First, a power of living in the present, without taking short views. Every day for him was filled with the hope and the impulse of a fresh beginning. He surveyed the problems of each morning with an eye unobstructed by preconceived opinions, past utterances, or previous disappointments and defeats. In times of peace such a mood is not always admirable, nor often successful for long. But in the intense crisis when the world was a kaleidoscope, when every month all the values and relations were changed by some prodigious event and its measureless reactions, this inexhaustible mental agility, guided by the main purpose of Victory, was a rare advantage. His intuition fitted the crisis better than the logical reasoning of more rigid minds.\n\nThe quality of living in the present and starting afresh each day led directly to a second and invaluable aptitude. Mr. Lloyd George in this period seemed to have a peculiar power of drawing from misfortune itself the means of future success. From the U-boat depredations he obtained the convoy system: out of the disaster of Caporetto he extracted the Supreme War Council: from the catastrophe of the 21st of March he drew the Unified Command and the immense American reinforcement.\n\nHis ascendancy in the high circles of British Government and in the councils of the Allies grew in the teeth of calamities. He did not sit waiting upon events to give a wiseacre judgment. He grappled with the giant events and strove to compel them, undismayed by mistakes and their consequences. Tradition and convention troubled him little. He never sought to erect some military or naval figure into a fetish behind whose reputation he could take refuge. The military and naval hierarchies were roughly handled and forced to adjust themselves to the imperious need. Men of vigour and capacity from outside the Parliamentary sphere became the ministerial heads of great departments. He neglected nothing that he perceived. All parts of the task of Government claimed his attention and interest. He lived solely for his work and was never oppressed by it. He gave every decision when it was required. He scarcely ever seemed to bend under the burden. To his native adroitness in managing men and committees he now added a high sense of proportion in war policy and a power of delving to the root of unfamiliar things. Under his Administration both the Island and the Empire were effectually organized for war. He formed the Imperial War Cabinet which centred in a single executive the world-spread resources of the British Monarchy. The convoy system, which broke the U-boat attack at sea; the forward impulsion in Palestine, which overwhelmed the Turks, and the unified command which inaugurated the victories in France, belonged in their main stress and resolve as acts of policy to no one so much as to the First Minister of the Crown.\n\n# CHAPTER XI\n\n# GENERAL NIVELLE'S EXPERIMENT\n\nJoffre's Plans for 1917\u2014His Decline\u2014A New Figure\u2014The Final Scene\u2014The Appointment of Nivelle\u2014The Nivelle-Mangin Model\u2014The Sudden, Violent Blow\u2014Nivelle's Extensions of Joffre's Plans\u2014Nivelle and Haig\u2014Nivelle's Relations with the War Cabinet\u2014Unified Command\u2014Ludendorff intervenes\u2014 _Alberich_ \u2014Nivelle's Repugnance to Facts\u2014His Secret Memorandum captured\u2014Intense German Preparation\u2014Fall of Briand's Government\u2014Power and Opinions of Painlev\u00e9\u2014French Misgivings\u2014New Factors\u2014Nivelle Inflexible\u2014The Eve of Battle\u2014The Sixteenth of April\u2014British Persistency\u2014Lloyd George and the French Government\u2014His Exhortation\u2014The French Mutinies\u2014P\u00e9tain's Achievement.\n\nGeneral Joffre's plan for the campaign of 1917 was simple. It was to be a continuation of the Battle of the Somme, with only the shortest possible interlude during the extreme severity of the winter. The salient formed by the German line was to be crunched by convergent assaults of the British and the French. No time was to be lost in regrouping the armies; no delay was to be allowed for the arrival even of friendly reinforcements, or for the completion of the new artillery and munitions programmes of the Allies. February 1 was fixed for the opening of the new battle. All the British forces available for the offensive and the northern group of the French armies were to attack due east, the British from Vimy to Bapaume, the French between the Somme and the Oise; simultaneously another French Army of the centre group was to strike northward from the direction of Rheims. Then, after all these armies had been in full battle for a fortnight and the Germans if not broken were thoroughly gripped, the Fifth French Army, supported by the Reserve group to which it belonged, was to strike in to decide the struggle or exploit the victory. Taken in an enormous purse, or as between gigantic pincers, the German armies, if their front gave way on any considerable scale, were to see themselves confronted first with the capture of very large numbers of men and enormous masses of material, and secondly with a rupture of the front so wide as to be irreparable.\n\nSuch were the proposals which the French Generalissimo laid before the Allied Statesmen and Commanders at a Conference at Chantilly on November 16, 1916, and which he expounded with precision in his Instruction of November 27. 'I have decided to seek the rupture of the enemy's forces by a general offensive executed between the Somme and the Oise at the same time as the British Armies carry out a similar operation between Bapaume and Vimy. This offensive will be in readiness for the 1st February, 1917, the exact date being fixed in accordance with the general military situation of the Allies.'\n\nAs will be seen as the account progresses, the launching of these tremendous operations from the beginning and during the whole of February would have caught the Germans at a moment exceedingly unfavourable to them. Here perhaps at last, after so many regrettable misadventures and miscalculations, Joffre might have won unchallenged laurels. But these possibilities remain in the mists of the unknown; for at this very moment Joffre was removed from his command, and the supreme direction passed to another hand.\n\nAlthough the fame of Verdun and the Somme had been valiantly trumpeted by Press and propaganda to the uttermost ends of the earth, instructed opinion in Paris was under no illusions about either battle. The glory of Verdun belonged to the French soldiers, who under Castelnau, P\u00e9tain, Nivelle and Mangin had sustained the honour of France. The neglect and inadequacy of its defences was clearly traceable to the Commander-in-Chief. His astonishing correspondence with Galli\u00e9ni in December, 1915, had already been read in secret session to the Chamber in July; and although Briand had sustained the Commander-in-Chief, he had clearly intimated that his retention of the command must be reviewed at a more propitious season. To remove him while the Battle of Verdun was at its height, when the offensive he had concerted with the British on the Somme had just begun, and before that battle and the hopes involved in it had reached their conclusion, could not, he had urged, be in accordance with the interests of France. But the Battle of the Somme was now over. Its last engagement had been fought, and, for all the heroism and sacrifice of the soldiers, fought without decisive gains. The German line, sorely pressed, had nevertheless been maintained unbroken. Nay, some of the troops to invade Roumania had actually been drawn from the Western Front. Roumania had been destroyed and the German prestige re-established as the year, so terrible in its slaughters, drew to a crimson close. Now was a time of reckoning.\n\nNow also for the first time Briand considered himself to have discovered a fitting and suitable successor to Joffre. The three great Chiefs of the French Army, the war horses of the fighting front, Commanders of armies or groups of armies since the beginning of the war\u2014Foch, Castelnau, P\u00e9tain\u2014were all for reasons which seemed sufficient at the time ruled out. Of Castelnau it was said by the Socialist left that he was too religious. Of P\u00e9tain it was complained that he was not sufficiently gracious to members of the Parliamentary Commissions and other persons of distinction who visited his headquarters. And it was stated that General Sarrail, speaking to Cl\u00e9menceau in August, 1915, had said of him, 'Il n'est pas des notres' (He's not one of us), to which that grand old man had replied, 'What do I care for that, if he can win us a victory?' But Cl\u00e9menceau's day had not yet dawned, and the Sarrail suggestion festered wherever it had reached. Of Foch a keen propaganda, widespread but untraceable, had said, 'His health is broken; his temper and his nerves have given way. He is finished.' So much for Castelnau, P\u00e9tain and Foch.\n\nBut now a new figure had appeared. Nivelle had conducted the later battle of Verdun both with vigour and success, and under his orders Mangin had recovered the famous Fort of Douaumont. In the mood of the hour Joffre had already selected Nivelle to replace Foch. Forthwith a stream of celebrities took the road to Verdun and made for the first time the acquaintance of the new Army Commander. They found themselves in the presence of an officer whose modesty, whose personality, whose lucidity of expression, exercised an almost universal charm. A stream of glowing and delighted accounts flowed towards Paris. There can be no doubt of the attraction exercised by General Nivelle over the many experienced men of affairs with whom he came in contact. Briand, his Ministers, the delegations from the Chamber, were as swiftly impressed as Lloyd George and the British War Cabinet a few months later. Add to these pleasing impressions the glamour of unquestioned and newly won military achievement, and the elements of an alternative Commander-in-Chief were not in that weary moment lacking.\n\nOn December 27, Joffre was promoted Marshal of France and relieved of his command. A pleasing and pathetic personal light is thrown on the closing scene by Pierrefeu's skilful pen. No one has been a more stern or more instructed critic of General Joffre. His searching studies, made with the fullest knowledge of events and first-hand observation, have been more fatal to the Joffre legend than all the other attacks and exposures which have appeared in France. But Pierrefeu lights his severe pictures with many a deft and human touch. He has described the curious spectacle of Joffre's life at Chantilly during these two tremendous years. 'This office without maps;' 'this table without papers;' the long hours passed by the Commander-in-Chief in reading and in answering tributes of admiration received from all over the world; his comfortable and placid routine; his air of leisure and serenity; his excellent appetite and regular customs; his long full nights of unbroken repose far from the crash of the cruel cannonade, 'cette vie de bon rentier au plus fort de la guerre.' He tells us of Joffre's habit when in difficulties with the enemy or with his Government, of patting his massive head with his hand and ejaculating with a droll air, 'Pauvre Joffre.' He tells us of his little aide-de-camp Captain Thouzelier; so familiar a figure during all this period, flitting to and fro among the bureaus of the Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral, everywhere known as 'Tou Tou.' And how in moments of good humour and as a special compliment Joffre would address him as 'Sacr\u00e9 Thouzelier.' It is from such details that an impression is obtained of real historic value. But the picture is now to fade and vanish for ever.\n\n'The new Marshal assembled at the Villa Poiret his principal officers to bid them his adieux: the ceremony was sad. All these men were painfully affected at the idea of separation from the illustrious man who had directed them for so long. Each bore in his breast the anxiety for a future which seemed sombre. The Marshal, who by his rank had the right to three orderly officers, asked who among those present wished to accompany him in his retirement. Alone the Commandant Thouzelier lifted spontaneously his hand. As the Marshal seemed astonished, General Gamelin said to him softly, \"Don't bear a grudge to those who have their career to make.\" And certainly Joffre never bore any such grudge. When all the company had gone, the Marshal cast a final glance at the house which had nursed so much glory. Then with a smile and giving a friendly tap to his faithful Thouzelier, passing his hand across his head, he uttered his favourite expression, \"Pauvre Joffre\u2014Sacr\u00e9 Thouzelier.\"\n\nThe appointment of General Nivelle was clearly a very questionable proceeding. There are enormous dangers in selecting for the command of the National Army or Fleet some comparatively junior officer, however well supported by subordinate achievement. To supersede not only Joffre, but Foch, Castelnau, P\u00e9tain, by a General like Nivelle, who had only commanded a single army for five months, was a step which could only be vindicated by extraordinary results. Happier would it have been for General Nivelle had he been left to make his way step by step in the high circles of command to which his good conduct and substantial qualities had won him admission.\n\nMeanwhile the French Staff in the dusk of Joffre had formed new conceptions on tactics. The principle that 'the Artillery conquers the ground and the Infantry occupies it,' which had played a comforting, if somewhat barren, part in 1915 and 1916, was to a large extent discarded in favour of greater audacity. The Nivelle-Mangin exploit on October 24 at Verdun had tended to become the model of the French Staff. It was the foundation, not only of General Nivelle's fame, but of his convictions. It comprised the whole of his message. He believed that he and his principal officers had found a sure, swift method of rupturing the German defence. He believed further that his method was capable of application on the largest possible scale. Multiply the scale of such an attack ten or fifteen times, and the resultant advantages would be multiplied in an even greater proportion. Just as Falkenhayn in his scheme of attack on Verdun had always in his mind the victory of Gorlice-Tarnow, so Nivelle a year later founded his hopes and reasoning upon his achievement at Douaumont.\n\nNo one will undervalue the tactics which gained success on October 24. They were hammered out by fighting Generals amidst the fiercest fires. However, it does not follow in war or in some other spheres that methods which work well on a small scale will work well on a great scale. As military operations become larger, they become more ponderous, and the time factor begins to set up complex reactions. Where days of preparation had sufficed, months may be required. Secrets that can be kept for days are apt to wear out in months. Surprise, the key to victory, becomes harder to secure with every additional man and gun. There were in the Nivelle-Mangin methods and in the spirit which animated them the elements of decisive success. But their authors had not learned to apply them on the gigantic scale with which they were now to be concerned: nor in the year 1917 did they possess the necessary superiority of force in its various forms. It was reserved for Ludendorff, on March 21, 1918, to execute what Nivelle had conceived, to combine audacity of action with a true sense of values, to make long preparations without prematurely losing secrecy, and to effect a strategic surprise on a front of fifty divisions. But this comparison cannot even be suggested without numerous reservations arising from the different circumstances.\n\nNivelle became Commander-in-Chief on December 12. He arrived at Chantilly on the 16th; and on that same date there issued from the French High Command a Memorandum on the new (Verdun) methods of the offensive which had no doubt been drawn up during the preceding month while Joffre still ruled, to greet the advent of the new Chief. General Nivelle lost no time in developing this theme in his own words. On December 21, in a letter to Sir Douglas Haig and in instructions to his own groups of armies, he wrote:\n\n'The objective which the Franco-British armies should seek, is the destruction of the principal mass of the enemy. This result can only be attained as the consequence of a decisive battle'...\n\nOn the 24th, in a further Note to his Army Group Commanders, communicated to the British Staff, he affirmed:\n\n'That the rupture of the front (penetration to the rear of the mass of the hostile batteries) is possible on condition it is made at a single stroke by a sudden attack in 24 or 48 hours.'\n\nAnd on January 29 to General Micheler whom he had placed in command of the three armies destined for the main attack, he emphasized 'the character of violence, of brutality, and of rapidity which should clothe the offensive, and in particular its first phase, the break-through.'\n\nThese quotations are typical of a continued flow of instructions and exhortations which General Nivelle, his Verdun Confraternity, and the French Headquarter Staff dutifully toiling behind them, lavished week after week upon their armies and their Allies.\n\nThe reader will remember Colonel de Grandmaison, the Director of Operations of the years before the war, the Apostle of the Offensive, immediately, every time\u2014' _\u00e0 outrance, \u00e0 la baionette_ ,' etc. War has claimed her Priest. The body of Colonel de Grandmaison lies mouldering in the grave\u2014a grave, let no one fail to declare, guarded by the reputation of a brave gentleman eager to give his life for his country and his theories. He has fallen; but his theme has found a fleeting resting-place in the bosom of Colonel d'Alenson, Chief of the Staff of General Nivelle. Pierrefeu gives a vivid description of this officer who flitted so suddenly, so swiftly and so tragically across the scene. Immensely tall and thin, dark, sallow, cadaverous, silent, sombre, full of suppressed fire\u2014a man absorbed in his convictions and ideas. The astonishing rocket rise of Nivelle had carried d'Alenson as an attendant star to the military zenith. But there is this fact about him which should be noted\u2014he had but one year to live, and consequently but one coup to play. Gripped in the closing stages of consumption, he knew that his time was short. Still, short as it was, there was a deed to do which might win enduring honour. Such a personal situation is not favourable to the practical common sense and judgment peculiarly required in a Chief of Staff.\n\nFortune had no sooner hoisted General Nivelle to the topmost summit of power than she deserted him. From the moment of his assuming command of the French armies everything went against him. He was from the outset more successful in exciting the enthusiasm of the political than of the military leaders: and he was more successful with the British Government even than with his own. He proceeded immediately to extend the scope of the immense operations which had been contemplated by Joffre. In his general offensive against the German salient Joffre had been careful to avoid the formidable span of thirty kilometres from Soissons to Craonne along the Aisne so well known to the British in 1914. General Nivelle ordered an additional offensive to be mounted against this front, and another further to the East at Moronvillers. Joffre had planned to attack at the earliest moment, even if it involved the sacrifice of some degree of preparation. Not only must Nivelle's scale be larger, but his preparations must be more detailed and complete; and for all this he was willing to pay in terms of time. Whereas the French Staff under Joffre had defined his aim as 'la recherche de la rupture du dispositif ennemi,' Nivelle claimed nothing less than 'la destruction de la masse principale des arm\u00e9es ennemies.' Whereas Joffre had contemplated a revival of the Somme battle on a still larger scale and under more favourable conditions, with three or four tremendous attacks engaging successively over a period of weeks the front and resources of the Germans, Nivelle proclaimed the doctrine of the sudden general onslaught culminating in victory or defeat within twenty-four, or at the most forty-eight, hours. And whereas Joffre would have struck early in February, Nivelle's extensions involved delay till April. The effect of the Nivelle alterations upon the Joffre plan was to make it larger, more violent, more critical, and much later.\n\nOn December 20, Nivelle explained his ideas to Sir Douglas Haig and invited him to recast the previous plans and extend the British Right from Bouchavesnes to the road from Amiens to Roye. These discussions\u2014not to say disputes\u2014between the French and British Headquarters upon the share which each should assume upon the front were continuous throughout the war. All followed the same course; the French dwelt on the number of kilometres they guarded, the British on the number of German divisions by which they were confronted, and each reinforced these potent considerations by reminding their Ally that they were about to deliver or to sustain a major offensive. On this occasion, however, Haig was not unwilling to meet the wishes of the French Command. He was in favour of renewing the offensive in France and was ready to fall in with Nivelle's views as to its direction and scope. Moreover, when the French wished to assume the brunt of the new attack and asked for assistance for this purpose, it was hardly for the British to refuse. On December 25 therefore Haig wrote to Nivelle. 'I agree in principle with your proposals and am desirous of doing all I can to help you on the lines you suggest.' He also undertook to extend the British front from February 1 as far as the Amiens-St. Quentin Road. Both Haig and the British Headquarters were however extremely sceptical of the power of the French Army to carry out the part assigned to it in the ambitious programme of General Nivelle. They were further greatly preoccupied by the condition of the Nord railway which, as maintained by the French, was at this time quite inadequate to sustain the important operations expected of the British Army. They therefore pressed for the improvement of their communications and declared themselves unable to fix a date for the British offensive while this extremely practical point remained unsettled.\n\nIn the course of these discussions the first hint of the proposed renewal of the offensive and of its changed form was conveyed to the British War Cabinet on December 26. Monsieur Ribot who had come to London stated that the new French Commander had an idea of breaking through on a wide front, keeping in reserve an army of man\u0153uvre to carry on the attack after the line had been broken. For this to be achieved the British Army must add 30 or 40 kilometres to their present line. Mr. Lloyd George was at first adverse to the renewal of the offensive in France and especially to the renewal of a long offensive like the Somme. In all our talks before he had become Prime Minister I had found him in sympathy with my general views on this subject. His first effort on obtaining power was to find some alternative. At the Rome Conference which he attended at the beginning of January he developed the proposal for a heavy attack on the Austrian front, mainly by Italian troops supported by an enormous concentration of Anglo-French batteries. The French, under the Nivelle influence, opposed this plan. Sir William Robertson gave it no support and it was merely remitted to the Staffs to study. As the train bringing the Prime Minister home from Italy waited at the Gare du Nord, General Nivelle presented himself and unfolded his scheme in outline. The first impressions on both sides were favourable. Nivelle was invited to London and met the War Cabinet on January 15. His success was immediate. The British Ministers had never before met in Council a general who could express himself in forceful and continuous argument, and they had never before met a French general whom they could understand. Nivelle not only spoke lucidly, he spoke English. He had not only captured Fort Douaumont, but had an English mother. He explained that his method involved no resumption of the prolonged Somme battles but one short, sharp, decisive rupture. Mr. Lloyd George's resistance to the new offensive plan had been melting rapidly since the meeting at the Gare du Nord. It was soon to transform itself into ardent support. Haig was also in London; he and Robertson were summoned to the Council, and a Memorandum was drawn up and signed by all three Generals formally approving a renewed offensive on the Western Front to begin not later than April 1, with consequential preliminary extensions of the British Front.\n\nSo far all had been harmonious, but the Prime Minister in the process of being converted from his previous opposition to the offensive had evolved a further design. He was already set upon his great and simple conception of a united command. Like the War Cabinet he was attracted by the personality of General Nivelle and disposed to back him\u2014if at all\u2014whole-heartedly. It was believed that better war direction could be obtained from the French. It was also believed\u2014and in this case with far more justification\u2014that one single controlling hand ought to prevail on the whole of the Western Front. 'It is not,' as Lloyd George said when later in the war he had gained his point, 'that one General is better than another, but that one General is better than two.' So Nivelle returned to Chantilly carrying the virtual promise of the Prime Minister that Haig and the British Army should be subordinated to his directions. These important additional developments were not at this stage imparted by the Prime Minister or the War Cabinet to either Robertson or Haig.\n\nDuring January the inadequacy of the rolling stock on the Nord railway became so marked that after strenuous British protests another conference was convened at Calais on February 26. The French then produced a detailed scheme of organization for an allied G.H.Q. in France. This provided for a French Generalissimo with a Headquarters Staff of French and British Officers under a British Chief of Staff. A British Commander-in-Chief was to be retained in name for Adjutant-General's work, but without influence upon operations. The immediate resistance of the British Generals led to this proposal being put aside, and instead an agreement was drawn up placing the control of the forthcoming operations solely in Nivelle's hands and the British Army under his orders for that period. To this Haig and Robertson\u2014lest worse should befall\u2014agreed.\n\nThe episode\u2014in itself remarkable\u2014had sensibly impaired the relations between the British and French Headquarters. It seemed to the British High Command that Nivelle had been concerned in an attempt with their own Government to procure their subordination to himself, if not indeed their supersession. From the outset they had viewed the appointment of the new Commander-in-Chief over the heads of all the best-known French soldiers with some surprise. Now mistrust and resentment were added. When on the strength of his new authority Nivelle sent instructions to Haig, couched in a tone of command, directing him to give up the long-planned British attack upon the Vimy Ridge in favour of the operations further to the South of Arras, Haig refused to comply. He applied to the British Government and 'requested to be told whether the War Cabinet wished the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force should be subject to such treatment by a junior foreign commander.' The strain was sharp. A compromise was eventually reached, but the friendly and intimate co-operation which had existed for so long between the British and French Staffs had undergone a noticeable decline, and Nivelle was criticized in French high military circles for having provoked this unfavourable result.\n\nAt this moment an unexpected event occurred. Ludendorff intervened, and the Germans acted. The great military personality which Germany had discovered in her need, armed in the panoply and under the \u00e6gis of Hindenburg, by one sure stroke overturned all the strategy of General Nivelle. Towards the end of February the German evacuation of the whole sector from Arras to Noyon began. Leaving a screen of troops to occupy the abandoned positions and fire off their guns and rifles, the German Army withdrew fifty miles from the threatened area of the salient, and with unhurried deliberation assumed their new deeply considered positions on what was henceforth to be known as the Hindenburg line. The German General Staff called this long prepared operation by the code name _Alberich_ , after the malicious dwarf of the Nibelungen legend. They left their opponents in the crater fields of the Somme, and with a severity barbarous because far in excess of any military requirements, laid waste with axe and fire the regions which they had surrendered.\n\nThe retrograde movement, rumoured for some days, was first detected on the front of the British Fifth Army. On February 24 suspicion was aroused by the German artillery shelling its own trench lines. British patrols found the hostile trenches empty. The Fifth Army Operations Order of that same night said 'The enemy is believed to be withdrawing.' Immense clouds of smoke and the glare of incendiary fires by night proclaimed the merciless departure of the enemy. On the 25th he was reported to be retiring on a front of 18,000 yards, and on February 28 the British Intelligence spoke of a retirement to the Hindenburg line.\n\nHowever absorbed a Commander may be in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is necessary sometimes to take the enemy into consideration. Joffre's plan had been to bite the great German salient in February; and whether it would have succeeded or not, no man can tell. The Nivelle plan was to bite it with still larger forces in April. But by March the salient had ceased to exist. Three out of Nivelle's five armies, which were to have been employed in the assault, were now separated by a gulf of devastated territory from their objective. All their railroads, all their roads, all their magazines were so far removed from the enemy's positions that at least two months would be required to drag them forward into a new connection with the war. The remaining two armies were left with no other possibility before them than to deliver disconnected frontal attacks on the strongest parts of the old German line.\n\nIn these circumstances Nivelle's _Directive_ to the British armies under his control is of great interest.\n\nG.Q.G.,\n\n_March_ 6, 1917.\n\n_Direction for the Marshal._\n\nThe retirement of the enemy on the front of the Fifth British Army constitutes a new fact, the repercussion of which upon the joint offensive of the Franco-British Armies must be examined.\n\nSo far the retreat of the Germans has only been carried out on the front of the Fifth British Army. It will perhaps be extended to the region of the Somme and the Oise. But in any case there is no indication which would allow us to suppose that the enemy will act similarly on the front of attack of your Third and First Armies, any more than on that of the G.A.R. (Reserve Group). On the contrary, the so-called Hindenburg position is so disposed that the directions of our principal attacks, both in the British and the French zones, are such that they will outflank it and take it in reverse.\n\n_In this respect the German retirement may be entirely to our advantage, even if it becomes general_ ; and on this assumption I base a first decision, which is _not to modify in any fundamental way the general plan of operations already settled_ , and in particular to stick to the date fixed for the launching of our attacks.\n\nIt must, however, be admitted that all our operations cannot be carried out in the way arranged, and I will therefore examine in succession the attitude to be adopted on the front of the British Armies and of the G.A.N. (Northern Group).\n\nDistance, numbers, direction\u2014all were changed. Yet it was decreed that the principle was unaffected and that the enterprise should proceed.\n\nWe have seen the tactical characteristics of the Joffre plan as developed by General Nivelle; the gigantic scale of the attack, its convergence upon the German salient; the minute study of detail and its comprehension by all ranks; and lastly, most precious and vital of all, the brutal, violent explosion of surprise. Of these four conditions, the Scale had been reduced by half, and the Convergence practically prevented by the German retreat. The other two\u2014Detail and Surprise\u2014were destined to destroy one another.\n\nThe progress of the immense preparations on those parts of the British and French fronts still in offensive relation to the enemy was continually visible from the air. From the south of Arras to the south of Soissons along a front of nearly 150 kilometres the Germans knew that since their retirement they could not be attacked. The 20-kilometres sector before Arras and perhaps a hundred kilometres in Champagne remained the only dangerous fronts. On these fronts they could watch each day the gathering of the storm. Good intelligence and aerial observation enabled the slight uncertainty as to where the main thrusts of the attack would take place to be reduced still further. But information of far greater precision and certainty was soon to be placed at their disposal.\n\nIn his desire that all ranks should comprehend the spirit of his plan, and that Battalion Commanders and even Company Commanders should know its whole scope, General Nivelle had caused various documents of high consequence to be circulated among the troops in the line. The first of these was the famous Staff memorandum on the new principles of the offensive dated December 16 which has already been quoted. The imprudence of allowing such a document to pass into the hands of troops holding the line often at even less than 100 yards from the enemy was swiftly punished. On March 3 a raid by a German division of the Crown Prince's army captured this fateful document. 'This memorandum,' writes the Crown Prince, 'contained matter of extraordinary value, it made clear that this time there was to be no question of a limited attack but a break-through offensive on a grand scale was contemplated.... The memorandum also made disclosures above all as to the particular nature of the surprise which the attacker had in view. This was based on the fact alleged to have been observed on our side that our defensive artillery as a rule made only a weak reply to the artillery preparation which preceded the attack. The French therefore thought to avoid protracted digging of earthworks for the attacking troops, particularly for the artillery.'...'Graf Von Schulenberg... at once formulated the logical reply for the defence, the artillery preparation not only to be powerfully returned, but even beforehand all recognized enemy preparations for attack to be overwhelmed by concentrated artillery fire. We ventured to hope that the surprise might in this way be most effectively met and the sting taken out of the first attack, which experience had shown to be the strongest and best prepared.'\n\nAll through the month of March, General Nivelle's preparations for surprise continued to rivet the attention of the enemy. 'By April,' writes the Crown Prince, 'a great deal of information already obtained led to the conclusion that the main attack was to be expected before long against the south front of the Seventh and Third Armies west of the Argonne. The Intelligence Service further confirmed the impression left by the French attack memorandum which had been captured.... Great depths of artillery, enormous supplies of ammunition, innumerable battery positions directly before the enemy's first line, no strong fortifications of battery positions, simply cover from the enemy's view, complete cessation of hostilities....' Again, 'On April 6 a clever attack by the 10th Reserve Division at Sapigneul brought us into possession of an order of attack of the French Fifth Army. In it the French attacking units were mentioned by name. The Fifth Army's objective was the line Prouvais-Proviseux-Aumenancourt. The Brimont [position] was to be taken by an enveloping movement from the north. Fresh information upon the anticipated French method of attack was given. The last veil concealing the intention of the French offensive was torn aside.'\n\nAll this time the Germans, spurred and assisted by the most perfect information, were preparing their defences. The army commands were reorganized. In February, when Nivelle's preparations first began to be obvious, the Crown Prince's command was extended eastwards to include the Seventh Army (of Prince Rupprecht's group), thus unifying the control of the entire front to be attacked. In March a whole additional army\u2014the First\u2014was interpolated between the Seventh and the Third. The Crown Prince's Headquarters were moved from Stenay to Charleville. Throughout March the reinforcements of his group of armies was unceasing. Machine-guns, artillery, battle-planes, intelligence service and labour battalions flowed in a broad stream to the threatened front. The relief gained by the Germans in the shortening of their line through their retirement from the salient enabled ever larger forces to be concentrated opposite the impending French attack. Night and day by ceaseless German toil the fortification of the whole area proceeded vehemently. Their position from Soissons to Rheims and beyond Rheims was by nature perhaps the strongest sector of the enemy's front. The Craonne plateau, the long hog's-back of the Chemin des Dames, the wooded bluffs and ridges of the Argonne were all developed by ardent toil into one homogeneous labyrinth of trenches and tunnels, crowded with battalions and machine guns and swathed in tangles of barbed wire. At the beginning of the year eight or nine German divisions had stood upon this front; by the time Nivelle had perfected his plan of surprise forty, a number scarcely inferior to the attack, were waiting to receive him.\n\nOther preoccupations began to gather round General Nivelle. He had been the choice of a French Government whose reputation and existence were largely bound up with his. In Briand, the Premier, and in Lyautey, the Minister of War, he had sponsors who could by no means separate themselves from him. No Government could afford to change their mind about a Commander they had violently elevated above all the recognized chiefs of the profession. But now suddenly this sure support was to fail. Early in March, General Lyautey became entangled in the Parliamentary meshes. He precipitately resigned, and in his fall dragged down Briand and the whole Government. New rulers ascended the tribune of power, with whom Nivelle had no associations but those of hostility. Under a Ribot Administration Painlev\u00e9 became Minister of War.\n\nPaul Painlev\u00e9 was a man of marked intellectual distinction, ardent in politics, great in mathematics, a faithful partisan of the Left, and ready to conform to all its formularies so far as a wide interpretation of the public interest allowed. In the original Briand Ministry Painlev\u00e9 had been Minister of Education, charged with the study of inventions which might be serviceable to the armies. In this capacity he had constantly and freely toured the front, and discussed not only inventions but plans with most of the important Commanders. He knew them all, and most of them appreciated his keen intellect. Painlev\u00e9 had discerned P\u00e9tain. This General was so cold and reserved to the Members of Parliamentary Commissions that he had incurred damaging unpopularity in influential circles. But Painlev\u00e9 admired him for his independence, and perhaps P\u00e9tain had responded to such a recognition. Painlev\u00e9's nominee for the succession to Joffre had been P\u00e9tain. When Briand at the end of October, 1916, had reconstructed his Cabinet, he had done so on the basis of the dignified liquidation of Joffre and the enthronement of Nivelle. Painlev\u00e9, offered a renewal of his offices, had refused to continue on the specific ground that he did not agree with the appointment of Nivelle. His entrance into the Chamber after this decision\u2014a serious one for any public man to take in time of war\u2014had been marked by a salutation not only from the Left but almost of a general character. Now he was Minister of War, and under the aged Prime Minister, the most important figure in the new French Administration. Instead of a Briand wedded to Nivelle's success, the new Commander-in-Chief now had a Painlev\u00e9 who, however loyal to his subordinate, had publicly and in advance testified that he regarded his appointment as a mistake.\n\nBut Painlev\u00e9's objections to Nivelle were not limited to the personal aspect. Painlev\u00e9, and the political forces which at that time he embodied, were the declared opponents of the great offensives on the Western Front. He agreed with P\u00e9tain that France should not be bled to death, that the life of the French Army must be husbanded, that there was no chance of the break through ( _la perc\u00e9e_ ) in that year in that theatre, that the gradual capture of limited objectives was the only prize within reach, and that moderation of aim and economy of the lives of French soldiers were the key-notes of the immediate military policy. Nivelle stood at the opposite pole: the offensive on the largest scale, the French in the van; the armies hurled on in absolute confidence of decisive victory; the rupture of the German line on an enormous front; the march through the gap of great armies of man\u0153uvre; the re-establishment of open warfare; the expulsion of the invader from the soil of France. Nor were these differences of principle academic. Nivelle was actively planning the most ambitious offensive ever undertaken by the French; and Painlev\u00e9 was the Minister who had to take responsibility before Parliament and before history for all that Nivelle might try to do. It is not easy to say which of the two men was in the more unpleasant position.\n\nHad Painlev\u00e9 acted upon his convictions, which in this case were proved right, he would have dismissed Nivelle and appointed to the Chief Command P\u00e9tain, in whom he had confidence and with whose general military outlook he and his party were in entire sympathy. But practical difficulties and many valid considerations dissuaded him from decisions which, if he had survived them, would have proved his title-deeds to fame. He temporized. He made the best of the situation as he found it. He bowed\u2014who in great position has not had to so?\u2014before the day-to-day force and logic of circumstances, before the sullen drift of events. He acquiesced in Nivelle; he submitted to his plans\u2014already so far advanced.\n\nIn the face of all the facts which marched upon him grimly and in spite of pressures of every kind, from every side, increasing constantly in severity, General Nivelle displayed an amazing persistence. In February he was aware of P\u00e9tain's scepticism, and of misgivings at the British Headquarters about his general plan. When the German retreat was apparent, General Micheler, his own man, chosen specially to command the main offensive, wrote to point out that everything was changed and to ask whether it was wise in the new circumstances to count on 'an exploitation having the rapid character of a forward march.' 'The character of violence, of brutality and of rapidity,' replied Nivelle on April 1, 'must be maintained. It is in the speed and surprise caused by the rapid and sudden irruption of our Infantry upon the third and fourth positions that the success of the rupture will be found. No consideration should intervene of a nature to weaken the \u00e9lan of the attack.' Warned that the enemy were fully prepared; knowing as he did before the final signal was given that his detailed plan had fallen into their hands, he still extolled the virtue of Surprise. Behind him stood Colonel d'Alenson with fevered eye and a year to live. At his side was the redoubtable Mangin burning with the ardour of battle, confident that on the evening of the first day of the offensive his cavalry would be scampering in pursuit on the plains of Laon. But elsewhere in the high commands of the armies and in the Bureaux of the Headquarters Staff, doubt and distrust welled in chilling floods.\n\nPainlev\u00e9 became Minister of War on March 19. Everyone knew that the offensive was imminent. 'On the 20th,' wrote Painlev\u00e9, 'before even being installed in the Ministry, I learned, I might say by public voice, that this was fixed for April 8, and that in consequence the British would attack at Arras on the 4th.' These dates were eventually postponed from day to day by unsuitable weather until April 9 and 16 respectively. On March 22 the Minister had his first interview with the Commander-in-Chief. He told him that it was well known his choice for the Commander of the army would have been different, but that was past, and he could count on his full support. Painlev\u00e9 proceeded however to point out that the original plan of operations had been affected by a series of first-class events. The German retreat, the outbreak of the Russian revolution, the certain and imminent entry of the United States into the war against Germany\u2014surely these had introduced some modification into the problem. In the name of the Government he urged the General to review the situation and reconsider his position freely, without feeling himself tied by any expectations he had previously formed himself or expressed to others. 'A new situation ought to be considered with a new eye.'\n\nNivelle's mind was not open to such argument. His confidence was unshakable. According to Painlev\u00e9, he expressed himself as follows: The German retreat did not inconvenience him. It liberated more French than German divisions. He could not himself have prescribed movements of the enemy which would better have favoured his own decisions. The narrowing of the front of attack would be remedied by prolonging the French right and including a portion of the Army Group under P\u00e9tain, opposite Moronvillers. The enemy's front would be broken, it might almost be said, without loss. As for the Plateau of Craonne 'he had it in his pocket,' the only thing he feared was that the Germans would make off. The more they reinforced their front the more startling would be the French victory, if only the intensity of the attack were continually increased. Perhaps the third day one might draw breath on the Serre after 30 kilometres of pursuit, but 'it would be difficult to hold the troops back once they got started,' and so on. Such was the mood of General Nivelle.\n\nUpon the new Minister of War there flowed advices of a very different character. Staff Officers of the highest credentials wrote secretly, at the risk of their commissions, solemn, reasoned warnings of the impending disaster, if the orders which had been given were actually carried out. All the three Commanders of army groups, Franchet d'Esp\u00e9rey, P\u00e9tain, even Micheler, in respectful but decisive terms dissociated themselves from the idea that a sudden violent rupture of the front was practicable. All three however recognized the danger of allowing the initiative to pass to the enemy. P\u00e9tain alone suggested a pregnant alternative, namely to let the Germans attack the French, and then launch the prepared French offensive as a gigantic counter-stroke.\n\nPainlev\u00e9 summoned a conference which met on the evening of April 3 at the War Ministry, at which the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief, together with several other Ministers, were present. He drew General Nivelle's attention to the misgivings of his principal subordinates. To the last Nivelle was undaunted. Complete victory was certain. The first two positions of the enemy would be carried with insignificant loss. Did they think he was unaware that to take the third and fourth positions one must begin by taking the first and second? No one knew better than he that good weather was essential to his mode of attack. All would be decided in twenty-four hours, or forty-eight at the most. If within that time the rupture was not obtained it would be useless to persevere. 'Under no pretext,' he declared, 'will I recommence a Somme battle.' Finally, if he did not command their confidence, let them appoint a successor. The Ministers were overwhelmed by this extraordinary assurance, and General Nivelle left the conference convinced that the last word had been spoken.\n\nSeveral times in this struggle the name of General Messimy occurs, and always finds itself associated with decided action for good or for ill. We see him in 1911 as War Minister arraigning Michel the Prophet before a Sanhedrin of Generals and dismissing him into the cool shades. We see him on August 25, 1914, again at the centre of power, serving General Joffre with the formal order to assign at least three Army Corps to the defence of Paris, which that General had proposed to declare an 'open town' and to abandon as such. We see him a few days later removed from the War Office by one of the innumerable and to the foreigner baffling shufflings of French politics in the very height and climax of the war's opening convulsion, but not until he had ordered that Paris should be defended, had procured the necessary Army, and had appointed Galli\u00e9ni, instead of his former victim, Michel, to the vital task. Thereafter at once he takes his place at the head of a Brigade and vanishes into the dust and confusion of the conflict, until now on April 5, 1917, two and a half years later, Messimy emerges quite suddenly with an extremely irregular letter which he presented to Monsieur Ribot. This letter marshalled all the arguments against the offensive. 'Prisoners yes, guns yes, a narrow band of territory of perhaps 10 or 12 kilometres; but at an outrageous cost, and without strategic results. Urgent conclusion\u2014give without losing an hour the order to delay the attack till the weather improves.' These views he declared were written 'almost under the dictation of Micheler,' and represented the conviction of the 'most famous Chiefs of the French Army.'\n\nBut now the hour was imminent. The vast preparations were everywhere moving forward to explosion-point. The British Cabinet had been won over. The British Headquarters had been persuaded. The co-operation of England, the great Ally, had by a tremendous effort been obtained, and once obtained would be given with crude and downright force. To resist the plan, to dismiss the Commander, meant not only a Ministerial and a Parliamentary crisis\u2014possibly fatal to the Government\u2014but it also meant throwing the whole plan of campaign for the year into the melting-pot, and presumably, though not certainly resigning the initiative to the Germans. So Nivelle and Painlev\u00e9, these two men whose highest ambitions had both been newly and almost simultaneously gratified, found themselves in the most unhappy positions which disillusioned mortals can occupy: the Commander having to dare the utmost risks with an utterly sceptical Chief behind him; the Minister having to become responsible for a frightful slaughter at the bidding of a General in whose capacity he did not believe, and upon a military policy of the folly of which he was justly convinced. Such is the pomp of power!\n\nI shall not attempt to describe the course either of the French offensive which began on April 16 nor of the brilliant preliminary operation by which the British Army at the Battle of Arras captured the whole of the Vimy Ridge. Numerous excellent accounts\u2014French, English and German\u2014are extant. It will here be sufficient to say that the French troops attacked in unfavourable weather with their customary gallantry. On a portion of the main front attacked they penetrated to a depth of 3 kilometres; they took between the 16th and the 20th, 21,000 prisoners and 183 guns, lost over 100,000 soldiers and failed to procure any strategic decision. It was only indeed on the fronts of Moronvillers and Soissons-Craonne, added by Nivelle to the attack after the documents captured by the enemy had actually been written, that surprise and success were alike achieved. By the evening of the 16th Nivelle's high hopes and confidence had withered, and his orders for the resumption of battle on the 17th implied not merely tactical modifications but the substitution of far more moderate strategic aims.\n\nThe later phases of the battle were in some respects more successful than its beginning; nor were the losses of the French so disproportionate to those of the Germans as in the Joffre offensives. In fact the Nivelle offensive was the least costly, both actually and relatively to the enemy's loss, of any ever undertaken by the French. But the General could never escape from the consequences of his sanguine declarations. Again and again he had affirmed that, unless the rupture was immediate and total 'within twenty-four or forty-eight hours,' it would be useless to continue the operation. He had predicted such a rupture with many circumstances of detail. Almost everyone had doubted before. Now all doubts were certainties. The slaughter, woeful to the shrunken manhood of France, was fiercely exaggerated. Disturbances broke out among the troops, and in the capital a storm of fury arose against the General. His wish to convert the great operation into a more modest enterprise was brushed aside. On April 29 P\u00e9tain became, as Chief of the General Staff, the adviser of the French Cabinet on the whole conduct of the military operations.\n\nA peculiar situation followed the collapse of Nivelle's offensive. The British Army had, as we have seen, already entered with vigour and success upon their very important part in the general plan. The victory of Arras, with its capture of the Vimy Ridge, thirteen thousand prisoners and two hundred guns, had been achieved without undue sacrifice. Haig had originally intended to close these operations after the capture of Monchy-le-Preux and to begin as soon as possible the attempt to clear the coastal sector by the capture of the Messines and Passchendaele ridges. But the conditions prevailing in the French Army and in Paris were such that it was thought dangerous to relax even for a few weeks the pressure upon the enemy. The continuance of the British attack was however very costly, and unrewarded by any real success. At an early stage the Germans developed a new method of defence. Holding their front system of trenches with few men, they kept strong forces intact close at hand, and by heavy counter-attacks independently launched they robbed, in nearly every case, the British of their initial gains.\n\nThe Prime Minister was himself deeply committed by his facile acceptance of the Nivelle schemes to the offensive mood. He showed himself resolute to persevere. The British Army should be thrown ungrudgingly into the battle of attrition, and every effort must be made to induce the French to exert themselves unceasingly to the utmost. General Headquarters thus found in Mr. Lloyd George at this juncture a strong supporter. His action cannot be judged apart from the situation. The hour was tragic. The U-boat sinkings for April, surpassing all previous records, had reached the total of 800,000 tons. The fatal curve was still rising, and in British minds it dominated everything. 'Let the armies fight while time remained.' Or in Lord Fisher's challenging phrase 'Can the Army win the war before the Navy loses it?' Prime Minister, Commander-in-Chief and Sir William Robertson proceeded together to Paris, and in conference on May 4 and 5, Mr. Lloyd George addressed to Messieurs Ribot, Painlev\u00e9 and General P\u00e9tain some of the most strenuous exhortations to continue the offensive that have ever passed between Allies. The whole proceedings of the conference have been published by Mermeix in one of his excellent books. They form an astonishing chapter in Anglo-French relations and in the life of Mr. Lloyd George.\n\nSir William Robertson sternly demanded a continuance of the offensive, and an agreement on this was reached among the Generals. Then Mr. Lloyd George began. 'We have wished,' he said, 'to make sure that there was agreement between us on the general principle of continuing the offensive with all our resources and with all our energies.' Speaking in the presence of Nivelle and championing his case against his own Government, 'we have no need,' he went on, 'to know the details which concern particularly those who have the direct responsibility for the military operations. We prefer that Generals shall keep their plans of execution to themselves. When plans are put on paper for communication to Ministers, it is rare that the Ministers are the only ones to know them. We do not seek to know the precise plan of attack nor the number of guns or divisions engaged. It is essential that these details remain secret. In England we do not ask such questions. Besides, General Robertson does not encourage us to ask them. We treat him with the respect which he deserves and we refrain from indiscreet curiosity.' Under this allusion Ribot and Painlev\u00e9 both interrupted to declare themselves in agreement with the rule that apart from general principles and the outline of the plan everything must rest with the Generals alone. Mr. Lloyd George continued: 'In the name of the British Government we declare to you that we approve the military protocol which General Robertson has just read. But there must be no doubt about the sense of this document. Do we mean by an offensive an offensive limiting numbers to two or three divisions, or an offensive of great armies like that which Marshal Haig has launched before Arras? After full consideration the British War Cabinet ask of its French colleagues to push the offensive during the course of this year with all the force which our two armies are capable.'\n\nHe proceeded to dilate upon the results of the offensive so far as it had gone. 'The highest hopes had not been realized, but without hopes, even beyond what is possible, how shall we find the indispensable impetus of war? In spite of all, we have taken 45,000 prisoners, 450 guns, 800 mitrailleuses, and we secured 200 square kilometres. Supposing it was the Germans who had obtained these results, how great would have been our own discouragement! We ought not to leave the enemy a single moment of rest. If we stopped our offensive or if we limited ourselves to small demonstrations the Germans will say the Allies are beaten and by going on sinking ships we shall starve England and render the continuation of the war impossible.' He concluded by urging the most extreme intensity of action throughout the whole summer. The French Premier responded to this objurgation with some reserve. He undertook to continue the offensive, subject to not squandering the reserves of France. He expressed admiration of the resolute language of Mr. Lloyd George, with which his own sentiments accorded. Painlev\u00e9 also declared that the battle would continue with all possible energy. 'We have kept our promises and done our part,' was Mr. Lloyd George's final remark, 'and we are confident you will keep yours.'\n\nThese undertakings extorted in full conference from the French Government by the imperious Welshman did not accord either with the final decision of the French Staff or the facts of the case. The battle was indeed continued, and during the next fortnight both Craonne and the Chemin des Dames were captured. But upon the very day of the conference in Paris, there had occurred a deeply disquieting incident. A French division ordered into the line refused to march. The officers succeeded in recalling the soldiers to their duty, and the division took part in the fighting without discredit. It was the first drop before the downpour.\n\nThe demoralization of the French Army was proceeding apace. Want of confidence in their leader, cruel losses and an active defeatist propaganda had produced an intense spasm throughout its ranks. Mutinies\u2014some of a very dangerous character\u2014occurred in sixteen separate Army Corps. Some of the finest troops were involved. Divisions elected councils. Whole regiments set out for Paris to demand a Peace by negotiation and more home leave. A Russian force of about 15,000 Infantry had before the Revolution been sent to be armed and equipped in France. These men were affected by the political developments in their own country. They had put it to the vote whether they should take part in the battle of April 16, and had decided by a majority to do so. They were used by the French in a ruthless manner, and nearly 6,000 had been killed or wounded. The survivors went into open revolt. One sentence in their Manifesto reveals the propaganda of a master hand. 'We have been told,' so the complaint begins, 'that we have been sent to France to pay for munitions sold to Russia.' It was not until prolonged artillery fire had been employed against these troops that they were reduced to submission and disbanded.\n\nThe spirit of the French nation was not unequal to this perilous trial. On May 15, Nivelle refusing to resign was dismissed, and P\u00e9tain became Commander-in-Chief. Loyal troops surrounded those who had fallen from their duty. Old Territorials, the fathers of families, pleaded with the infuriated linesmen. The disorders were pacified or suppressed. Over all a veil of secrecy was thrown so impenetrable that though scores of thousands of Frenchmen were concerned, no whisper ever reached the enemy, and whatever information was imparted to Sir Douglas Haig long remained buried in the bosom of his immediate staff. P\u00e9tain was of all others fitted to the healing task. In a period of several months he visited a hundred divisions of the Army, addressed the officers and men, heard grievances and complaints, mitigated the severities of the service, increased the leave of the soldiers, and diminished by every skilful shift the fighting on the French front. He thus restored by the end of the year the morale and discipline of that sorely tried, glorious Army upon whose sacrifices the liberties of Europe had through three fearful campaigns mainly depended.\n\n# CHAPTER XII\n\n# AT THE MINISTRY OF MUNITIONS\n\nI rejoin the Government\u2014Munitions Supply\u2014The Admiralty Claims\u2014The Limiting Factors\u2014Reorganization of the Ministry of Munitions\u2014The Munitions Council\u2014The Work of the Munitions Council\u2014Sir James Stevenson\u2014My Memorandum of November 9, 1916\u2014The Attack by Armoured Vehicles\u2014Scale and Intensity\u2014Futility of Pure Attrition\u2014Six Forms of War Machinery\u2014Blasting Power and Moving Power\u2014The Fateful Issue.\n\nOn July 16, 1917, the Prime Minister invited me to join the new Government. He proposed to me either the Ministry of Munitions or the newly created Air Ministry, with the proviso that if I chose the latter, he must have till the afternoon to make certain personal rearrangements in the Administration. I said at once that I preferred Munitions; and the matter was settled in as many words as I here set down.\n\nThe appointment was announced the next morning. There was an outcry among those who at that time had accustomed themselves to regard me with hostility. An immediate protest was made by the Committee of the National Union of Conservative Associations, and an influential deputation of Unionist Members presented themselves to the leader of the Party in strong complaint. Mr. Lloyd George had however prepared the ground with his accustomed patience. Lord Northcliffe was on a mission to the United States, and appeased. Sir Edward Carson and General Smuts were warm advocates. The group of Ministers who had successfully prevented my entering the Government on its formation was no longer intact. Some had been previously placated: the remnant acquiesced. And Mr. Bonar Law, who had always been a friend, returned a very stiff answer to his deputation. I was re-elected for Dundee by a remarkable majority, and took up my duties without delay. Not allowed to make the plans, I was set to make the weapons.\n\nThe internal conditions of munitions supply, and indeed the whole structure of the British Executive, were vastly different from those I had quitted twenty months before, and still more from the days when I was First Lord of the Admiralty. In the first period of the war\u2014indeed almost to the end of 1915\u2014the resources of Britain far exceeded any organization which could employ them. Whatever was needed for the fleets and armies had only to be ordered in good time and on a large enough scale. The chief difficulty was to stretch the mind to a hitherto unimagined size of events. Megalomania was a positive virtue. Indeed, to add a nought, or a couple of noughts, to almost any requisition or plan for producing war supplies would have constituted an act of merit. Now all was changed. Three years of the struggle had engaged very nearly the whole might of the nation. Munition production of every kind was already upon a gigantic scale. The whole island was an arsenal. The enormous national factories which Mr. Lloyd George had planned were just beginning to function. The first difficulties with the Trade Unions about the dilution of labour had been overcome. Hundreds of thousands of women were making shells and fuses cheaper and better than the most skilled craftsmen had done before the war. The keenest spirits in British industry were gathered as State servants in the range of palatial hotels which housed the Ministry of Munitions. The former trickles and streamlets of war supplies now flowed in rivers rising continuously.\n\nNevertheless the demands of the fighting fronts eagerly and easily engulfed all that could be produced. We were in the presence of requirements at once imperative and apparently insatiable; and now at last our ultimate capacity began to come into view. I found myself in a world of 'Limiting Factors' and 'Priorities.' All problems were complicated by the fact that the Admiralty had not been brought within the general sphere of munitions supply. When the munitions crisis of May, 1915, had overwhelmed the War Office and the Liberal Government, the Admiralty had not been found wanting in any important respect. All supplies for the Fleets were at hand or coming forward in abundance in consequence of the orders we had placed at the beginning of the war, and which had received a further expansion during my partnership with Lord Fisher. The Admiralty therefore had been able to retain their separate and privileged position. They had their own great supply departments, their own factories, their own programmes, and their own allegiances. In a period when a general view and a just proportion were the master-keys, they vigorously asserted their claim to be a realm within a realm\u2014efficient, colossal, indispensable, well-disposed, but independent.\n\nIn their view the Navy came first not only in essentials, but in refinements, not only in minima but in precautionary margins. And of all these the Board of Admiralty was the sole judge. Theirs was the first claim upon materials and skilled labour of all kinds. After that had been met, they were genuinely glad that the Armies, the Air Force and, at a considerable interval, the civil population should be adequately maintained. This dominating position was fortified by the grave anxieties of the U-boat campaign, and lost nothing from the virile personality of the new First Lord.\n\nThe career of Sir Eric Geddes during the war had been astonishing. As the General Manager of an important Railway, versed in every detail of its working from the humblest to the highest, he possessed not only the practical organizing power of a skilful business man, but the _quasi_ -official outlook of the head of a great public service. To this he added those qualities of mental and physical energy, of industry, of thoroughness and compulsive force, often successful, always admirable, and never more needed than at this time. He had risen rapidly under Mr. Lloyd George to be one of the principal figures of the Ministry of Munitions in its early days. He had reorganized the railways of the British front in France with the rank and uniform of a Major-General. He had controlled the Supply Departments of the Navy with the rank and uniform of a Vice-Admiral. Now the same hand which had conducted him through these swift and surprising transformations placed him at the head of the Board of Admiralty. He reinforced its particularism with an ability and domineering vigour all his own.\n\nJudged by the truest sense of proportion, the Navy had a right to absolute priority in all that was necessary to grapple with the supreme peril of the U-boat attack, including the vast replacement of the sunken merchant ships. But when such rights were extended to all the other branches of the Naval Service, and even to strengthening the Battle Fleet and increasing its already overflowing resources of stores, guns and ammunition, a serious inroad was made upon what was due to the armies and to the ever-growing service of the air. The War Cabinet, riveted by the U-boat attack and rightly determined to give the Navy all it wanted for the purpose of meeting it, was not found capable of drawing the necessary distinctions between this and less imperious services. In consequence the Grand Fleet absorbed in the final phases of the war a larger share of our resources than was its due, and our war effort in the field was unwarrantably diminished to that extent.\n\nThe principal limiting factors to munitions production with which I was confronted in the autumn of 1917 were four in number, viz., shipping (tonnage), steel, skilled labour and dollars. The last of these had been rendered less acute by the accession of the United States to the Allies. We had already sold a thousand millions sterling of American securities, and had borrowed heavily to feed and equip ourselves, and our Allies, before this decisive event. Our transatlantic credits were practically exhausted at the beginning of 1917. The dollar situation was now somewhat relieved. A door that would otherwise have closed altogether was now held partially open. None the less the limits of the power of purchase both in American and Canadian dollars imposed a restrictive finger on the lay-out of every programme.\n\nThe stringency in shipping was acute. The losses of the U-boat war, the requirements of the armies in every theatre, the food and what remained of the trade of Britain, the needs of the Allies, the increasing desires of the United States, and the importations of all the raw materials of war, had drawn out our Mercantile Marine to its most intense strain. Tonnage therefore was at this period the controlling factor in our production. Steel ranked next to tonnage, and was a more direct measure of war effort. The steel output of Great Britain had already nearly doubled. Mines which would not pay in peace had come into active production. But in the main we depended for iron ore upon the north coast of Spain, and all vessels which carried it ran perilous voyages amid frequent sinkings. In addition we bought finished steel to the utmost limit of our dollars from the United States and Canada, as well as shell castings of every intermediate form.\n\nOf all we produced or obtained the Admiralty took their fill. The prime need was the replacement of merchant ships sunk by submarines. The War Cabinet had approved an ambitious programme of building 3,000,000 tons of mercantile shipping in 1918. This claimed priority even over the innumerable anti-U-boat flotillas. Next came the improved heavy-shell outfits which the disappointing experiences of Jutland were claimed to require. Not till these and other less vital naval demands had been satisfied could the requirements of the British armies for guns, shells, tanks and indispensable subsidiaries be considered. We had also to provide a large proportion of steel for the French shell factories under arrangements we had made early in the war; and to Italy we had to send both steel and coal in serious quantities under agreements, failure in which would have crippled her fighting strength.\n\nLastly, there were the limits fixed by the supply of skilled labour. And here again the Army and the Air Force clashed with the Admiralty at a hundred points. All the most perfect lethal instruments were demanded at once by the three Services, and at the same time ever-increasing numbers of skilled artisans were drawn into the fighting sphere. The ceaseless process of training and dilution steadily expanded our supply. But in spite of the earnest help afforded by all the responsible Labour leaders, Trade Union principles and prejudices made every step delicate. Such were the main features of the task with which I had the honour to be entrusted.\n\nIf I were to attempt to exhaust the details, this chapter would become a volume. We depended, and through us the Allies, upon the sea power which drew from the remotest portions of the globe not only the bulky imports, but all those rare and scarce commodities without which steel cannot be hardened or explosives made, or Science realize its full death-dealing power, or an island people get their daily bread. Some of these aspects will emerge in the narrative.\n\nThe growth of the Ministry of Munitions had far out-stripped its organization. A year had passed since its creator, Mr. Lloyd George, had moved on to still more intense spheres. The two gifted Ministers who had succeeded him, Mr. Montagu and Dr. Addison, had dealt with the needs as they arose, shouldering one responsibility after another, adding department to department and branch to branch, without altering in essentials the central organization from the form it had assumed in the empirical and convulsive period of creation. All the main and numberless minor decisions still centred upon the Minister himself. I found a staff of 12,000 officials organized in no less than fifty principal departments each claiming direct access to the Chief, and requiring a swift flow of decisions upon most intricate and inter-related problems. I set to work at once to divide and distribute this dangerous concentration of power.\n\nUnder a new system the fifty departments of the Ministry were grouped into ten large units each in charge of a head who was directly responsible to the Minister. These ten heads of groups of departments were themselves formed into a Council like a Cabinet. The Members of the Council were charged with dual functions: first, to manage their group of departments; secondly, to take a general interest in the whole business of the Ministry. They were to develop a 'Council sense,' and not to regard themselves as confined to their own special sphere. Each group of departments was denoted by a letter. Thus D was design, G guns, F finance, P projectiles, X explosives, and so on. By ringing the changes upon these letters committees could be formed exactly adapted to handle any particular topic, while the general movement of business was held firmly together by means of a co-ordinating or 'Clamping' committee. The 'big business men' who now formed the Council were assisted by a strong cadre of Civil Servants, and I obtained for this purpose from the Admiralty my old friends Sir William Graham Greene and Mr. Masterton-Smith. Thus we had at once the initiative, drive, force and practical experience of the open competitive world coupled with those high standards of experience, of official routine, and of method, which are the qualifications of the Civil Service.\n\nThe new organization was announced to the public on August 18 in a memorandum from which the following paragraphs are taken:\u2014\n\n'.... In the fourth year of the war, we are no longer tapping the stored-up resources of national industry or mobilizing them and applying them for the first time to war. The magnitude of the effort and of the achievement approximates continually to the limits of possibility. Already in many directions the frontiers are in sight. It is therefore necessary not simply to expand, but to go back over ground already covered, and by more economical processes, by closer organization, and by thrifty and harmonious methods, to glean and gather a further reinforcement of war power.\n\n'It is necessary for this purpose that the Minister of Munitions should be aided and advised by a Council formally established. The time has come to interpose between more than fifty separate departments on the one hand and the Minister on the other, an organism which in the main will play a similar part and serve similar needs as the Board of Admiralty or the Army Council. It has been decided therefore to form the departments of the Ministry into ten groups, classified as far as possible by kindred conditions, placing in superintendence over each group an experienced officer of the Ministry, and to form these officers into a Council for the transaction of business of all kinds in accordance with the general policy which the Minister receives from the Cabinet.' Here is my Council as it began:\u2014\n\n_Financial Secretary._ \u2014Sir LAMING WORTHINGTON-EVANS.\n\n_Parliamentary Secretary._ \u2014Mr. KELLAWAY.\n\nGROUPS OF DEPARTMENTS.\n\nF. _Finance._ \u2014Sir HERBERT HAMBLING.\n\nD. _Design._ \u2014Major-General the Hon. FRANCIS BINGHAM.\n\nS. _Steel and Iron._ \u2014Mr. JOHN HUNTER.\n\nM. _Materials._ \u2014Sir ERNEST MOIR.\n\nX. _Explosives._ \u2014Sir KEITH PRICE.\n\nP. _Projectiles, etc._ \u2014Sir JAMES STEVENSON.\n\nG. _Guns._ \u2014Sir GLYNN WEST.\n\nE. _Engines._ \u2014Sir ARTHUR DUCKHAM.\n\nA. _Allies._ \u2014Sir FREDERICK BLACK, later Sir CHARLES ELLIS.\n\nL. _Labour._ \u2014Sir STEPHENSON KENT.\n\nTHE SECRETARIAT.\n\n( _At a later date._ )\n\nR. _Requirements and Statistics._ \u2014Mr. LAYTON.\n\n_War Office Representative._ \u2014Major-General FURSE.\n\nW. _Trench Warfare and Inventions._ \u2014Major-General SEELY.\n\nThe relief was instantaneous. I was no longer oppressed by heaps of bulky files. Every one of my ten Councillors was able to give important final decisions in his own sphere. The daily Council meeting kept them in close relation with each other and with the general scheme; while the system of committees of councillors enabled special questions to be brought to speedy-conclusion. Once the whole organization was in motion it never required change. Instead of struggling through the jungle on foot I rode comfortably on an elephant whose trunk could pick up a pin or uproot a tree with equal ease, and from whose back a wide scene lay open.\n\nI confined myself to the assignment and regulation of work, to determining the emphasis and priority of particular supplies, to the comprehensive view of the war programmes, and to the initiation of special enterprises. After five months' experience of the new system I was able to say, 'I practically always approve a Council Committee report exactly as it comes. I think I have hardly ever altered a word. I read each report through with great attention and see the decision on the question, which I know is ever so much better than I could have produced myself, if I had studied it for two whole days.'\n\nAt the Ministry of Munitions I worked with incomparably the largest and most powerful staff in my experience. Here were gathered the finest business brains of the country working with might and main and with disinterested loyalty for the common cause. Many if not most of the leading men stood at the head of those industries which were most expanded by war needs. They therefore resigned altogether the immense fortunes which must inevitably have come to them, had they continued as private contractors. They served the State for honour alone. They were content to see men of lesser standing in their own industries amass great wealth and extend the scale of their business. In the service of the Crown there was a keen rivalry among them; and the position of Member of the Council with its general outlook was deeply prized. According to the Statute constituting the office, the whole authority rested with the Minister; but in practice the Council had a true collective responsibility.\n\nIf in these pages I dwell with pride upon the extraordinary achievements of the Munitions Council in the field of supply, it is not to appropriate the credit. That belongs in the first instance to Mr. Lloyd George, who gathered together the great majority of these able men, and whose foresight in creating the national factories laid the foundations for subsequent production. It belongs also to the men who did the work, who quarried and shaped the stones, and to whose faithful, resourceful, untiring contrivance and exertion the Army and the nation owe a lasting debt.\n\nIt would be difficult and invidious for me to single out individuals among those who are still living. Their services have not been unrewarded by the Crown. But there is one who has gone from us to whom this account offers me the opportunity of paying tribute.\n\nJames Stevenson was the most ingenious and compulsive manager and master of difficulties\u2014material or personal\u2014with whom I have ever served. Whether at the Ministry of Munitions or after the war when he accompanied me to the War Office and to the Colonial Office, no task however laborious, no problem however baffling, once it had been remitted to him, was ever a source of subsequent difficulty or complaint. With him, with his close colleague, Sir Arthur Duckham, and with the young, profound Professor Layton, who assembled and presented the weekly statistics, I was brought into the closest daily contact. These three constituted for me the mainspring, both of action and of review, by which the central control of the immense organization was exercised. Stevenson is dead. He died at fifty, worn out, as thoroughly as a brave soldier in the trenches, by his exertions in the public service. He left behind him a reputation, sustained by the opinion of Ministers of many Departments and of all Parties, for ability, integrity and devotion which should afford an example and an inspiration to the business men of Britain. To the deep appreciation of his work and gifts declared by those in a position to judge, I wish to add my testimony.\n\nThe relief afforded by the new organization in the general business of supply gave me time to pursue my ideas upon mechanical attack. After the apparition of the tanks at the taking of Flers a year earlier, in September, 1916, and in the disappointment with which the end of the Somme battle oppressed the Cabinet, I had, though in nominal opposition, some credit in official circles. At the wish of the Minister of Munitions I had written a paper upon 'The greater application of mechanical power to the prosecution of an offensive on land.' Mr. Montagu had it printed for the Committee of Imperial Defence and circulated it to the Cabinet.\n\n_November_ 9, 1916.\n\n1. The conditions of this war deny to the stronger power, whether on sea or land, its legitimate offensive scope. In all previous wars the stronger army was able to force matters to a final decision. The great developments of defensive power now prevent this.\n\n2. We shall never have a superiority in numbers sufficient to triumph by itself. At present the fighting forces are much too evenly balanced. We have perhaps a superiority of five to four in fighting formations on all fronts, but the enemy's advantage of being on interior lines more than covers this. Even if we have a superiority of six to four, that will be insufficient, and we are not likely to see a greater superiority than this for a very long time.\n\n3. Frontal attacks were abandoned forty years ago on account of the severity of fire. Now that the severity of fire has enormously increased and is constantly increasing, they are forced upon us in the absence of flanks.\n\n4. Two methods of frontal attack have been tried. First the unlimited, as at Loos and Champagne, where the troops were given a distant objective behind the enemy's lines and told to march on that; and second, the limited form as tried by the Germans at Verdun, and by ourselves and the French on the Somme. Neither produces decisive results. The unlimited simply leads to the troops being brought up against uncut wire and undamaged machine guns. The limited always enables the enemy to move his artillery away, and to sell a very little ground at a heavy price in life, gaining time all the while to construct new defences in the rear.\n\n8. An attack depends on two processes\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Blasting power and\n\n( _b_ ) Moving power;\n\nblasting power is very well provided for in the constantly improving supplies of guns and shells, but moving power is in its infancy.\n\n9. Two things stop the offensive movement of armies\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Bullets and fragments of shell which destroy the motive power of men, and\n\n( _b_ ) The confusion of the conflict.\n\n15. A method of overcoming these difficulties exists. It may be shortly described as 'the attack by armoured vehicles.' I cannot pretend to do more than outline it and suggest it. I am not an inventor or designer. I have no means of testing and elaborating these ideas. Evidently they require study, experiment, and at least six months' preparation.\n\nBut now is the time in the winter to organize and perfect this method of attack. The 'Tanks' have shown the way. But they are only a beginning.\n\nA year had passed. Nothing had been done. Mr. Asquith's Government had fallen, Mr. Montagu was at the India Office and I had succeeded his successor at the Ministry of Munitions. I had therefore the chance and the duty of giving effect in one form or another to the project of a mechanical battle which I had advocated when a private member.\n\nIn the interval the tanks had been consistently misused by the generals, and their first prestige was markedly diminished. The War Office and General Headquarters had demanded from the Ministry of Munitions guns and shells on the basis of a thirty weeks' continuous British offensive in 1918. The sketch programmes which I found upon taking office were all framed on this assumption. No one contemplated such an event as a German offensive. The only question open was what was the best method of attacking the enemy. I drew up the following paper in the light of these acceptances.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_October_ 21, 1917.\n\n1. In deciding upon the Munitions Programme for 1918, the first question to be answered is, 'What is the War Plan? When is it to reach its climax? Have we the possibility of winning in 1918, and if so, how are we going to do it?...\n\n2. It is obvious that the defeat and breaking-up of the German armies in the West afford the best, the simplest and the swiftest method of arriving at decisive victory. The only question is, 'Have we the power to do it?' It would be a thousands pities to discard this direct and obvious method of victory in favour of weaker, more roundabout, protracted and far less decisive strategy, unless we are convinced that we have not the power to conquer on the Western Front....\n\n3. Ever since the autumn of 1914 we have heard the same accounts of the exhaustion of the enemy's man-power, of the decline of his morale, and of how near we stand, if we only make the effort, to the supreme and final result. Every year we have in consequence made exertions on the greatest possible scale, and every year the close of the campaign has seen the enemy's front, however dinted, yet unbroken. But this in itself is by no means conclusive; for the effects of our efforts upon the enemy have been cumulative, the exhaustion of his man-power and the deterioration of his morale have been progressive; our superiority in munitions of all kinds has continually augmented; the offensive power of the British army has continually increased; that of the French is still formidable. The German armies in the West, on the other hand, appear to have completely lost their offensive power. The Germans have now been for four campaigns extended to their maximum war effort. They have maintained in continual battle upon all fronts armies of four or five millions of men. The very efficiency of their organization enabled them to strain themselves to their fullest compass from the outset, and the draft which they have made upon the life-energies of their whole nation is proportionately equal to and possibly greater than the draft which has been made upon the life-energies of France. We can measure the effect of the strain upon the French; and this affords perhaps the best guide to the actual remaining fighting power of Germany. Therefore it may well be that conclusions drawn from our disappointments in four successive campaigns would not apply to the fifth, and that the assertions and hopes that have proved unjustified in four successive campaigns might be vindicated in the end. For this reason it is imperative not to abandon the Western effort and resign ourselves to the formidable dangers involved in the prolongation of the war into 1919, without the most searching consideration of all our resources.\n\n4. If we are to conquer in the West, we must for that purpose provide for the concentration of all our methods of attack upon the enemy simultaneously at the decisive period....\n\n5. Success can only be achieved by the _scale and intensity_ of our offensive effort within a limited period. We are seeking to conquer the enemy's army and not his position; and one stroke must follow another so rapidly that no breathing space for recovery or recuperation is afforded. Unless the effort reaches and is maintained at the required degree of _intensity_ or on a sufficiently large scale, the campaign will be indecisive like all the others, however successful and profitable individual battles may have been. It is this principle of the intensity of the effort during a culminating period which must govern all our calculations. With armies so large as those which confront each other in the West, and with numerical superiority on our side which cannot be large, and may well be non-existent, a succession of heavy blows at intervals during the campaigning season may, however successful, result only in reciprocal losses without substantially altering the strategic situation. A policy of pure attrition between armies so evenly balanced cannot lead to a decision. It is not a question of wearing down the enemy's reserves, but of wearing them down so rapidly that recovery and replacement of shattered divisions is impossible. In a struggle between, say, 250 divisions on one side and 200 on the other, the small margin of superiority possessed by the stronger cannot be made to tell decisively before the winter respite is reached unless the war effort of the offensive reaches a far higher degree of general intensity than has hitherto been found possible. In other words, our attack must be of such a character that a division once used up _on either side_ cannot reach the battle-front again during the culminating period in time to influence the conclusion. Unless this problem can be solved satisfactorily, we shall simply be wearing each other out on a gigantic scale and with fearful sacrifices, without ever reaping the reward.\n\n6. It is clear that in 1918 we cannot hope for any large numerical superiority in men. The relief which will be afforded... to the German armies in the West by the collapse of Russia must be set against the reinforcement we shall receive from the United States. I have witnessed with profound disappointment the slow and frugal development of American fighting strength in France. From the day when America entered the war, the stream of American manhood, trained, half-trained, or untrained, to Europe should have been continuous, and all the available means of transportation should have been assembled and continually used to their utmost capacity\u2014the men, of course, being properly trained either on one side of the Atlantic or the other. The melancholy decision to adopt a different form of armament, both for the infantry and artillery, has also seriously retarded the development of American war power. This is now being realized by the American authorities, but too late. We cannot therefore count on any great superiority in numbers on the Western Front in 1918. Our calculations must proceed upon an assumption that there will be no decisive preponderance in the number of formed divisions or in the number of men in the line or in the reserves available within the year. We are however entitled to count upon a marked and possibly increasing superiority in quality and morale. There remain in addition only the great province of war machinery and the resources of superior generalship operating through war machinery. Will these suffice?\n\n7. There are six principal forms of machinery by which our infantry on the Western Front (slightly superior in numbers, markedly superior in quality) may be aided, viz.:\u2014\n\nArtillery preponderance,\n\nAir supremacy,\n\nRailway or mechanical mobility,\n\nTrench-mortar development,\n\nTank development,\n\nGas development.\n\nIn what way can these be combined and applied by generalship so as to produce the maximum intensity of offensive power during the culminating period?...\n\n# V.\n\n25. It should not be supposed that victory in the West depends indispensably on a large superiority in numbers. When one army, partly from superiority in numbers, partly from superiority in morale, feels itself decidedly the stronger, it seeks to assume the offensive. What is lacking is an effective method of the offensive. A very large superiority in numbers would of course be one way, but we have no prospect of getting this. Three or four times the artillery we have at present would be another method; but there is no prospect of getting this in the immediate future. Still, if a means could be found whereby the stronger and better army could advance continuously _and at a sufficient speed_ on a front of twenty or thirty miles, a general retirement would unquestionably be forced upon the German armies.\n\n26. How then are we to find this method of continuous offensive, which is the inherent right of the stronger and better army, and the absence of which is the sole cause of the prolongation of the war? We have at present only the artillery. If you concentrate the bulk of the artillery of a great nation on a narrow battle-front and feed it with the whole industry of the people, it is possible to pound and pulverize certain areas of ground, so that a limited advance can certainly be made. But the artillery is so local in its action, so costly in its use, and so ponderous in its movement that the rate of the advance has not hitherto led to any decisive strategic results. It is clear therefore that the artillery alone is not sufficient, and will never be sufficient, to impart to the stronger army the certain and irresistible means of advancing which it requires. It is becoming apparent that the 'blasting power' of the artillery is only one of the factors required for a satisfactory method of the offensive. 'Moving power' must be developed equally with 'blasting power.' 'Moving power' deserves as sustained a study, as extensive an application, and as large a share of our resources as have hitherto been given to the 'blasting power' of the artillery.\n\n'Moving power,' in the shape of railways, motor transport, light railways and tramways, has already attained large dimensions up to the edge of the battlefield; but 'moving power' _on the battlefield itself_ is practically limited to the arms and legs of human beings. This is not enough, and it never will be enough, and until it can be supplemented _on the battlefield_ by machinery of one kind or another which can be brought into being and kept in working order in spite of intense battle conditions, the stronger army will remain robbed of its method of advance.\n\n29. If we may assume a stronger and better army equally equipped with 'blasting power' and 'moving power,' and capable of operating continuously on a front sufficiently broad, its success would not necessarily be dependent upon the relative numbers of troops available on either side in the whole theatre of war. Whatever his strength in other parts, the enemy would be under a continual imperative obligation of arresting this offensive movement on a given front. Someone must stop the tiger. If the rate of advance was sufficiently rapid, lack of a great superiority in numbers would not paralyse the attackers; and even bringing superior numbers to the spot would not help the defenders. For the defensive, even more than for the offensive, the numbers of men which can be usefully employed in given areas of ground is severely limited. Just as it may be said that the 'intensity' of the offensive all along the front should be such as to make the whole line rock and keep the enemy in continual movement and uncertainty, so the rate of progress of the attack on the main battlefield and the obstruction of communications behind it should be sufficient to prevent reinforcement before essential points are lost.\n\n30. When we see these great armies in the West spread out in thin lines hundreds of miles long and organized in depth only at very few points, it is impossible to doubt that if one side discovered, developed, and perfected a definite method of advancing continuously, albeit upon a fairly limited front, a decisive defeat would be inflicted upon the other. If therefore we could by organized mechanical processes and equipment impart this faculty to our armies in 1918 or in 1919, it would be an effective substitute for a great numerical preponderance in numbers. What other substitute can we look for? Where else is our superiority coming from?\n\n31. A survey of these mechanical possibilities together with a computation of our resources compared to those of the enemy should afford the best means of judging the fateful question already postulated, viz., whether we have the means of overthrowing finally the enemy's main armies on the Western Front during the campaign of 1918....\n\n# CHAPTER XIII\n\n# THE MUNITIONS BUDGET\n\nCompeting Needs and Rival Authorities\u2014The Priorities Committee\u2014Resources and Demands\u2014Duplication and Waste of Effort\u2014Over-insurance\u2014Memorandum on the Munitions Budget\u2014Tonnage: Iron Ore\u2014Allocation of Steel\u2014Distribution of Labour\u2014Explosives\u2014Chemical Warfare\u2014Guns and Ammunition\u2014The Rival Artilleries on the Western Front\u2014Aeroplanes; Tanks; Dollars\u2014Summary of Recommendations\u2014Ship Plates and the Tank Programme\u2014An Unexpected Cut in Tonnage\u2014Efforts to Retrieve the Loss\u2014Letter to the Shipping Controller\u2014Pressure on the French\u2014Recasting the Programme\u2014A Note to the War Cabinet\u2014All ends well.\n\nBy the middle of October the Munitions Council had completed a comprehensive study of the whole of our material resources to which I had directed their efforts. I was therefore able to frame the Munitions Budget for the coming year. The difficulties of this task far exceeded those of the budgets for which Chancellors of the Exchequer are usually responsible. The enormous variety of needs for which provision must be made could be surmounted by systematized collective study. But the fierce rivalry of so many authorities, and the dependence of our programmes upon the decisions of others, made the work complicated and baffling in the last degree.\n\nIn one quarter of our horizon stood the Shipping Controller, Sir Joseph Maclay, a most able Glasgow shipowner with deep knowledge, a charming personality and the unbounded confidence of Mr. Bonar Law. He estimated the maximum tonnage available for all purposes; and his figures, framed in a conservative and Caledonian spirit, were accepted by the War Cabinet. In another quarter stood the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Bonar Law, one of the all-powerful Triumvirate. He also took, as was his duty, an extremely restrained view of the limits of dollar credits, both in the United States and Canada. To anything we could buy in Britain the Treasury interposed no obstacle; but we could not realize our programmes unless we were able to make very large purchases of steel from the United States, of unfilled shells from Canada and of nitrates from Chili. Thirdly, there arose the Minister of National Service, Sir Auckland Geddes, whose duty it was\u2014outside a large field over which the Ministry of Munitions reigned\u2014to apportion all the available man power and to provide the recruits for the fighting services. Last, and not least of all, loomed the portentous figure of Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty, charged with the paramount duties of maintaining the Fleet, of crushing the U-boats and of rebuilding the Mercantile Marine. For these purposes the Admiralty was armed not only with Absolute Priority, but possessed a monopoly control over all the firms with which they were accustomed to deal. This priority was interpreted so harshly that skilled men had to be found on one occasion for potato-peeling machines for the Grand Fleet, while they were actually being withdrawn from making range-finders for the anti-aircraft guns.\n\nThe attitude of the War Office and the Air Ministry towards us was somewhat different. They lived by our supplies, and to that extent were on our side. They not only demanded the supplies on an ever-increasing scale, but they also simultaneously demanded as recruits for the fighting forces the workmen, skilled and unskilled, without which these supplies could not be produced. Against all these potentates the Ministry of Munitions sallied out to do battle. Over everybody sate, as was proper, the War Cabinet, a final court of appeal. But the business of the court was heavily congested, and neither its time nor its temper was unlimited. There was therefore set up in the autumn of 1917 the 'Priorities Committee,' presided over by General Smuts. On this the Departments fought and tore for every ton of steel and freight. Never, I suspect, in all the vicissitudes of his career has General Smuts stood more in need of those qualities of tact and adroitness for which among his many virtues he is renowned.\n\nOne of my difficulties was in having to argue on so many fronts at once. Facts and reasoning used in one direction for one purpose could be quoted in resistance to another. Because I had thought it right on a general view of the situation to urge that strong efforts should be made to re-equip the Italian armies after Caporetto, I was forever confronted with the argument, 'If you can spare all that for the Italians, you cannot be so badly off yourself.' Or again, in the fight to secure a handful of steel plates for the tank programme, we encountered at first the odious statement: 'But the Army doesn't want any more; General Headquarters does not rank them very high in their priorities; they have not done well at Passchendaele; they cannot cope with the mud, etc.'\n\nThe War Cabinet, and particularly the Prime Minister, always took a great interest in tanks. At the end of the year after the Battle of Cambrai this became accentuated. They recorded the most solemn adjurations upon the importance of tank construction with the utmost speed and in the largest numbers. But at the same time they ruled that the Admiralty demand for ship plates for the Mercantile Marine, which was several hundred times greater than would ever be needed for tanks, should retain their super-priority. Since we were unable to overcome Sir Eric Geddes by reason, it became necessary to gorge him with ship plates. This the Munitions Council and Sir John Hunter's steel department soon succeeded in doing. The Admiralty's merchant shipbuilding programme of three million tons in twelve months proved far beyond even their very great and splendid activities. We watched with unsleeping attention the accumulations which soon began of ship plates in every yard. Not until the moment was ripe did we unmask the guilty fact. The effect was decisive. The proud Department condescended to parley, and eventually the modest requirements of the tank programme were satisfied.\n\nSurveying the whole process in retrospect, I have no doubt it was not\u2014apart from the privileged position of the Admiralty\u2014either unhealthy or inefficient. It would have been better, as I vehemently argued, to assign the whole sphere of man-power to the Ministry of National Service and the whole sphere of material to the Ministry of Munitions, and for the War Cabinet to have adjudicated upon the main distribution. The one great blot upon the high economy of the British war effort in the last year of the struggle was the undue and unwarrantable inroads upon the common fund made by the Admiralty. That they accomplished vital tasks cannot be denied. But when a nation is fighting for its life, the honour lies not in securing the lion's share, but in a just apportionment of limited resources.\n\n# DUPLICATION AND WASTE OF EFFORT.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_November_ 6, 1917.\n\nIf we are to realize the full war effort of this country in 1918 and in 1919, it is indispensable that the most searching economy of men and material should be practised in every direction and by every Department; that no services should be duplicated; that no more should be taken for any service, however necessary, than is required; and that one central and superior view should regulate every portion of our defensive and offensive system. Unless we are to be confronted with a failure in munitions and shipbuilding, and with a very serious diminution in our potential war-making capacity, it is necessary that there should be a general stocktaking.\n\nThose members of the War Cabinet or Government who were members of the Committee of Imperial Defence in the years before the war are of course familiar with every aspect of the 'Invasion' argument. I will therefore content myself with drawing attention to a few simple facts.\n\nDuring the early months of the war, especially at the beginning, when Germany had the greatest incentive to try to throw a raiding army across the North Sea, we had as our defence against invasion:\u2014\n\n1. The Fleet, with a margin of eight Dreadnoughts.\n\n2. Our submarines and flotillas.\n\n3. Two, and then one, and finally no regular divisions.\n\n4. The Territorial Army, newly mobilized, with hardly any machine guns, with 15-pounder artillery and scarcely any reserves of ammunition, and gunners almost unskilled.\n\n5. No coast fortifications and only a few guns in open batteries at the defended forts.\n\n6. No mine-fields.\n\n7. Practically no aircraft.\n\n_In these circumstances the Germans did not choose or did not venture to make an oversea attack._\n\nWe now have:\u2014\n\n1. The British Fleet, with a margin of about twenty Dreadnoughts.\n\n2. The American Battle Fleet (the third strongest in the world) if we require it.\n\n3. Enormous mine-fields, covering the German debouches and hampering the movement even of submarine craft.\n\n4. Submarines and flotillas multiplied manifold.\n\n5. The coast-line fortified from end to end with powerful batteries mounted at every port _and still being increased._ Powerful aeroplane forces and a perfect system of coastal watch.\n\n6. A defence scheme devised by Lord French himself, according to the latest experience of this war.\n\n7. A Home Army mostly in its actual battle stations, aggregating a quarter of a million men and supported by a powerful field artillery of upwards of 500 modern guns and howitzers, with boundless supplies of ammunition and enormous numbers of organized mobile or sited machine guns.\n\n8. A million and a quarter other armed and uniformed men behind these.\n\n9. The Volunteers.\n\nSecurity is no doubt vital, but it must be remembered that if the factor of safety is exaggerated in any one part of our organization, other parts may be exposed to fatal peril; and that if our strength is dissipated in making sure three or four times over in one direction, we may fail to have the strength available for the general offensive war, and may consequently be compelled impotently to witness the defeat of our Allies one by one.\n\nThe very serious situation of the war and the impossibility on present lines of securing any effective numerical superiority or any sufficiently large mechanical superiority over the German armies in the field compel me to bring these aspects of our present arrangements to the notice of the War Cabinet.\n\nA few days earlier I had presented the 'Munitions Budget' to the Cabinet. As it covers and explains so many aspects of our war plans and efforts, I reprint it almost in full.\n\nTO THE WAR CABINET.\n\nMUNITIONS BUDGET FOR 1918.  \n(PROVISIONAL.)\n\n_November_ 1, 1917.\n\n1. The foundation of the Munitions Budget is Tonnage; the ground floor is Steel; and the limiting factor in construction is Labour.\n\nThe period covered by this Budget is, broadly speaking, from now to the end of the 1918 offensive, and the figures relate precisely to the twelve months from the 15th November, 1917, to the 15th November, 1918.\n\n2. The following are the principal demands made by the fighting departments upon the Ministry of Munitions for the campaign of 1918 compared with 1917:\u2014\n\n(i) The demand of the War Office for the completion of their programme involving a 40 per cent. further increase in the striking power of the artillery, both in guns and ammunition.\n\n(ii) The demand of the Admiralty for doubled shipbuilding materials.\n\n(iii) The demand of the Air Board for tripled aeronautical supplies.\n\n3. _Tonnage._ \u2014The programmes as proposed require the delivery here of 1,100,000 tons per month for munitions alone ( _i.e._ apart from items for other departments included in our tonnage allocation). To secure this there should be assigned to us for all purposes 1,300,000 tons of shipping a month. I propose to place orders abroad somewhat in advance of this figure. If the shipping falls off, the material ordered will be received more slowly. It is better to have a moderate surplus of orders awaiting shipment than not to have the tonnage fully occupied with vitally needed materials.\n\n4. _Iron Ore._ \u2014More than half our total munitions imports consist of iron ore. The blast furnaces could deal with a monthly importation of 735,000 tons of Spanish and Swedish (mainly hematite) ore, and with a monthly home production of 1,500,000 tons of (mainly basic) ore. On the above tonnage basis I count only on getting 635,000 tons of ore, viz.: 550,000 tons from Spain, and 85,000 tons from Sweden. There is a good reserve of Swedish ore, which can be drawn upon in case of need. I estimate that the home production will average over 1,500,000 tons a month.\n\n5. _Steel._ \u2014On this basis we can produce in the year approximately 8,500,000 tons of finished steel product. Orders are being placed for 1,000,000 tons of steel from the United States (included in our tonnage requirements). Arrangements have also been made with the French and with the Shipping Controller to carry approximately 500,000 tons of French Shell Steel already purchased in America which we should otherwise have had to supply from home sources. Having regard to this rearrangement of supplies it may be said that our steel production in relation to our needs and our commitments to the Allies is equivalent to 10,000,000 tons. Out of this every requirement must be met, and if through shipping shrinkage the total production is reduced, all programmes will be affected.\n\n6. _Allocation of Steel._ \u2014Shipbuilding is the first charge on our steel resources. Orders have been given that the rolling mills are to be kept constantly fed to their full and increasing capacity, and that sections and other shipbuilding components shall be supplied in their proper proportion to the output of plates assigned to the Admiralty, until such time as the shipyards are provided with material to their full capacity. An agreement has been reached with the Admiralty after a full disclosure of figures whereby a portion of our rolling-mill production, varying from 7,000 to 8,500 tons a week, shall be reserved for all non-Admiralty services (including the War Office and the civilian needs of the country) and the whole of the rest of the production assigned to Admiralty needs. We have already succeeded in raising the Admiralty supply of plates from 16,000 tons a week in July to an average of 20,000 tons a week at the end of September, and subject to their capacity we shall still further raise them gradually up to at least 27,000 tons a week in October, 1918. This with other shipbuilding material to be supplied during the period under forecast is equivalent to a construction of from 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 tons of merchant shipping in addition to warship construction. The twelve months' Admiralty allocation of steel aggregates approximately 2,000,000 tons.\n\nThe next principal draft on our Steel Budget is shells. On the programme demanded by the War Office this requires approximately 2,500,000 tons for Great Britain.\n\nThe requirements of the Allies for steel of all classes have been cut down to about 700,000 tons in the year, chiefly by the arrangement to ship 500,000 tons of shell steel from the U.S.A. to France. The other direct munition requirements, including aircraft, guns, military railways, tanks, steel-works extensions, &c., are approximately 2,200,000 tons. The War Office, the India Office, and certain other Departments require approximately 600,000 tons, leaving 1,500,000 tons for construction, machinery, and the so-called civilian services of the country, most of which are intimately related to munitions production.\n\nThese civilian requirements are mostly for the purpose of the maintenance and repair of plant and works in this country. Among these the upkeep of our railways and rolling-stock is the most important. For some considerable time the supplies to meet these demands have been cut down to the lowest possible figure, and if this is continued for much longer the position is likely to become serious. This, with the 500,000 tons of French steel shipped direct from America, balances a steel budget of 10,000,000 tons....\n\n7. _Labour._ \u2014The prospective labour requirements resulting from the preceding Admiralty, War Office, and Aircraft programmes amount in the aggregate to\u2014\n\nSkilled men, 25,000 (10,000 for aircraft).\n\nUnskilled men, 58,000 (40,000 for aircraft and 8,000 for steel works).\n\nWomen, 70,000 (50,000 for aircraft).\n\nIn addition to these demands the Admiralty are asking for 12,500 skilled men and 67,500 unskilled men; the War Office require 15,000 artificers, of whom about 8,000 can be met from among men already in the army, leaving a balance of 7,000, of whom 5,000\u20136,000 have still to be supplied by the Ministry [of Munitions]....\n\nTo meet the demand for skilled men, the Ministry has at its disposal a total of 210,000 transferable men, of whom over 50 per cent. are at present employed on important war work. Even the balance cannot be considered to be immediately available for transfer, inasmuch as a considerable proportion of them are engaged in sugar refineries, collieries, food production, and other indispensable occupations.\n\nNevertheless, the process of dilution is steadily, though slowly, extending, and as industries are accommodating themselves to the war conditions, the productivity of a given quantity of labour tends to rise. Since the March Agreement the Ministry of Munitions have, while continually increasing output, released 53,000 general service men for the army as against 700 released by the Admiralty and 700 from War Office contracts.\n\nI am therefore advised that, so far as the demand for skilled labour for the purely munitions programme is concerned, the requirements can be met without serious dislocation. This is however subject to the three following conditions:\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) A modification of the Admiralty claim that no man can be transferred from the work on which he is at present engaged for the Admiralty.  \nThis demand means in effect that the whole of the skilled labour required for the new shipbuilding programme must be drawn exclusively from Munitions work.\n\n( _b_ ) A severe limitation on the demands of the Army for recruits for artificers corps from among skilled men working on munitions.\n\n( _c_ ) The co-operation of the skilled engineering Unions in a more extensive dilution on war work....\n\nI do not anticipate any difficulty in finding the women required.\n\n8. _Explosives._ \u2014This is even more an explosives war than it is a steel war. Steel is the principal vehicle by which explosives are conveyed to the enemy. The requirements of propellent are limited by the production of shell, but there are other methods, besides those of artillery, of delivering high explosives to the enemy. The capacity of our existing high explosives plant is at present in excess of our shell programme for 1918. It has been arranged to supplement the present system of discharging high explosives by providing up to a maximum 1,000 tons a week of bombs to be dropped from aeroplanes. The possibility of extending the Trench Mortar offensive power of our Army is also being examined. To utilize fully our existing high-explosive plants it is necessary that we should ship from Chile approximately 788,000 tons of nitrates; at present the tonnage for only 600,000 has provisionally been agreed upon.\n\nNew and very serious demands for T.N.T. are also being made by the Admiralty for mines.\n\n9. _Chemical Warfare._ \u2014G.H.Q. has asked that we should add an irritant gas to our lethal and lachrymatory gases. Development of this new branch of chemical warfare will take many months and cannot come fully into play until the end of next year's campaign. Using all possible resources of chemical shell with existing types of chemical, we could supply the army next year with 2\u00bd times the quantity of gas shell supplied in the 1917 campaign.\n\nIf the present scheme for the new gas matures, the whole supply of chemical shell would be four times as great by the end of 1918 as in 1917.\n\n10. _Guns and Ammunition._ \u2014On the above basis of steel and explosives, together with importations of finished shells and components, it will be possible to meet the Commander-in-Chief's full demand both for guns and shells as set out in his letter of the 17th July....\n\n11. Before rejoicing at these facts it is necessary to compare the British, French and German artilleries. During 1917 the French and ourselves have maintained about an equal number of combatants in the line in France, and we have done the harder fighting. The French had however on the 1st October 10,000 guns to our 6,000 guns, ours, on the whole, being heavier and newer. The new French heavy artillery programme is now coming into bearing, and from now on they anticipate very large monthly deliveries. By April, 1918, the French will have 9,000 guns, all modern and steadily increasing. Our comparable figure in the field in France will be approaching 8,000, which is the maximum establishment that our army has at present arranged for. Our infantry will not therefore be quite so well supported with artillery as the French.\n\nThe War Office state that the Germans had in 1917\u2014\n\n| Guns.  \n---|---  \nOn the French front| 12,432  \nOn the Russian front| 5,176  \nBalkans and Italy| 808  \nTotal| 18,416\n\nThe balance on the Western front was as follows:\u2014\n\nFranco-British| 15,969  \n---|---  \nGerman| 12,432\n\nBut though we had a superiority in numbers, the Germans had superior weight of metal. Deducting from each side field guns, in which we are greatly superior, the balance in heavier and more important weapons stood as follows:\u2014\n\nFranco-British| 6,654  \n---|---  \nGerman| 7,568\n\nIf the new British and French programmes are carried out punctually we should have in the West by April, 1918, 17,000 modern and 2,000 older guns with steady increases in prospect.\n\nThe Germans will have their present 12,432 guns, plus\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Any new programme they are making.\n\n( _b_ ) Any of the 5,176 guns they may choose to take from the Russian front.\n\n( _c_ ) Any of the 2,000 or 3,000 guns recently captured from the Russians or Italians.\n\nIt is certain therefore that with our utmost efforts, and under the most favourable conditions, we cannot expect any superiority in guns next year.\n\nIt does not follow however that the ammunition for all the German guns will be as abundant as ours.\n\nNor on the other hand, being on the defensive, need they use it so copiously or continuously.\n\nAll these facts appear to me to be worthy of profound consideration.\n\n12. The most striking deficiency in the British artillery is found in very heavy long-range guns. On the 1st October the position was as follows:\u2014\n\nVery heavy guns (9.2-in. and 12-in.)\u2014\n\nGerman| 180  \n---|---  \nFrench| 175  \nBritish| 6\n\nThere is only one source to which we can look to improve the long-range heavy battery at the disposal of our troops, viz., the Navy.\n\nIf we could receive from Naval sources and from our Fortresses during the next six months 100 heavy guns (including 30 already promised), _i.e._ 14-inch, new 13\u00b75-inch, or 12-inch of all marks, and 100 medium guns, _i.e._ 10-inch and 9\u00b72-inch, it would be possible, without prejudice to the programmes, to make a very substantial addition to the British long-range heavy artillery.\n\nI ask that this may be earnestly examined.\n\n13. _Aeroplanes._ \u2014It is understood that the programme of the Royal Flying Corps provides for the equipment of the following:\u2014\n\nBy December, 1917,| 85 active squadrons.  \n---|---  \nBy March, 1918,| 106 active squadrons.  \nBy June, 1918,| 149 active squadrons.  \nBy December, 1918,| 200 active squadrons.\n\nThis programme, together with a total of 3,000 aeroplanes required by the R.N.A.S. by August, 1918, and 9,500 by the R.F.C. for training purposes, involves a total production by that date of between 27,000 and 28,000 machines of all kinds. In order to obtain this result our output in the summer of 1918 should be at the rate of 2,700 per month....\n\n14. _Tanks._ \u2014Tanks have never yet been used in numbers under conditions favourable to their action. Nor have we ever yet had a sufficiently reliable kind of tank, nor nearly enough of them. If they have held their own in 1917 it has been under adverse circumstances, both in their production here and their use in France.\n\nIn consequence the army consider that they cannot allocate more than 18,500 men to the tank corps. This limits the number of fighting tanks required to an establishment of 1,080 with ample maintenance and a certain number of supply and gun-carrying tanks.\n\nThere will be no difficulty in supplying this requirement, but the new designs will not be available in full numbers until July, 1918. Thereafter considerable expansions would be possible. The demand made by tanks on steel and skilled labour is small and does not sensibly affect either shipbuilding or aeroplanes.\n\n15. _Dollars._ \u2014We have been forced by the shortage of Canadian and American dollars to reduce our orders in Canada and the United States to considerably lower figures than hitherto. Shell-producing and explosives plants have had to be demobilized in Canada almost as soon as they had been called into being, and thus we have had to do without most valuable additions to our resources for which labour and material were available. We cannot buy more than 8 millions sterling a month on the average in 1918 from the United States, instead of an average of 13 millions in the first half of 1917; nor more than 6 millions a month in Canada, compared to 9\u00bd millions. This curtailment of our resources must be borne in mind.\n\n16. To sum up, the present adverse factors to munitions production are as follows:\u2014\n\n(i) The increasing demands of the Admiralty.\n\n(ii) The general shortage of labour (especially skilled labour) and the risk of pressing labour hard at the present time.\n\n(iii) The curtailment of our orders in Canada and the United States on financial grounds.\n\n(iv) The low level to which we have been compelled to restrict our iron ore importations.\n\nOn the other hand, the immense new plants begun in the first year of the Ministry of Munitions are being utilized to their full advantage and are steadily developing their output of various munitions.\n\nThe power of massed production and the increasing efficiency of diluted and female labour, together with the accumulation of working stocks and adequate reserves and the progressive elimination of commercial work, render possible a large increase in the total output so long as the necessary tonnage and labour required are forthcoming.\n\n17. In spite therefore of the difficulties, it should still be possible, by taking the proper measures of organization, by enforcing the necessary economies, and by utilizing to the full the resources of every department without exception, to meet and satisfy the main demands that are made upon us.\n\nThere still remain as new objectives of effort within the bounds of possibility and without undue prejudice to the above:\u2014\n\n(i) Increased long-range aeroplane bombing power.\n\n(ii) Increased long-range mobile and semi-mobile heavy artillery.\n\n(iii) Increased trench-mortar offensive.\n\n(iv) Increased tank development late in the year.\n\n(v) Increased chemical warfare supplies.\n\n18. There are however four principles which must be accepted and resolutely applied:\u2014\n\n(i) The tonnage utilized for non-military imports of all kinds, including to some extent food, must be cut down.\n\n(ii) The Admiralty must endeavour to find the bulk of its own skilled labour for shipbuilding from its own extensive resources, and it must subject every part of its immense organization to a loyal and searching scrutiny in the general interest.\n\n(iii) The dormant man-power of the units of the Home army must be made effective as an aid to transport, industry, and agriculture.\n\n(iv) The business of supply must be properly co-ordinated. We cannot afford the waste which arises from the independent and competitive action of individual departments.\n\nNo sooner had we completed the Munitions Budget, with its innumerable apportionments and orders, than the startling news arrived that the Inter-Allied Commission on Food Supplies, on which the War Cabinet was represented, had allocated, at the earnest request of the French Minister of Commerce, no less than two million tons of freight for the transport of additional food for France and Italy. Nearly the whole\u20141,550,000 tons\u2014had to be cut off the Munitions share. I reacted violently against this. The threat to France and Italy of drastic reductions in the steel we had promised them enlisted the active aid of the Munitions Ministers of both countries. A considerable portion of these self-indulgent importations were eventually cancelled. But heavy cuts had to be made in shell steel, and the Army was warned to expect a reduced programme.\n\nThe outlook and the immediate pressure led me, in my own sphere, to seek by every shift and from every quarter to increase our steel resources on which the British armies depended. No doubt from the higher position of the War Cabinet a more general view of relative requirements could be taken, and my appeals and protests imply no criticism of others. It was my duty above all to keep Sir Douglas Haig supplied with every requisite, and at this we slaved and struggled from daybreak to midnight. We were well ahead with shells of nearly every kind. We were well ahead with rifles and rifle ammunition. During all the autumn the armies had had all the shell they demanded, but the prolonged firing of Passchendaele and the destruction of battle had so seriously worn out our field and medium artillery that guns had become the limiting factor. Immense replacements and repairs had to be made in the brief interval between November and the spring.\n\n_To the Chancellor of the Exchequer._\n\n_November_ 25, 1917.\n\nThe position which has been created by the surrender of 2,000,000 tons of shipping to the food supply of France and the consequent reduction on Munitions imports (almost exclusively steel and iron-ore) of upwards of 1,550,000 tons, is so disastrous in its consequences upon the offensive power of the British armies next year, and indeed upon our whole war-making capacity, that I cannot accept it without using every conceivable effort to minimize the disaster. If the _volume_ of our tonnage is to be reduced, it is indispensable that the _value_ of it should, as far as possible, be enhanced. This raises the whole Canadian position. There is no more melancholy chapter in the history of British Munitions Supply than the laborious creation of large and vitally needed shell plants in Canada, only for them to be dispersed and destroyed at the moment they have come into bearing.... Shortage of dollars, and dollars only, was the cause of this misfortune.... Surely the truth ought to be known, and further efforts made to avert the loss which is impending. There could be no more short-sighted and even mad policy than to damp down and break up these Canadian plants at the very time when the increasing demands of the United States for their own armies threaten to exclude us very largely from that field. I am now confronted both with American proposals for placing orders in Canadian Munition Factories, and with additional offers of shell and other essential munitions from Canada. Are you really going to be content to let this all go by the board? Here for instance are proposals from the Governor-General of Canada to utilize the Ross Rifle Factory for the manufacture of machine-gun barrels. This would be of the greatest service to us. Both the Colonial Office and the Governor-General are pressing for a reply. Again, there is an offer for 25,000 6-inch shells a week additional from Canada. These are the shells which are most needed by our troops at the present time, in regard to which I have just received a fresh demand for 2,000,000 from the Commander-in-Chief. The machinery in Canada is available, the labour is available, the material is available\u2014the need is most grave. Are we really to let the plant be scattered and the machines to drift over piecemeal into the United States and so cut ourselves off for ever from this source of highly portable munitions of the most necessary character? I know how great your difficulties are and how strenuous have been the exertions which you have made to procure us larger credits, but I really cannot accept this decision departmentally from the Treasury and make myself the agent of its announcement. It seems to me that the responsibility in a matter of this kind could only be assumed by the War Cabinet, and I hope you will not mind my asking that the matter should definitely be brought before them. Neither in man-power nor in war material are we putting out our full energies, and having regard to the reserves which the Germans will be able to bring back in both troops and artillery next year from the Russian front, the position of our armies may be most serious. Perhaps in the first instance we could have a small private conference at the Treasury, to which I would bring various experts.\n\n_To Sir Joseph Maclay_ ( _Controller of Shipping_ ).\n\n_November_ 25, 1917.\n\nYou must pardon my anxiety about the importations of iron-ore. The decisions which have been taken without my being even informed, to give 2,000,000 tons of shipping to the French and Italian food supply, have shattered our means of furnishing the armies in the field with the ammunition they require for 1918. They will also force me to notify to the French and Italians an entire suspension of the allocation to them of steel products of all kinds, although used exclusively for military purposes. This will unquestionably create a serious diplomatic position. I was informed in Paris that the French were astonished at the liberality of our concessions to them in the matter of food.\n\nIt is scarcely possible to do justice to the disastrous position created by the cut of 1,550,000 tons on munition imports, and the lamentable crippling of our otherwise available resources in war power which that entails. Can you wonder therefore that I am exerting myself by every means to procure some amelioration of this state of things? I am advised by experts of unimpeachable authority that ferro-concrete barges of a seaworthy character could have been constructed many months ago and that they could have been so employed as to afford a direct relief to certain classes of tonnage. Even now I do not think they are being sufficiently developed. Only 70 I understand have been ordered, whereas at least double the number are required. A deficiency of British shipping and our liberality to our Allies may not be our business at the Ministry of Munitions, but it is undoubtedly our misfortune. As it is, the plans of the Commander-in-Chief are being vitiated and the offensive power of the British armies very seriously impaired. I say nothing of the economic difficulties which will be created in England through the failure to maintain the Railways and other essential Civil Services through the deficiency of steel.\n\n_To Monsieur Loucheur (Minister of Armaments, France_ ).\n\n_November_ 25, 1917.\n\nI have referred your letter of the 20th of November to the study of the departments concerned, and I will communicate with you as soon as I have their observations on its detail. The whole steel situation in Great Britain has however been revolutionized by the decision to allocate 2,000,000 tons of British shipping to carry food supplies to France and Italy. The direct consequence of this has been to reduce the estimated importation for the Ministry of Munitions by 1,550,000 tons up to the present time, and practically the whole of this is taken from our importations of ore and of steel. It is therefore quite impossible for me to continue to supply the 40,000 tons of various steel products to France as previously agreed between us. I have to impose the most severe reductions on the supply of ammunition for the British Armies, reducing the weight of shell to be fired in 1918 by between half a million and 750,000 tons, and a further very severe reduction has to be imposed upon our already depleted railway and other vital domestic services. In these circumstances, I can only supply France with steel products in 1918 to the extent to which tonnage is placed at my disposal in abatement of the 1,550,000 tons reduction. If, for instance, it is in your power to procure a retrocession of half a million or 300,000 tons of tonnage allocated to French food stuffs, I can continue my supplies of steel to that extent, as the liberated tonnage will be used to bring in the necessary quantities of ore and steel to us. But failing this or some similar arrangement, it is absolutely impossible for me, with the tonnage allocated at present, to continue supplies of steel for French purposes. I am of course making a similar communication to the Italian Government so far as next year is concerned, and apart from the immediate measures which are required to meet the emergency caused by their disaster.\n\nI should add that if the position improves from any cause, and especially from a reduction in the net weekly loss by submarine sinkings, I shall of course be ready to contribute towards your programmes to the best of my ability.\n\nWhile awaiting the results of this outcry, it was necessary to face the facts. I gave the following instructions:\u2014\n\n_Secretary._\n\n_S._\n\n_M._\n\n_Clamping Committee._\n\n_November_ 25, 1917.\n\nThe cut in the importations of iron-ore is so serious that every effort must be made to mitigate its consequences. There must be great masses of iron in one form and another scattered about the country. Take for instance all the park and area railings. I should suppose there were 20,000 tons of iron in the Hyde Park railings alone, while the weight of metal in the area railings of the London streets must be enormous. The same is true of many great towns throughout the country. Then there is the building material of unfinished buildings, girders, etc., which could be worked up into other urgently needed Works of Construction for military purposes. A few strands of barbed wire could be used to protect areas and enclosed parks. Drastic action will help to rouse people to a sense of the emergency and of the magnitude of the effort required. Thirdly, there are the battlefields. There must be 700,000 or 800,000 tons of shell-steel lying about on the Somme battlefields alone. The collection of this is vital. The proper machines must be constructed. A smelting plant should be set up on the battle-fields.\n\nLet me have definite recommendations for immediate action on all these points with the least possible delay, and advise me as to the composition of a suitable committee, not consisting of members of Council, which can carry out any policy decided on.\n\n_Clamping Committee._\n\n_November_ 26, 1917.\n\nYou should recast the Programme on the following assumptions:\u2014\n\n(1) That the armies in France only fire in 1918 the same weight of shell as they fired in 1917.\n\n(2) That all additional shell that our iron and steel import permits of should be stored for a 1919 climax.\n\n(3) That explosives needs will be reduced by the reduction on the Programme of artillery firing.\n\n(4) That the Trench Mortar offensive will be limited to 25,000 tons additional.\n\n(5) That the Army do not want the semi-mobile mountings and that about 30 firing points on railway mountings will be sufficient to wear out all the guns we are likely to get from the Navy.\n\n(6) That the manufacture of Tanks of various designs must be pushed to the extreme limit.\n\n(7) That an additional programme of aeroplanes will be necessary.\n\n(8) That the process of substitution and dilution must be continued to release at least 100,000 A 1 men.\n\n(9) That the manufacture of guns should be carried on at full blast during the whole of 1918.\n\n(10) That the shell plant which will have been somewhat damped down in 1918 should be opened out to the full in 1919.\n\n(11) That our Munitions Programme should be harmonized with those of France, Italy, and the United States, so as to secure the maximum production.\n\n(12) That we cannot count on more than a minimum of 11,000,000 tons delivered here during the 12 months, and must not promise to other Departments anything based on a larger delivery. Probably we shall get more, in which case it will be easy to do better than our word.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_December_ 31, 1917.\n\nI must draw the attention of the Cabinet to the serious character of the problems of steel supply now presented for their decision.\n\nThe revised Munitions Budget which has been circulated involves a heavy reduction upon the Ammunition Programme on which the Commander-in-Chief and the War Office have been counting, not less than 500,000 tons which we could have made into shells having been deducted from it. I had urged as a measure of precaution that we should be permitted to place orders in the United States for 1,000,000 tons of steel, of which 500,000 is needed this year for the reduced programme, and the other 500,000 would afford a reserve on which we could draw sooner or later according to tonnage conditions. We are now told that we cannot place these orders. If this decision is to stand, the Shell Programme of the armies must undergo further serious reduction. We are cut off from Spanish ore by [want of] tonnage and from American steel by [want of] dollars. In both cases food imports for ourselves or for our Allies are displacing ton for ton metal which could otherwise be fired at the enemy\u2014for which, that is to say, shell factories, the fuses, the filling plants, the guns and the gunners are all available.\n\nAt the same time we have been forced to break up Canadian shell plants as soon as they have been laboriously called into being and had begun deliveries, on account of the failure of the Canadian Government or of the Treasury or of both to make the necessary financial arrangements. On top of this we are now confronted with the proposal to cut our Canadian allocation of dollars from 30,000,000 to 20,000,000 per month....\n\nThirdly, the Admiralty demand for steel in all its forms is already enormous and continues to increase.\n\nIn these circumstances it is surely our duty to make vigorous and genuine efforts to sustain the artillery of the British Army with the necessary supplies of ammunition, and not to acquiesce in its being cut down whenever a difficulty of tonnage or dollars or food supply is involved.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_November_ 11, 1917.\n\nWe ought to endeavour to gain and keep the control of the war to which our strength entitles us, using that strength to sustain our Allies without allowing them to lose their self-reliance. We should be careful not to dissipate our strength or melt it down to the average level of exhausted nations. It will be better used with design by us than weakly dispersed. _Resolute to expend everything for the common cause, we ought not to shrink from being taskmasters._ I deprecate most strongly our making any general agreement in regard to Munitions and raw materials similar to that which has been made about food. On the contrary, I would continue to make _ad hoc_ allocations when particular emergencies are shown, always exacting where possible some other services or accommodation in return. There must at any rate be one strong power to face Germany in 1918. To strike an average in these matters, to bind oneself in advance to some system of 'share and share alike,' and thus to deprive ourselves of all our power of giving when need arises, may be logic\u2014it may even be equity\u2014but it is not the way to win the war.\n\nIn the end all finished happily. The Shipping Controller proved better than his word. The U-boat pressure weakened and several million tons more freight became in fact available than his caution had allowed. We too were found to have somewhat larger resources than we had thought it right to parade. As will be seen as the account proceeds, the Ministry of Munitions were found capable not only of fulfilling their original programmes, but of meeting a gigantic emergency for which no formal provision had been made. 'As regards material,' wrote Sir Douglas Haig in his final despatch in 1919, 'it was not until midsummer, 1916, that the artillery situation became even approximately adequate to the conduct of major operations. Throughout the Somme battle the expenditure of artillery ammunition had to be watched with the greatest care. During the battles of 1917 ammunition was plentiful, but the gun situation was a source of constant anxiety. Only in 1918 was it possible to conduct artillery operations independently of any limiting consideration other than that of transport.'\n\n# CHAPTER XIV\n\n# THE AUTUMN STRUGGLE\n\nThe Eve of the Passchendaele Offensive\u2014A Misleading Statement\u2014The Prime Minister and the Offensive\u2014My Letter to the Prime Minister\u2014Allenby in Palestine\u2014Brilliant and Frugal Operations\u2014Unsound Strategy\u2014The Battle of Passchendaele\u2014Sir William Robertson and his Responsibilities\u2014The Italian Disaster of Caporetto\u2014Italian Fortitude\u2014The Re-equipment of the Italian Army\u2014The Tank Battle opposite Cambrai\u2014First Ideas of the Use of Tanks\u2014Their Long Misuse\u2014Their First Chance\u2014Ludendorff's Professional Blindness\u2014The German Counter-stroke after Cambrai.\n\nAt the time I rejoined the Government the British armies were on the eve of a new tremendous offensive. The long prepared attack upon the Messines ridge had been executed with precision and success on June 7, and Sir Douglas Haig's further plan was to strike from the direction of Ypres towards Ostend. This was in fact a revival on a gigantic scale and by different methods of those ideas of clearing the sea flank by which Sir John French had been so much attracted in 1914. Forty divisions had been assembled between Kemmel Hill and the Belgian front. Mountains of ammunition had been accumulated, and the strongest concentration of artillery ever yet developed was to sustain the attack. The British Headquarters were as usual confident of a decisive success, and as usual they were stoutly supported by Sir William Robertson and the General Staff at the War Office. On the other hand, the positions to be assaulted were immensely strong. The enemy was fully prepared. The frowning undulations of the Passchendaele-Klercken ridge had been fortified with every resource of German science and ingenuity. The ground was studded with ferro-concrete block-houses, 'Pill Boxes' as they were soon called, crammed with machine guns, lapped in barbed wire, and impenetrable to the heaviest bombardment. The railway communications behind the enemy's front were at least as good as, if not indeed superior to those which maintained the British offensive. A German army containing three times as many divisions as were required at any given moment to hold the ground had been assembled under Prince Rupprecht, and every facility for the relief and replacement of exhausted units had been carefully studied. The Dutch railways carried ceaseless supplies of gravel for the concrete, and the elaboration of the defences line behind line proceeded continually.\n\nApart from the hopes of decisive victory, which grew with every step away from the British front line and reached absolute conviction in the Intelligence Department, two reasons were adduced by General Headquarters to justify the renewed severe demand upon the troops. First, the alleged exhausted and quiescent condition of the French Army since the defeat of General Nivelle's April offensive; secondly, the importance of taking Ostend and Zeebrugge in order to paralyse or cripple the U-boat war. The first of these arguments was exaggerated. The French Army was no doubt saving its strength as much as possible; but the casualty tables show that during 1917 they inflicted nearly as many losses on the Germans as did our own troops. The U-boat argument was wholly fallacious. A grave responsibility rests upon the Admiralty for misleading Haig and his Staff about the value of Ostend and Zeebrugge to the submarine campaign. These two ports were convenient advanced bases for U-boats working in the English Channel, but they were in no way indispensable to the submarine war. Submarines able to go completely around the British Isles and to remain at sea a whole month at a time could work almost as easily from their own home bases in the Elbe, the Weser, and the Ems, as from the advanced and much-battered harbours of Belgium. The whole U-boat war was based on the main German naval harbours, and was never dependent on anything else. In fact in May, 1918, the month after both Ostend and Zeebrugge had been sealed up by the Navy, the U-boat sinkings actually showed an increase over the preceding month in which they were open and in full activity. Whatever influence this erroneous argument may have had upon the Haig-Robertson decision to launch a new offensive, it certainly contributed to baffle the objections of the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet. It seemed to throw the army into the struggle against the submarines. It confused the issue, it darkened counsel, it numbed misgivings, overpowered the dictates of prudence, and cleared the way for a forlorn expenditure of valour and life without equal in futility.\n\nIn the war against Turkey in the south-eastern theatre the most costly and laborious policy was also pursued. The Turks, fortified between the desert and the sea at Gaza under Jemal Pasha, confronted successfully the British Army under Allenby, which had toiled forward by railway and water-pipe line from Egypt at extreme exertion and expense. This obstacle was surmounted or destroyed in the following year. Meanwhile however the obvious man\u0153uvre of landing an army behind the Turks was dismissed by Sir William Robertson as venturesome and impracticable.\n\nEven before I joined his Government the Prime Minister, as I have written, used to discuss the war situation with me freely. On my taking office he made me acquainted with everything. After his excursion with General Nivelle and its disillusionments, he had returned to those views against seeking offensives on the Western Front without the necessary superiority or method, with which the reader is familiar. The peak of the U-boat sinkings seemed to have been surmounted. If on land hopes had been dupes, fears at sea had also been liars. Mr. Lloyd George was now content to await in the main theatre the arrival of the American Armies. He wished Sir Douglas Haig to maintain an active defensive for the rest of the year and to nurse his strength. Meanwhile activity in Palestine and the reinforcement of Italy by British and French Divisions might produce important results against Turkey and Austria, and would in any case not be unduly costly in life. At first the majority of the War Cabinet shared these general opinions. But between right thought and right action there was a gulf. Sir William Robertson, and under his direction the General Staff at the War Office, pressed unceasingly for further immediate exertions. Their insistence gained several adherents in the Cabinet. All through June the discussions were maintained. In the end the Prime Minister did not feel strong enough to face the Haig-Robertson combination. He submitted with resentful fatalism. The plan of sustaining Italy was dropped, and by the third week of July Robertson had extorted from the Cabinet and conveyed to Haig an assurance of 'whole-hearted' support for the Passchendaele attack. When I had the opportunity of learning the facts it was too late. The decision had already been taken. My only hope was to limit the consequences. On July 22 I gave my counsel as follows:\u2014\n\n_Mr. Churchill to the Prime Minister._\n\nMany thanks for letting me see these most interesting papers which I return herewith. Broadly speaking I agree with Smuts. But I deplore with you the necessity for giving way to the military wish for a renewed offensive in the West. The armies are equal. If anything, the Germans are the stronger. They have larger reserves and ample munitions. An endless series of fortified lines with all kinds of flooding possibilities and great natural difficulties of ground constitute insuperable obstacles. We already approach the end of July. Even if three or four battles as good as Messines are won, the situation in the West will not be appreciably altered by the end of the year.\n\nIt is clear however that no human power exists which can stop the attempt being made. The essential thing now is to arrive at a definition of success and 'great results' which will enable a new decision to be taken after the first or second phases of this offensive have been fought. Such a definition must, it seems to me, involve three conditions, viz., objectives taken; casualties sustained; and thirdly (very important) the time taken or required between any one thrust and the next. Thus it should be possible, by reference to these forecasts, to settle definitely after (say) six weeks of fighting whether there really is any prospect of obtaining 'great results' before winter sets in. Unless you can arrive at something definite on these points, your Italian project, with which I cordially agree, will simply be put off from day to day until it is too late. Remember how Joffre behaved about the four divisions which were to go to the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles as soon as he knew whether he was going to achieve decisive results in the Champagne battle in 1915.\n\nIt is worth also remembering that the best of all feints, and the most deceptive, is a real attack which you subsequently decide not to carry through; the reserves for which are suddenly thrown into quite a different theatre.\n\nWith regard to the East, the truth is staring us in the face. An army of six divisions, British or Franco-British, should be taken from [the] Salonica [front] and put in behind Jemal's army. This will force that army to surrender, and all the allied troops in Syria and Palestine, including Allenby's, would be free by the spring of next year for action in Italy or France. The mere concentration of five or six divisions in Salonica, as they were gradually replaced on the front by fresh [Greek] arrivals, would impart to the Salonica army a speculative value it has wholly lost. It would be crouched instead of sprawled. They could stay in Salonica training and recuperating until the season of a potential Russo-Roumanian offensive had passed, collecting aquatic transport meanwhile. All the time they would be threatening the enemy in a dozen places. It will be a thousand pities if this or something like it cannot be done.\n\nDon't get torpedoed; for if I am left alone your colleagues will eat me.\n\nThe Prime Minister went so far as to offer the command of the British armies in Palestine to General Smuts. After deliberation Smuts replied that he was willing to accept the task on one condition, namely that he should be allowed to land an adequate army to cut the Turkish communications. As this project was not considered open, he declined the command. But in his place was found a leader whose personality and skill were equal to the task of dislodging and ultimately of destroying the Turkish armies in Syria without the aid of a great amphibious operation. With the appointment of Allenby the whole situation in Palestine was rapidly transformed. Although he repeatedly demanded more reinforcements than could be spared, and prudently dwelt on the difficulties before him, Allenby by a series of masterly combinations succeeded with smaller forces both in out-man\u0153uvring and in out-fighting the Turks under Jemal, advised by Falkenhayn. Feinting at Gaza in the last week of October, he stormed Beersheba by a surprise attack of two infantry divisions and a wide turning movement of cavalry and camelry. Having thus gained the enemy's desert flank, he rolled up from the eastward in a succession of fierce actions the strongly fortified Turkish lines. Gaza was taken on November 6: 10,000 Turks had been made prisoners, and at least as many killed and wounded: and a vigorous pursuit opened the port of Jaffa to the further supply of the British forces. Thus possessed of the coastal region, a new base, and an alternative short line of communication, Allenby advanced north-westward upon Jerusalem, continuing to drive the Seventh and Eighth Turkish Armies before him and compromising the eventual retreat of the Fourth. On December 8, 1917, the Turks abandoned Jerusalem after 400 years of blighting occupation, and the British Commander-in-Chief entered the city amid the acclamations of the inhabitants. Here he maintained himself in a situation of much delicacy throughout the winter, re-grouping his forces, wisely fostering the Arab revolt which grew around the astonishing personality of Lawrence, and preparing for even larger enterprises in the spring. With no more than 150,000 men he had expelled 170,000 German-led Turkish troops from fortified positions\u2014Plevnas\u2014on which years of labour had been spent, and had inflicted upon them most serious losses in men, guns and territory.\n\nNo praise is too high for these brilliant and frugal operations, which will long serve as a model in theatres of war in which man\u0153uvre is possible. Nevertheless their results did not simplify the general problem. On the contrary, by opening up a competing interest which could not influence the main decision, they even complicated it. The very serious drain of men, munitions and transport which flowed unceasingly to the Palestine Expedition ought to have been arrested by action far swifter in character and far larger in scale. Brevity and finality, not less at this period than throughout the war, were the true tests of any diversion against Turkey. Prolonged and expanding operations in distant unrelated theatres, whether they languished as at Salonica, or crackled briskly and brightly forward under Allenby in Palestine, were not to be reconciled with a wise war policy. It would have been far safer and far cheaper in life and resources to run a greater risk for a shorter time. The advantage of the command of the sea should not have been neglected. If, while Allenby held the Turks at Gaza, a long-prepared descent had been made at Haifa or elsewhere on the sea coast behind them, and if the railway by which alone they could exist had been severed in September by a new army of six or eight divisions, the war in Syria would have been ended at a stroke. The Eastern drain on our resources would have been stopped from February onwards; all the British troops in Palestine would have been available to meet the supreme peril in France. But in Palestine as formerly at Gallipoli, the clash of the Western and Eastern schools of thought produced incoherence and half-measures. Enough was sent East to be a dangerous dispersion, and never at one time enough to compel a prompt conclusion. It will be incredible to future generations that the strategists of an island people then blessed with the unique and sovereign attribute of Sea Power should, throughout the whole of the Great War, have failed so utterly to turn it to offensive profit.\n\nIn the actual event, as will be seen, Ludendorff's offensive of 1918 dissipated in a day all Allenby's careful plans for the spring campaign. Not less than sixty battalions with many batteries were incontinently snatched from Palestine to plug the shot hole of the twenty-first of March; and his depleted army remained till two Indian divisions arrived from Mesopotamia in August, in an extremely precarious position. That from such circumstances he should have contrived the captures of Deraa, Damascus and Aleppo, and the destruction of every vestige of Turkish power in Syria, military and civil before the armistice, is one of the most remarkable achievements of the war.\n\nMeanwhile the British offensive against Passchendaele unrolled its sombre fate. The terrific artillery pulverized the ground, smashing simultaneously the German trenches and the ordinary drainage. By sublime devotion and frightful losses small indentations were made upon the German front. In six weeks at the farthest point we had advanced four miles. Soon the rain descended, and the vast crater fields became a sea of choking fetid mud in which men, animals and tanks floundered and perished hopelessly. The few tracks which alone could be preserved across this morass were swept with ceaseless shell fire, through which endless columns of transport marched with fortitude all night long. The impossibility of supplying the British field and medium batteries with ammunition at any distance from the only road maintained in being, led to their being massed in line by its side. Thus there could be no concealment, and the German counter-fire caused very heavy losses in gunners and guns and killed nearly all the artillery horses.\n\nThe disappointing captures of ground were relieved by tales of prodigious German slaughter. The losses and anxieties inflicted upon the enemy must not be underrated. Ludendorff's admissions are upon record. These violent sustained thrusts shook the enemy to their foundations. But the German losses were always on a far smaller scale. They always had far fewer troops in the cauldron. They always took nearly two lives for one and sold every inch of ground with extortion.\n\nFurther efforts were made during October by the Prime Minister to bring the operations to an end. He went so far as to call Sir Henry Wilson and Lord French into counsel as 'technical advisers' of the Cabinet, independent of the General Staff. We have the tale na\u00efvely published by Robertson himself. Lord French, we are told, after criticizing 'in twenty pages out of twenty-six' the Haig-Robertson strategy and tactics, recommended that we should 'stand everywhere on the defensive, only resorting to such offensive action as would make the defensive effective; await the development of the forces of the United States; and in the meantime rely upon a drastic economic war to weaken the enemy.' In formally consulting outside advisers the Prime Minister obviously courted the resignation of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. It was not forthcoming. The Cabinet were not prepared to demand it; and nothing but mutual mistrust resulted.\n\nAccordingly in Flanders the struggle went on. New divisions continued to replace those that were shattered. The rain descended and the mud sea spread. Still the will power of the Commander and the discipline of the Army remained invincible. By measureless sacrifices Passchendaele was won. But beyond, far beyond, still rose intact and unapproachable the fortifications of Klercken. August had passed away; September was gone; October was far spent. The full severity of a Flanders winter gripped the ghastly battlefield. Ceaselessly the Menin gate of Ypres disgorged its streams of manhood. Fast as the cannons fired, the ammunition behind them flowed in faster. Even in October the British Staff were planning and launching offensives and were confident of reaching the goal of decisive results It was not until the end of November that final failure was accepted. ' _Boche_ is bad and _Boue_ is bad,' said Foch, then little more than an observer of events, 'but _Boche_ and _Boue_ together... Ah!' He held up warning hands.\n\nIt cannot be said that 'the soldiers,' that is to say the Staff, did not have their way. They tried their sombre experiment to its conclusion. They took all they required from Britain. They wore down alike the manhood and the guns of the British Army almost to destruction. They did it in the face of the plainest warnings, and of arguments which they could not answer. Sir Douglas Haig acted from conviction; but Sir William Robertson drifted ponderously. He has accepted the main responsibility. He could not well avoid it. 'I was more than a mere adviser. I was the professional head of all the British Armies, as Haig was of those in France. They looked to me, as did the whole Empire, to see that they were not asked to do impossible things, and were not in any way placed at a disadvantage unnecessarily. And again (June 23), 'My own responsibility... is not small in urging the continuance of a plan regarding which he [the Prime Minister] has grave misgivings...' And lastly (Robertson to Haig, Sept. 27), 'My own views are known to you. They have always been \"defensive\" in all theatres but the West. But the difficulty is to _prove_ the wisdom of this now that Russia is out. I confess I stick to it more because I see nothing better, and because my instinct prompts me to stick to it, than because of any good argument by which I can support it.' These are terrible words when used to sustain the sacrifices of nearly four hundred thousand men. Meanwhile the results of neglecting Italy for the sake of Passchendaele exploded with a violence which no one could have foreseen. On October 24 began the Italian disaster of Caporetto. Six German divisions were brought swiftly to the Isonzo by night marches and concealed in deep valleys behind the front. These and the presence of General von Below animated the large Austrian armies. A skilful attack by mountain roads gained a key position. A sudden bombardment by heavy artillery and gas shells, followed by a general assault along the whole front led at the decisive points by German troops, aided by the effects of defeatist propaganda within the Italian lines, produced in twelve hours a complete and decisive defeat of General Cadorna's army. By nightfall more than a million Italians were in full retreat. A large portion of the army passed into dissolution. In three days 200,000 men and 1,800 guns were captured, and before the long retreat was finished and the Italian front had been reconstituted 80 miles to the westward along the Piave, upwards of 800,000 soldiers through death, wounds, sickness, capture, desertion, and above all disappearance, had been torn from the Italian standards. This astounding disaster required immediate exertions by Britain and France.\n\nI was resting at my house in Kent when authentic news arrived. The Prime Minister telephoned to me to motor at once to Walton Heath. He showed me the telegrams, which even in their guarded form revealed a defeat of the first magnitude. At this moment when our army had been bled white at Passchendaele and when the French were still recovering from the Nivelle offensive and its disquieting consequences, the prospect of having to make a large detachment of force for Italy was uninviting. The Prime Minister reacted with his accustomed resiliency. He set off in a few days to Rapallo, where he had proposed a meeting with the French and Italian political and military chiefs. Meanwhile five French and five British divisions under General Fayolle and Sir Herbert Plumer, two of the most successful and experienced Commanders on the Western Front, were moved with the utmost rapidity through the tunnels under the Alps, and began to appear from the 10th of November onwards upon the Italian front. Had they been sent a few months earlier, it is certain, even if the Ally-Italian offensive had not yielded important results, that events would have followed an entirely different course.\n\nThe greatness of the Italian nation shone forth in an hour which recalled the morrow of Cannae. 'Defeatism' withered in the flame of national resolve. Immense as had been the Italian losses, the war effort of Italy was far greater from Caporetto onwards than in the earlier period of the war. Ruthless punishment restored the discipline of the armies: ardent reserves and volunteers refilled their ranks. But all this took time, and for several months the fate of Italy hung in the balance. It was necessary to contemplate a situation in which the North of Italy might be completely overrun by Teutonic armies; when Italy might be beaten out of the war, and when the development of a Swiss front might have been imposed upon France. Mercifully 'the trees do not grow up to the sky,' and offensives however successful lose their pristine force satiated with the ground they gain.\n\nWhat would have happened had Germany prepared from the beginning to back her initial impulse with twelve or fourteen more divisions drawn from the vanished Russian front, is an inquiry which may well occupy and instruct the military student. But Ludendorff was nursing other plans, larger, more ambitious and as it turned out fatal to his country. Already the vast design of the German offensive in 1918 had gripped his mind. Italy was but a 'side show,' worth perhaps 'the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier,' but never to obstruct a classical theory and the supreme trial of strength against the strongest foe. Yet the falling away of Italy, a people of 40 millions, a first-class power, from the cause of the Allies at this time would have been an event more pregnant with consequences than all the triumphs of March 21, 1918. To overwhelm Italy and to sue for a general peace afforded still the surest hope for the Central Empires. It is a valid though inadequate claim on the part of the British High Command that the continuous pressure on Passchendaele played its part in influencing the German war mind. The almost inexhaustible resources of the British attack, its conquering of superhuman difficulties, its obstinate Commanders, its undaunted troops, the repeated destruction of the German front lines, the drain\u2014half ours, but still frightful\u2014on German resources, all riveted the eyes of Ludendorff on the Western Front. God forbid that such sacrifices, however needless, however disproportioned, should be vain!\n\nFrom these deep matters I must recall the reader to the limited situation from which my tale is told.\n\nIt was imperative that Italy should be rearmed to the utmost possible extent by France and England. On November 18 I proceeded to Paris to meet in conclave with Loucheur and the Italian Minister of Armaments, General Dallolio. It was a cheerless experience; our margins were so small, our needs so exacting\u2014and the Italian void gaped. In those hard days defeat was not leniently viewed by overstrained Allies. We all went through it in our turn\u2014the politeness which veiled depreciation, the sympathy which scarcely surmounted resentment. And here I must pay my tribute to the dignity and quiet courage of the Italian Minister, and to the respect which in such circumstances he knew how to command from all.\n\n_Mr. Churchill to Prime Minister and Lord Derby._\n\n_November_ 21, 1917.\n\nGeneral Furse and I have after consultation to-day met first Loucheur and secondly Loucheur and Dallolio. We have arranged as follows: (1) The French will send at once 150,000 rifles, complete transportation of which will begin to-night and take about eight days. We shall give an equal number beginning on the ninth day with possibility of some delay in the latter portion. (2) The French will give 2,000 mitrailleuses and we 2,000 hotchkiss guns spread over next few weeks. (3) Ammunition as requested for all the above from both French and British sources. (4) French will give immediately 300 field guns ('seventy-fives') with ammunition. We reserved our undertaking on this item on account of the difficulty, though Italians requested 300 field guns from us. The 15-pounders may afford a partial solution. (5) French will give from 175 to 200 medium guns and howitzers with ammunition. We have promised to do our best to provide up to 175 of various medium natures, but we have warned the Italians that possibly the whole number cannot be found. It is understood that these deliveries will be spread over two months. (6) French cannot give any heavy or very heavy pieces, but we have undertaken to give 40 heavy\u2014probably 8-inch howitzers with ammunition\u2014which is Italian total demand. (7) We have refused very heavy natures. (8) We have stated that we consider 40 tanks if sent at all should be complete with British personnel and as part of British force and that this is a matter for General Staff. Above appears to be upon the whole satisfactory arrangement to meet the emergency. In making it we have kept in view possibility that it may be better to supply the deficiency in field guns and medium natures by increasing the proportion of organized artillery batteries with British force rather than by sending unfamiliar equipments to the Italian army which we need ourselves. General Furse leaves for London to-night. I return the day after.\n\nSecondly, Loucheur will endeavour to secure a rebate of 250,000 tons out of 2,000,000 allocated to France and Italy for food in aid of my promised deliveries of steel to him. If he fails I am free to review the position within these limits.\n\nThe Passchendaele offensive had ended in mire and carnage, when suddenly there emerged from the British sector opposite Cambrai a battle totally different in character from any yet fought in the war. For the first time the mechanical method of securing Surprise was effectively used. Boraston's account points to this battle as a refutation of 'the crude talk about the backward method of our leadership in France during 1916\u201317; its lack of genius or skill; its prodigious waste of life.' Here in his opinion was a superb example of scientific novelty and audacious tactics combined into a conception of military genius. But this conception, not only its underlying idea but its methods and even its instruments, had been pressed upon the British High Command for almost exactly two years. The plan of attack at Cambrai was inherent in the original conception of the Tank. It was for this, and for this precisely, that Tanks had been devised. In my first memorandum on armoured Caterpillar vehicles, written for Sir John French on December 3, 1915, the following passages occurred:\u2014\n\n'The cutting of the enemy's wire and the general domination of his firing-line can be effected by engines of this character. About seventy are now nearing completion in England, and should be inspected. None should be used until all can be used at once. They should be disposed secretly along the whole attacking front two or three hundred yards apart. Ten or fifteen minutes before the assault these engines should move forward over the best line of advance open, passing through or across our trenches at prepared points. They are capable of traversing any ordinary obstacle, ditch, breastwork, or trench. They carry two or three Maxims each, and can be fitted with flame apparatus. Nothing but a direct hit from a field gun will stop them. On reaching the enemy's wire they turn to the left or right and run down parallel to the enemy's trench, sweeping his parapet with their fire, and crushing and cutting the barbed wire in lanes and in a slightly serpentine course....\n\n'If artillery is used to cut wire, the direction and imminence of the attack is proclaimed days beforehand. But by this method the assault follows the wire-cutting almost immediately, i.e. before any reinforcements can be brought up by the enemy, or any special defensive measure taken.\n\n'The Caterpillars are capable of actually crossing the enemy's trench and advancing to cut his communication trenches; but into this aspect it is not necessary to go now. One step at a time. It will be easy, when the enemy's front line is in our hands, to find the best places for the Caterpillars to cross by for any further advance which may be required. They can climb any slope. They are, in short, movable machine-gun cupolas as well as wire-smashers....\n\n'Surprise consists in novelty and suddenness. Secrecy is vital, and it would be possible, over a period of three or four weeks, to work routine conditions into such a state that very little extraordinary preparation would be required. The weak man-power available in the enemy's front line can easily be overwhelmed by forces which might appear to be assembled in the ordinary course.'\n\nThese words in a paper printed by the Committee of Imperial Defence had been read by Sir Douglas Haig before the end of 1915. Tanks in considerable and growing numbers had been in action on the British front since their conception had been improvidently exposed to the enemy on the Somme in 1916. At the Headquarters of the Tank Corps the original tactical ideas inspiring their conception had been earnestly and thoroughly developed. The Tank Corps had never yet been allowed to put them into practice. These engines had been used in small numbers as mere ancillaries to infantry and artillery battles. They had been condemned to wallow in the crater fields under the full blast of massed German artillery, or to founder in the mud of Passchendaele. Never had they been allowed to have their own chance in a battle made for them, adapted to their special capacities, and in which they could render the inestimable service for which they had been specially designed.\n\nThe success of a few Tanks in a minor operation at Passchendaele, where in the Army Corps of General Maxse they were correctly employed, was probably the means of rescuing the Tank Corps from the increasing disfavour into which their engines had fallen through being so long mishandled by the British Headquarters. Whatever may have been the reason, the fact remains that 'a project which had been constantly in the mind of the General Staff of the Tank Corps for nearly three months and in anticipation of which preparations had already been undertaken, was approved, and its date fixed for November 20.' All the requisite conditions were at last accorded. The Tanks were to operate on ground not yet ploughed up by artillery against a front not yet prepared to meet an offensive. Above all Surprise! The Tanks were themselves to open the attack. With a daring acceptance of responsibility Sir Julian Byng, who commanded the Army, ordered that not a shot was to be fired by the British artillery, not even for registration, until the Tanks were actually-launched. The Artillery schemes which for the first time rendered this feat practicable without mishap to the troops reflect the highest credit on their authors.\n\nThe minutely prepared scheme of the Tank Corps had the following aim:\u2014'To effect the penetration of four systems of trenches in a few hours without any type of artillery preparation.' Nearly 500 Tanks were available. 'To-morrow,' wrote General Elles, Commander of the Tank Corps, in his Special Order to his men, 'the Tank Corps will have the chance for which it has been waiting for many months\u2014to operate on good going in the van of the battle.'\n\n'The attack,' says the historian of the Tank Corps (Colonel Fuller), 'was a stupendous success. As the Tanks moved forward with the infantry following close behind, the enemy completely lost his balance, and those who did not fly panic-stricken from the field surrendered with little or no resistance.... By 4 p.m. on November 20 one of the most astonishing battles in all history had been won and, as far as the Tank Corps was concerned, tactically finished, for no reserves existing it was not possible to do more.' In the brief life of a November day the whole German trench system had been penetrated on a front of 6 miles, and 10,000 prisoners and 200 guns captured, without the loss of more than 1,500 British soldiers. 'It is a question,' declares the Staff Officer, \"whether any stroke of the allied army on the Western Front was more fruitful ultimately of ground and result than this battle of Cambrai, despite its limited design.'\n\nBut if this was so, why not have done it before? Why not have done it on a far larger scale? If British and French war leaders had possessed\u2014not more genius, for the possibilities had by this time been obvious to all who were studying the Tank problem\u2014but the vision and comprehension which is expected from the honoured chiefs of great armies, there was no reason why a battle like Cambrai could not have been fought a year before, or better still, why three or four concerted battles like Cambrai could not have been fought simultaneously in the spring of 1917. Then indeed the enemy's front line pierced at once in three or four places might have been completely overwhelmed on a front of 50 miles. Then indeed the roll forward of the whole army might have been achieved and the hideous deadlock broken.\n\nBut, it will be said, such assertions take insufficient account of the practical difficulties, of the slowly gathered experience, of the immense refinements of study, discipline and organization required. Could, for instance, 3,000 Tanks have been manufactured by the spring of 1917? Could the men to handle them have been spared from the front? Could their tactical training have been perfected behind the line and out of contact with the enemy? Could the secret have been kept? Would not preparation on so large a scale, even behind the line, have become apparent to the enemy? To all these questions we will answer that one-tenth of the mental effort expended by the Headquarters Staff on preparing the old-fashioned offensives of which the war had consisted, one-twentieth of the influence they used to compel reluctant Governments to sanction these offensives, one-hundredth of the men lost in them, would have solved all the problems easily and overwhelmingly before the spring of 1917. As for the Germans getting to hear of it, learning, for instance, that the British were practising with Caterpillar armoured cars at dummy trenches behind their lines on a large scale\u2014what use would they have made of their knowledge? What use did Ludendorff make of the awful disclosure, not as a mere rumour or questionable Intelligence report, but of the actual apparition of the Tanks in September, 1916? There is a melancholy comfort in reflecting that if the British and French commands were short-sighted, the ablest soldier in Germany was blind. In truth, these high military experts all belong to the same school. Haig at least moved faster and farther along the new path, and in consequence, doubtingly and tardily, he reaped in the end a generous reward.\n\nIt has been necessary to the whole argument of this Part to dwell insistently upon these aspects of the Battle of Cambrai. Accusing as I do without exception all the great ally offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917, as needless and wrongly conceived operations of infinite cost, I am bound to reply to the question, What else could be done? And I answer it, pointing to the Battle of Cambrai, ' _This_ could have been done.' This in many variants, this in larger and better forms ought to have been done, and would have been done if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.\n\nIt remains only to be said of the battle of Cambrai that the initial success so far exceeded the expectations of the Third Army Staff that no suitable preparations had been made to exploit it. The Cavalry who scampered forward were naturally soon held up by snipers and machine guns, and no important advance beyond the first day's gains was achieved. The railways at this part of the German front favoured a rapid hostile concentration, and ten days after the victory the Germans delivered a most powerful counter-stroke in which they recaptured a large portion of the conquered ground and took in their turn 10,000 prisoners and 200 guns. In this counter-attack the enemy used for the first time those tactics of 'infiltration' by small highly competent parties of machine-gunners or trench-mortar men, which they were soon to employ on a larger scale. The bells which had been rung for Cambrai were therefore judged premature, and the year 1917 closed on the allied fronts, British, French, Italian, Russian and Balkan, in a gloom relieved only by Allenby's sword-flash at Jerusalem.\n\n# CHAPTER XV\n\n# BRITAIN CONQUERS THE U-BOATS\n\n' _Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully_.'\n\nDR. JOHNSON.\n\n'Nearly succeeded'\u2014The Fatal Puzzle\u2014The Anatomy of the Submarine\u2014Surface or Submerged Attack\u2014Arming of the Mercantile Marine\u2014The Q-ships\u2014The Episode of the _Dunraven_ \u2014The German Dilemma\u2014Depth Charges and Destroyers\u2014Detector Nets\u2014The Prelude to Unrestricted Warfare\u2014The Crisis of the Struggle\u2014Admiralty Counter-measures\u2014The Question of Convoy: pros and cons\u2014My March Memorandum\u2014Wireless Control of Shipping\u2014Importance of Concentration both of Shipping and Protection\u2014Carson's Anxious Tenure\u2014Triumph of the Convoy System\u2014The Dover Barrage\u2014Admiral Keyes in Command\u2014The Giant Anglo-American Barrage\u2014The Hunters hunted\u2014Total Defeat of the U-boat\u2014The Price.\n\nIt is commonly said that the German drive on Paris in 1914 and the unlimited U-boat warfare both 'nearly succeeded.' But this expression requires analysis, and also differentiation between the issuses on land and sea. A partisan watching an evenly contested football match, an engineer watching a vehicle whose weight he does not know exactly, crossing a bridge whose strength he has never been able to measure, experiences no doubt similar sensations of anxiety or excitement. The processes however are different. A football match like a great battle on land is in a continual state of flux and chance. But whether the vehicle will break down the bridge does not depend on chance. It depends on the weight of the vehicle and the strength of the bridge. When both these are unknown beforehand, anxiety is natural. But once it is known that the bridge will bear at least ten tons and the vehicle at the most weighs no more than eight, all misgivings are proved to have been unfounded. To say that the vehicle 'nearly' broke down the bridge is untrue. There was never any chance of it. Whereas any one of a score of alternative accidents would have given the German Army Paris in 1914, the seafaring resources of Great Britain were in fact and in the circumstances always superior to the U-boat attack. Moreover, that attack was inherently of a character so gradual that these superior resources could certainly obtain their full development.\n\nNevertheless, the struggle between the British sailormen, Royal and Mercantile\u2014for both played an equally indispensable part\u2014and the German U-boats stands among the most heart-shaking episodes of history, and its declared result will for generations be regarded as a turning point in the destiny of nations. It was in scale and in stake the greatest conflict ever decided at sea. It was almost entirely a duel between Britain and Germany. Austrian submarines assisted the Germans. Allied navies, United States and Japanese destroyers, helped Great Britain to the best of their power. But three-quarters of the tonnage sunk was British, and 175 U-boats out of a total German war loss of 182 were destroyed by British agency.\n\nThe shortcomings in the higher command of the British Navy, afloat and at home, which had led to Admiral de Robeck's failure to force the Dardanelles, to the abortive conclusion of Jutland, and to the neglect to carry the fighting into the German Bight, had given to the enemy during 1915 and 1916 the means of developing an entirely novel form of sea attack upon a scale the potential intensity of which no one could measure beforehand, and which if successful would be fatal. At first sight all seemed to favour the challengers. Two hundred U-boats each possessing between three and four weeks' radius of action, each capable of sinking with torpedo, gun fire or bomb four or five vessels in a single day, beset the approaches to an island along which there passed in and out every week several thousand merchant vessels. The submarine, with only a periscope showing momentarily like a broomstick above the waves, could discharge its torpedo unseen. It could rise to the surface and fire its gun to sink, burn or induce the surrender of a defenceless vessel, and disappear into the invisible depths of the vast waste of water without leaving a trace behind. Of all the tasks ever set to a Navy none could have appeared more baffling than that of sheltering this enormous traffic and groping deep below the surface of the sea for the deadly elusive foe. It was in fact a game of blind man's buff in an unlimited space of three dimensions.\n\nHad the problem been surveyed in cold blood beforehand it might well have seemed insoluble. But in the event as the danger grew, so grew also the will power of the threatened State, and the courage, endurance and ingenuity of its servants. At the summit through the authority of the Prime Minister all misgivings were suppressed, all croakers silenced, and all doubters banished from executive responsibility. But strict inquiry was made into facts, and no official grimace passed long for argument. The qualities of audacity, initiative and seamanship inbred in the sailors and younger officers of the Navy found in this new warfare their highest opportunity. But without the unquenchable spirit of the Merchant Service nothing would have availed. The foundation of all defence lay in the fact that Merchant-seamen three or four times 'submarined' returned unfalteringly to the perilous seas, and even in the awful month when one ship out of every four that left the United Kingdom never came home, no voyage was delayed for lack of resolute civilian volunteers.\n\nTo realize the issues of this strange form of warfare hitherto unknown to human experience, the reader must understand the general anatomy of the submarine. This delicate vessel is driven when on the surface by powerful oil engines which in those days yielded speeds up to sixteen or seventeen knots. Submerged she depended upon electric accumulators which she could recharge by her oil engines when on the surface. These accumulators produced a maximum speed under water of about eight knots, and would last about one hour at full and twenty at economical speed. In order to dive, a submarine does not give herself negative buoyancy, i.e. make herself heavier than the water. She fills enough tanks to have about a ton of buoyancy in hand and then, by depressing her horizontal rudders and going ahead on her electric motors, swims down to the desired depth. A submarine is strong enough to resist the ever-increasing water pressures down to about two hundred and fifty feet below the surface. Beyond that depth there is increasing risk of leakage through the joints of her hull. Any serious penetration by salt water may liberate chlorine gas from the electric accumulators and choke the crew in tortures. Beyond a depth of three or four hundred feet a submarine would certainly be destroyed by the water pressure and would swiftly sink bilged to the ocean floor. In deep water therefore a submarine could only remain submerged while in motion, and could only keep in motion as long as her accumulators lasted. When these were exhausted, she must come to the surface and float defenceless during several hours while they were being recharged. On the other hand, where the sea was not more than two hundred and fifty feet deep, a submarine need not fear to give herself negative buoyancy. She could sink and sit on the bottom without using up her accumulators as long as the air and oxygen tubes she carried enabled the crew to breathe. This allowed her to remain below water for at least forty-eight hours, during which time she could also move perhaps sixty miles. The power to remain submerged for more than twenty hours was thus limited to the shallow seas. On the other hand, depths of less than fifty feet raised difficulties of another kind which prevented submerged attacks.\n\nThe prime weapon of all submarines was the torpedo; and as long as they fought warships, no other weapon was of any service. Thin-skinned submersible vessels could only engage in an artillery duel with armoured surface ships at a fatal disparity in risk. The penetration of a U-boat's hull by a single shot deprived her of the power of diving, even if it did not sink her outright. But when the Germans decided to use their U-boats to attack merchant ships, another set of arguments arose. The merchant ships were so numerous that the torpedo was an unsuitable weapon for procuring decisive results. It was expensive, difficult and lengthy to manufacture; the supply could only gradually be broadened out; and only from eight to twenty torpedoes could be carried in submarines according to their classes. As a large proportion of torpedoes missed their target for one fault or another, the destructive power of a U-boat against commerce during a single cruise was severely limited. Therefore the first move of the Germans was to arm their U-boats with guns to attack merchant ships on the surface of the water, sinking them either by gun fire or, after surrender, by bombs placed on board.\n\nThis method also enabled the U-boats to use their much superior surface speed, and allowed them to discriminate between different classes of merchant ships and between enemy and neutral ships; to observe their own Prize Law by visit and search; and finally to give time for the merchant crews, if they chose to surrender their vessel, to escape in open boats.\n\nThe first British counter-move, made on my responsibility in 1915, was to arm British merchantmen to the greatest possible extent with guns of sufficient power to deter the U-boat from surface attack. When this was achieved, the reduction of the assailant's speed and the limited torpedo supply increased the merchant ship's chance of escape proportionately. The argument was overwhelming. Unhappily there were at first hardly any guns either for merchant ships or for the coastal patrols. We searched every quarter of the globe and all the recesses of the Admiralty for guns, no matter how obsolete or various in pattern. A hundred coastal vessels by the spring of 1915 were provided with one 12-pounder gun apiece. The more important seagoing vessels were also armed. The scarcity was such that their guns had to be transferred from outward- to inward-bound vessels at ports outside the submarine zone, so as to make them go further. Despite every effort made by my successor, Mr. Balfour, the supply of guns expanded slowly; and it was not until the autumn of 1916 that he was in a position to undertake the arming of the whole of the Mercantile Marine. Good progress had however been made before the submarine danger renewed itself in its gravest form.\n\nAs the U-boats were forced by the progressive arming of the British Mercantile Marine to rely increasingly on under-water attacks, they encountered a new set of dangers. The submerged U-boat with its defective vision ran the greatest risk of mistaking neutral for British vessels and of drowning neutral crews, and thus of embroiling Germany with other great Powers. We also resorted to the well-known _ruse de guerre_ of hoisting false colours in order further to baffle and confuse the enemy. Thus from a very early stage the U-boats were forced to choose between all the practical inconveniences and far-reaching diplomatic consequences of underwater attack with the torpedo, or on the other hand of facing the disproportionate hazards of the gun duel on the surface. It was at this stage that we developed the stratagem of the Q-ship. A number of merchant vessels were specially equipped with torpedo tubes and with concealed guns firing from behind trap-door bulwarks, and sent along the trade routes to offer themselves to the hostile submarines. When the U-boat, wishing to economize torpedoes, attacked the Q-ship by gun fire on the surface, a portion of the British crew took to the boats and by every device endeavoured to entice the Germans to close quarters. Once the enemy was within decisive range, the White Ensign was hoisted, the trap-doors fell and a deadly fire by trained gunners was opened upon them. By these means in 1915 and 1916 eleven U-boats were destroyed and the rest, rendered far more nervous of attacking by gun fire, were thrown back more and more upon their torpedoes. By the end of 1917 this process was complete. The German submarine commanders would not face the unequal gunfire combat. The stratagem of the Q-ship was thus exhausted, and its last victim, U.88, perished in September, 1917.\n\nThe action between the Q-ship _Dunraven_ and U.61 affords a vivid example of this strange form of war. On the morning of August 8, 1917, H.M.S. _Dunraven_ , disguised as an armed British merchant ship, was zigzagging towards the Bristol Channel, offering herself to submarine attack. At 10.58 a U-boat was sighted on the horizon two points before the starboard beam. The _Dunraven_ continued to zigzag; and the U-boat, having approached submerged, broke surface at 11.43 on the starboard quarter and opened fire at about 5,000 yards. The _Dunraven_ , playing her part as an armed merchantman, at once opened fire with her after gun (a 2\u00bd pounder). Her Captain, Commander Gordon Campbell, ordered much smoke to be made from the funnels, but at the same time reduced speed to seven knots with an occasional zigzag to give the enemy a chance of closing. This the enemy did, and by 12.25 was scarcely a half-mile away. Meanwhile the _Dunraven's_ unconcealed stern gun was intentionally firing short, and her Commander made _en clair_ signals to deceive the U-boat, such as: 'Submarine chasing and shelling me'; 'Submarine overtaking me. Help. Come quickly'; 'Submarine (position). Am abandoning ship.' At 12.40, when the U-boat shells were falling near, Commander Campbell made a cloud of steam to pretend boiler trouble, and gave the order 'Abandon ship.' The _Dunraven_ stopped, blowing off steam, and turned her broadside so that the enemy could see the panic on board. The crew tumbled into the boats, one of which purposely was left hanging by her after davit. Thus encouraged, U.61 closed warily and continued firing. A shell went through the poop, exploding a depth charge and blowing up a Lieutenant. Two more shells crashed into the poop, setting it on fire. Clouds of dense smoke poured from the burning vessel, partially hiding from view the now swiftly approaching U-boat. The magazine and also the store of depth charges of the _Dunraven_ being in the poop, it was obvious that an explosion must soon take place. The crew of the secret 4-inch gun immediately above the magazine stood to their post, waiting in grim anxiety for an opportunity which they were not destined to see. U.61 was now 'coming along nicely from port to starboard to pass 400 or 500 yards off.' In a few minutes the attacker would be on the weather side and a perfect target. Commander Campbell therefore had the option of opening fire under difficult conditions or of waiting longer for a far better chance. He waited.\n\nAt 12.58, when the U-boat was passing close astern of the _Dunraven_ two depth charges and some cordite exploded. The 4-inch gun and the gun's crew were blown into the air. The gun itself was hurled on to the well deck, and the crew fell in various places\u2014one man in the water amid a shower of scattered 4-inch ammunition. The 'open fire' buzzers of all the concealed guns were started by the explosion, and the gun on the after bridge (the only one bearing) opened fire. Had this misfortune been delayed for two minutes more, three guns could have fired on U.61 at 400 yards range. U.61, warned from the size of the explosion that it had a Q-ship to deal with, dived instantly. Commander Campbell, realizing that he was now about to be torpedoed, ordered the doctor to remove all the wounded and lock them up in the cabins, 'so as not to spoil the next part.' The fire hoses were turned on to the poop, which was a mass of flames. Although the deck was red hot, the magazine itself had not yet exploded. Meanwhile a warship had answered the _Dunraven's en clair_ appeals for assistance, and fearing lest the action should be prematurely ended by her arrival, Commander Campbell signalled to her to keep away.\n\nAt 1.20 a torpedo was seen approaching from the starboard side. It struck abaft the engine room. The ruse of abandoning ship had already been exhausted so far as 'an armed merchant ship' was concerned. But the desperate condition of the _Dunraven_ favoured the hope that it might succeed in another form. There is a moment when even a warship must be abandoned. The order was therefore given, 'Q abandon ship.' The two secret guns which had been exposed were left visible, and an additional party of men were ordered to escape by a raft and a damaged boat.\n\nU.61 was now in great doubt. Was the ship finally abandoned or not? For nearly an hour, showing only his periscope, the submarine circled round the heeling, burning ship at various ranges. During this period boxes of cordite and 4-inch shells were continually exploding in the flames. At 2.30 U.61 broke surface directly astern, where no gun was bearing, and at a few hundred yards shelled the stricken ship. Nearly all the shells either hit the _Dunraven_ or fell close to the boats, on which U.61 also fired with a Maxim. Two shells burst on the bridge with serious effects. All this time Commander Campbell still waited for a favourable chance.\n\nAt 2.50, U.61 ceased shelling, submerged, and steamed past the _Dunraven's_ port side at about 150 yards distance. Only a small part of the periscope was showing, but this revealed both depth and position. The long-awaited moment had now come. The _Dunraven_ was armed not only with guns but with under-water torpedo tubes. Unfortunately she was heeling over so far that accurate aiming was spoiled. At 2.55 Commander Campbell fired a torpedo. The bubbles passed just ahead of the periscope; and the U-boat, unaware that destruction had missed her by a few inches, came slowly round on to the starboard side. This gave the _Dunraven_ a second chance, and at 3.20 another torpedo was fired. Again the bubbles passed close to the periscope, and the deadly weapon can only have missed its mark by the narrowest margin. This time U.61 saw the peril and dived deep. Commander Campbell, having exhausted every device and with his ship in a sinking condition, signalled for assistance. Men-of-war, headed by the United States destroyer _Noma_ , arrived from all quarters. The U-boat, whose periscope had again been seen, was hunted; and the _Dunraven_ , after her crew had been rescued, foundered in the great approach route she had so faithfully defended. For his tireless perseverance in this action Commander Campbell received the Victoria Cross.\n\nBy all these man\u0153uvres and pressures the Germans were confronted during 1916 with the dilemma either of losing a great many U-boats in gun duels or Q-ship ambuscades, or of resorting almost entirely to the torpedo with a vastly increased risk of offending neutrals. This complicated and nicely balanced discussion produced great stresses and cross-purposes between the German naval and civil authorities. The Naval Staff, headed by Tirpitz and Scheer, demanded that the authorities should sink at sight all vessels in the war zone. The Emperor and the Chancellor in their fear of offending neutrals insisted that the custom of visit and search should be complied with in the case of unarmed ships. But\u2014protested the Naval Staff\u2014which were the unarmed ships, and what would happen to the U-boat while she was making her enquiries? They declared moreover that unrestricted warfare would increase the sinkings to such an extent that Britain would be forced within six months to sue for peace.\n\nThe relative vulnerability of armed and unarmed ships can be judged from the following summary of U-boat attacks on British vessels between January 1, 1916, and January 25, 1917.\n\n| Defensively armed ships| Unarmed ships.  \n---|---|---  \nNumber attacked| 310| 302  \nSunk by torpedoes without warning| 62| 30  \nSunk by gun fire or bombs| 12| 205  \nEscaped| 236| 67  \nPercentage escaped| 76| 22\n\nThese figures are illuminating and conclusive. They show that the U-boat was scarcely ever willing to face the gun duel with an armed vessel; and in consequence that with equal numbers of ships attacked the armed ship had nearly four times the unarmed ship's chance of escape. So much for the first great measure of defence.\n\nThe principal means of _attacking_ submarines under water was by dropping overboard charges which exploded at a certain depth. The shock of these explosions seriously jarred the submarine, and if near enough, deranged her mechanism or opened her joints. These depth charges were our earliest anti-submarine device. Gradually the methods of dropping them improved, and their size and number were multiplied many times. The arch-enemy of the submarine was the destroyer. She had the fastest speed, the greatest number of depth charges, and was herself cheaper than the quarry she hunted. When the periscope of a U-boat was seen in deep water all the available destroyers and motor launches and other fast small craft spread in an organized network over the surface so as to keep her down and force her to exhaust her accumulators; and alike in deep water or in shallow, the slightest indication of her whereabouts\u2014an air bubble, an oil stain on the surface\u2014drew the dreaded depth charges in a searching shower. As the struggle progressed the skill and methods of the hunting vessel perpetually improved. Wonderful instruments were devised for detecting the beat of a submarine propeller; and with this and other indications a U-boat was sometimes pursued to death after an intermittent but unrelenting chase of more than thirty-six hours, during which the U-boat had perhaps replenished her electric batteries on the surface unseen two or three times.\n\nThe second anti-submarine weapon was the thin wire net hung in long strips across straits or narrow channels. These nets, buoyed on the surface with glass balls, were intended to foul the propeller of the U-boat and to cling about the hull. A U-boat thus enveloped, even if her motive power was not affected, would unconsciously be trailing a fatal tell-tale buoy about upon the surface, thus guiding her pursuers. To these light nets there were added in particular channels elaborately devised necklaces of mines joined with nets and watched by large numbers of trawlers with destroyers at ready call. Collision was another danger for this slow-moving, half-blind creature; and the ram of battleship, cruiser, destroyer or merchant ship on frequent occasions exacted the final forfeit.\n\nLastly, submarines stalked one another, and a U-boat while attacking a merchant ship or recharging its batteries upon the surface was on more than one occasion blown to pieces by the torpedo of a submerged pursuer of whose approach she was unconscious. The brutal features inseparable from the submarine attack on merchant vessels, and the miserable fate which so often overtook the passengers and civilian crew, inspired this warfare with exceptional fierceness. The attack upon warships, however grievous in loss of life, was considered fair war by the Royal Navy. The sinking of merchant vessels or neutral ships or hospital ships seemed to be a barbarous, treacherous and piratical act deserving every conceivable means of extermination. When we consider that nearly thirteen thousand British lives were destroyed by the German U-boats and that many were civilians, and the cruel and shocking incidents\u2014to some extent inevitable\u2014which characterised this warfare, and when we remember further the awful character of the stakes, the fact that several hundred German officers and men were rescued from the sea or allowed to surrender after scuttling their vessels is a tribute to the restraint of the deeply injured conqueror.\n\nThe Germans had originally decided to begin unrestricted submarine war on April 1, 1916. The threat of the United States to break off relations after the attack on the _Sussex_ led at the end of the month to the permission being withdrawn. When Admiral Scheer, an ardent advocate of unrestricted warfare, received this order he intemperately recalled the High Sea fleet U-boats, refusing to permit them to work on the basis of visit and search. From May to October therefore the campaign was practically confined to the Mediterranean and to the mine-layers of the Flanders flotilla. The relief thus afforded to Great Britain in northern waters was however both fleeting and illusory. The Mediterranean U-boats, working in accordance with German prize procedure, succeeded in sinking a large number of ships, and the German Naval Staff on October 6 ordered Scheer to resume restricted warfare with the North Sea flotillas. In the interval the number of U-boats available for active service had risen from 47 in March to 93 in November. The sinkings consequently increased rapidly when operations were resumed. The average monthly loss for the period April to September had been 131,000 tons; that from November to February rose to 276,000 tons. By the end of 1916 it was evident that the development of anti-submarine measures had not kept pace with the increasing intensity of the attack. The defensive measures instituted during 1915 had increased the number of armed merchantmen and auxiliary patrol vessels, but the problem of actually attacking and destroying U-boats was still in a rudimentary stage.\n\nOn February 1 the unrestricted attack began in full vigour, and the numbers of the U-boats continually increased. The losses of British, Allied and neutral vessels increased from 181 in January to 259 in February, 325 in March, and 423 in April; the corresponding figures in gross tonnage being 298,000 in January, 468,000 in February, 500,000 in March, and 849,000 in April. We now know that the German Naval Staff estimated that British shipping could be reduced at a rate of 600,000 tons a month, and that in five months at this rate Britain would be forced to her knees. In April alone the total world tonnage lost reached the appalling figure of 849,000 tons. The average monthly loss of British shipping during April, May and June from U-boats amounted to 409,300 tons, corresponding to a rate of nearly five million tons a year. By the end of May, apart from vessels employed on naval and military services or essential trade in distant waters, and undergoing repairs, there was less than six million tons of shipping available for all the supplies and trade with the United Kingdom. If losses continued at this rate and were equally divided among the services exposed to attack, the tonnage available for trade at the beginning of 1918 would be reduced to under five million tons, that is to say, an amount almost exactly equal to the gross sinkings in 1917. It seemed that Time, hitherto counted as an incorruptible Ally, was about to change sides.\n\nNor did the entry of the United States into the war shed any beam of hope on these dark waters. The longed-for American resources required a vast array of British tonnage to transport them to the Front. The patrol system in the approaches to the English Channel and South of Ireland had completely broken down. Not only were the limited numbers of the patrol vessels unable to protect the shipping, but their mere presence assisted the submarines to find the traffic routes. In April the great approach route to the south-west of Ireland was becoming a veritable cemetery of British shipping, in which large vessels were sunk regularly day by day about 200 miles from land. During this month it was calculated that one in four merchant ships leaving the United Kingdom never returned. The U-boat was rapidly undermining not only the life of the British islands, but the foundations of the Allies' strength; and the danger of their collapse in 1918 began to loom black and imminent.\n\nThe stern pressure of events reacted upon Admiralty organisation. In May the Naval Staff was given an appropriate position on the Board by the merging of the office of First Sea Lord and Chief of Staff, while the addition of a Deputy and Assistant who could each act with Board authority accelerated business and relieved the Chief of Staff of a mass of work. The Operations Division, hitherto troubled like Martha over many things, had not been able to think far enough ahead. In May a small planning section was instituted, charged with a study of policy and preparation of plans; and this was later in the year expanded into a separate Division. Younger officers were called to the Admiralty and more responsibility was given to them. Without this reorganization of the Staff, the measures that defeated the U-boat, even if conceived, could not have been executed. These measures took a threefold form: first, the preparation and launching of extensive mining plans; secondly, the further development of research and supply in the technical fields of mines, depth charges and hydrophones; and thirdly, the decisive step, the institution of a convoy system which involved the escort and control of all merchant shipping.\n\nI had instituted the convoy system for troopships crossing the oceans at the beginning of the war. Then the attack by faster German light cruisers was the danger. The guns of an obsolete battleship or heavy cruiser could certainly drive away any hostile raiders then loose upon the surface of the seas. We had also from the beginning used destroyer escorts to convoy troopships in and out through the submarine zone. In no case did any mishap occur. It did not however seem reasonable to expect similar results from the convoy system in the case of attack by submarines upon merchant ships. On the contrary it seemed obvious that hostile submarines would work more damage in the midst of a crowd of merchantmen than against isolated vessels; and it was further evident that the escorting warships would themselves be among the targets of the enemy torpedoes. The U-boat attacks on trade in 1915 and the early part of 1916 seemed to have been confined within tolerable limits by the numbers of merchant vessels at sea, by the variety of their routes and ports, by the uncertainty of their times of arrival, and above all by the size of the sea. The system of watching and patrolling in the greatest strength possible the confluences of trade had worked well against the German raiding cruisers, and for the first two years of the war the Admiralty relied upon it against the U-boats without serious misadventure.\n\nWhen under the pressure of ever-increasing losses the remedy of convoys was again advocated by the younger officers of the Admiralty War Staff, it encountered opposition from practically every quarter. Every squadron and every naval base was clamant for destroyers, and convoy meant taking from them even those that they had. There would be delays due to assembling. There must be reduction in speed of the faster vessels and congestion of ships in port. The scale and difficulties of the task were exaggerated, and it was argued that the larger the number of ships in company, the greater the risk from submarines. This convincing logic could only be refuted by the proof of facts. In January, 1917, the official Admiralty opinion was expressed as follows:\u2014\n\n'A system of several ships sailing in company as a convoy is not recommended in any area where submarine attack is a possibility. It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming a convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being able to attack successfully and the greater the difficulty of the escort in preventing such an attack.'\n\nThe French and United States naval authorities were also opposed to the convoy system, and at a Conference held in February, 1917, representative Masters of merchant ships took the same view.\n\nNow let us see what was overlooked in this high, keen and earnest consensus. The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one. Here then was the key to the success of the convoy system against U-boats. The concentration of ships greatly reduced the number of targets in a given area and thus made it more difficult for the submarine to locate their prey. Moreover, the convoys were easily controlled and could be quickly deflected by wireless from areas known to be dangerous at any given moment. Finally the destroyers, instead of being dissipated on patrol over wide areas, were concentrated at the point of the hostile attack, and opportunities of offensive action frequently arose. Thirteen U-boats were actually destroyed while endeavouring to molest convoys. This fear of instant retaliation from convoy escorts had a demoralizing effect upon the enemy, and consequently U-boat attacks were not always pressed home.\n\nMost of this was still unproved in the early days of 1917. There stood only the fact that troopship convoys had always been escorted through the submarine zones during 1915 and 1916 and had enjoyed complete immunity from attack. The highest professional opinion remained opposed to convoy as a defence against U-boats, and personally I rested under that impression. I had no official position at that time, but I had confidential relations with Ministers and was informed both upon the discussion and the facts. I therefore wrote in March for the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Edward Carson, the following note. It was intended to offer an alternative means of gaining the advantages claimed by its advocates for the convoy system without running counter to the solid objections of the naval authorities. I print it because it throws a contemporary light upon the problem and because, although the method proposed was rejected in favour of a simpler and more practical plan, the reasonings are sound.\n\n_March_ , 1917.\n\nIt is assumed for the purposes of this argument that the Germans use about fifty submarines at a time in three reliefs; that every submarine remains out about a month and takes (except in the case of the Zeebrugge boats) from two to three days to get to its beat.\n\nThe number of enemy submarines actually on the watch is not large enough to allow of any great concentration: they must be widely dispersed to cover the whole extended approaches to these islands. There cannot be any large number in any one station. The amount of damage which a submarine can do is limited by its store of torpedoes, and also by the hours of the day. Tackling even a single ship involves a considerable time. What a submarine wants in order to make its best bag is a steady trickle of shipping day after day more or less evenly dispersed along all the routes approaching these islands. It is arguable that _a greater concentration both of shipping and of the means of protection_ , now here now there along particular routes and at particular times, would sensibly reduce the proportion of losses.\n\nThe measures suggested are as follows:\u2014\n\nTell all ships which have wireless who are approaching our shores and expect to enter the area of submarine activity by nightfall\u2014say Monday night\u2014to steam back on their course for thirty-six hours and then to resume their voyage. Tell all ships who would similarly arrive on Tuesday night to steam back on their course for twenty-four hours; and all ships that would similarly arrive on Wednesday night to steam back on their course for twelve hours\u2014and then in all cases resume their voyage. The result of this would be to create four blank days and to quadruple the volume of shipping arriving in the danger zone on the fourth day. For three days therefore the German submarines would be useless and would find no prey. On the fourth day they would be confronted with a crowd of shipping out of which it is possible, owing to their limited numbers, that they could not take a proportionate toll. It is clear that you could afford to lose four times as much shipping on the fourth day as on any one of the four days without being worse off. If the number of submarines remains few and constant\u2014their activity being in many respects a limited factor\u2014while the volume of traffic is quadrupled, there is a very fair prospect of the proportion of losses not increasing in anything like the same ratio as the proportion of shipping. One knows that if you want a big bag of pheasants you beat them out of the cover in twos and threes, whereas if it is intended to shoot the cover over again the whole lot should be driven out as quickly as possible in the largest numbers. If rabbits run across a ride past a limited number of guns, their best chance is to run unexpectedly and all at once. It is quite possible that these simple analogies have a wider application....\n\nThere is no reason to believe that losses are proportionate to the volume of traffic; the variations from day to day effectively prove this. There is every reason to believe that losses are limited by increased protection. The ships fitted with wireless are the most important and the largest; they are the ones which raise the tonnage totals. The experiment applied to them alone, as it necessarily must be, would be well worth while attempting. But if it were successful, the universal adoption of wireless in our merchant service would follow as a matter of course....\n\nThe intermittence and uncertainty which may be imparted to the movements of our shipping by the regulation of _time_ can be supplemented by the variation of _routes._ After one accumulation of shipping has been released upon (say) the Bristol Channel, the next might be directed on Liverpool or the Clyde\u2014all the available protection being meanwhile concentrated so far as possible upon the route about to be used.\n\nIt fell to Sir Edward Carson's lot during his tenure as First Lord to face the most anxious and trying period of the naval war. During those eight months the U-boat sinkings of merchantmen reached their terrible climax. It was under his administration that the peak was surmounted and most of the important decisions of principle were taken by which the peril was ultimately overcome. The trial of the convoy system was urged upon the naval authorities by the Cabinet, and in this the Prime Minister took a decisive part.\n\nAt the end of April, 1917, the Director of the Anti-Submarine Division definitely advocated the introduction of convoys, and the first one left Gibraltar on May 10. It was entirely successful, and regular convoys commenced from the United States on June 4. Instructions were issued on June 22 to extend the system to Canadian ports, and on July 31 similar orders were issued for the South Atlantic trade. The entry of the United States facilitated convoys by opening her harbours as ports of assembly and by the precious aid of a number of her destroyers for escort work. More than a quarter of the whole of the escorts across the Atlantic were provided by American destroyers, and the comradeship of this hard service forms an ineffaceable tradition for the two navies.\n\nThe convoy organization will for ever stand as a monument to the constancy and courage of the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine. No credit is too high for the officers and men who without previous training navigated these fleets of forty or fifty ships in close formation through all the winds that blew. No service ever carried out by the Navy was of greater value to the State than that of the escort vessels. Those who have served in small ships will realize the skill, faithfulness and hardihood required to carry out this duty day after day, month after month, in wild weather and wintry seas without breakdown or failure. The control and arrangements of the Admiralty and the Ministry of Shipping became more thorough and perfect with every week that passed.\n\nThe convoy system was at first confined to homeward-bound vessels. The percentage of sinkings in the outward sailings at once began to rise. In August, 1917, convoy was extended to outward-bound vessels. The diagram (pp. 1240\u20131241) reveals at a glance the triumph of convoy. By the end of October, 1917, 99 homeward convoys, comprising over 1,500 steamers of a deadweight capacity of 10,656,000 tons, had been brought in with the loss of only 10 ships torpedoed while actually in convoy, and of 14 which had become separated.\n\nWhile convoy was vastly improving the protection of trade, all methods of attacking the U-boats were progressively developed, and the rate of destruction steadily rose. In April, 1917, British submarine flotillas were based upon Scapa Flow, Lough Swilly on the North, and Killybegs on the West coast of Ireland, and began to lie in wait for U-boats passing northabout to attack the great trade route. At the same time in the Southern part of the North Sea the small British 'C' Class submarines were released from harbour defence for the same duties. This method by which submarine vessels preyed on each other yielded substantial results. Seven U-boats were destroyed by it in 1917 and six in 1918. The threat of submarine attack also forced the U-boats to submerge much more frequently and for longer periods on their passage, with consequent delays in reaching their beats.\n\nThe mine, however, proved to be the most effective killing weapon. The Admiralty, before the war, had not expected the mine to play an important part. In a war on the surface of the sea the weaker navy would no doubt use such a weapon to hamper the movements of its superior antagonist; but for the stronger fleet, the fewer minefields the better. These conclusions, which at the time were not ill-founded, were upset by the changes for which the prolongation of the war gave time. At the outset the British mines were few and inefficient. It was even stated in a German Order that 'British mines generally do not explode.' This was an exaggeration: but we were certainly at fault in the matter.\n\nAt the end of April, 1916, an attempt was made by the Dover Force, under Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, to blockade the Flanders U-boats by a long and extensive barrage off the Belgian coast. This was completed by May 7. It consisted of 18 miles of moored mines and nets guarded from May to October by day patrols. U.B.13 was destroyed by one of its mines the day after the barrage was laid, and an immediate diminution of U-boat activity in the North Sea and the Channel followed. This was not unnaturally attributed to the new barrage and gave the Dover Command an exaggerated idea of its value. We now know that it was to Admiral Scheer's impulsive recall of the High Sea Fleet U-boat flotillas, and not to the Dover barrage that the marked improvement of these months was due, for only one U-boat was destroyed by its mines; nor did it seriously impede their movements in and out.\n\nEfforts to improve the quality of the British mines had been unceasing since the beginning of the war. It was not until the autumn of 1917 that the new 'horned' mines became available in large quantities. The improvement of the new type upon the old cannot be better measured than by the fact that out of forty-one U-boats destroyed by mines only five were prior to September, 1917. No less than 15,700 mines were laid in the Heligoland Bight during 1917 and 21,000 more in 1918, mainly by the 20th Destroyer Flotilla working from the Humber. This attempt to block in the U-boats developed into a protracted struggle between British mine-layers and German minesweepers. The enemy was forced to escort the U-boats both on their inward and outward journey with a whole array of minesweepers, of specially constructed ships with concrete-filled bows called 'barrier-breakers,' and torpedo boats. These escorts had to be protected, and from 1917 onwards the main occupation of the High Sea Fleet was the support of its sweeping forces working far afield on the submarine routes. As time went on the difficulties of egress and ingress increased. The 'ways' or swept channels in the Bight were frequently closed, and in October, 1917, homeward-bound submarines began to be sent round by the Kattegat. Early in 1918 about 1,400 deep mines were laid in the Kattegat but could not be patrolled. The intensive mining of the Bight failed to achieve success because of the difficulties of attacking the German sweeping craft and the lack of destroyers for the patrol of the Kattegat. The effort however destroyed several U-boats, and increased their time on passage to and from the trade routes.\n\nDuring 1917 the failure of the 1916 Barrage across the Dover Straits had been total. From February to November U-boats continued to pass through it at the rate of about twenty-four a month. The Dover passage saved a small Flanders U-boat nearly eight days on its fourteen-days' cruise, and a larger boat from the Bight six days out of twenty-five. It was decided to make a fresh attempt with all the improved appliances now at hand. On November 21 a new deep minefield was laid between the Varne and Gris Nez. When no fewer than twenty-one U-boats passed through this in the first fortnight, a sharp controversy arose at the Admiralty. Some authorities supported the contentions of the Dover Command that the barrage was largely successful and that additional patrolling was impracticable. Others held that an intensive patrol and the use of searchlights and Hares at night to make the U-boats dive into the mines would achieve great results. About this time, and partly in connection with this discussion. Sir John Jellicoe was replaced as First Sea Lord by Admiral Wemyss, and Admiral Bacon was succeeded in the Dover Command by Admiral Keyes. Keyes revolutionized the situation. He redoubled the patrols, and by night the barrage from end to end became as bright as Piccadilly. The German destroyers from Ostend and Zeebrugge attempted to break down the patrols by sudden raids. They were repulsed in fierce night actions and the watch maintained with ever-increasing efficiency. Nine U-boats perished in the Dover area between January and May, 1918, and four more by September. As early as February the Bight boats ceased to use the Straits, and by April the Flanders boats had largely abandoned it. In September only two boats passed through, one of which was destroyed on its return.\n\nThe famous story of the blocking of Zeebrugge on St. George's Day by Admiral Keyes and the Dover Force cannot be repeated here. It may well rank as the finest feat of arms in the Great War, and certainly as an episode unsurpassed in the history of the Royal Navy. The harbour was completely blocked for about three weeks and was dangerous to U-boats for a period of two months. Although the Germans by strenuous efforts partially cleared the entrance after some weeks for U-boats, no operations of any importance were ever again carried out by the Flanders destroyers. The results of Admiral Keyes' command at Dover reduced the Allied losses in the English Channel from about twenty to six a month, and the minefields laid by the Flanders boats fell from thirty-three a month in 1917 to six a month in 1918. These results, which constitute a recognizable part of the general victory, were achieved notwithstanding the fact that the numbers of U-boats in commission were maintained by new building at about two hundred.\n\nThe attempts to mine in the Heligoland Bight had been frustrated by the German sweeping operations, closely supported by the High Sea Fleet. It was thought that a more distant barrage, under the direct watch and ward of the Grand Fleet, might succeed. In 1918 an ambitious scheme for establishing a line of guarded minefields across the 180 miles of water between Norway and the Orkney Islands was developed by the British and American Navies. Enormous quantities of materials, regardless of cost or diversion of effort, were employed upon this supreme manifestation of defensive warfare. The large centre section was laid entirely by Americans, the Orkney section by the British, and the Norway section by the two Navies in combination. The Americans used a special type of mine with antenn\u00e6 that exploded the charge on coming into contact with the metal hull. They laid no less than 57,000 mines, a large number of which exploded prematurely shortly after being laid. The British contribution was about 13,000 mines, but some of these were not laid deep enough for surface craft to pass over and had in consequence to be swept up. The efficiency of this enormous material effort cannot be judged, for the minefield was barely completed when the Armistice was signed. It is known however that two U-boats were damaged on the centre section, and four may possibly have been destroyed on the Orkney section.\n\nThe ever-increasing efficiency of the Anti-Submarine Organization during 1918 also mastered the mine-laying tactics of the U-boats. Closer co-operation between the British Intelligence and Mine Sweeping Divisions, the rapid distribution of news, the firmer control of shipping and the use of the 'Otter' all played their part. One hundred and twenty-three British merchant ships had been sunk by German mines in 1917. In 1918 this number was reduced to 10. All other anti-submarine devices were developed with ceaseless ingenuity. Aircraft, hydrophones and special types of mines levied an increasing toll upon the U-boats. During 1918 high hopes were based on systematic hunting tactics, and trawler flotillas equipped with ingenious listening devices were assembled in the northern area for this purpose. Several contacts were made, but the U-boats escaped by going dead slow so that their movements could not be detected by the instruments; and we could not provide enough destroyers over such wide areas to exhaust their accumulators.\n\nThe final phase of the U-boat war saw the r\u00f4les of the combatants reversed. It was the U-boat and not the merchant ship that was hunted. The experiences of U.B.110 on her first cruise may serve as an example. She sailed from Zeebrugge on July 5, 1918. Even before she had joined the Flanders Flotilla she had been attacked by two aeroplanes. Every day from July 7 onwards her log records the dropping of depth charges around her in ever-increasing numbers until the 18th, when twenty-six exploded close at hand. She was only able to fire two torpedoes during the cruise. The first one damaged an oil ship, but she could not see the result of the second owing to an immediate and violent counter-attack by destroyers. On the 19th, when attempting to attack a convoy, her diving rudders were damaged by a depth charge dropped from a motor launch; and while endeavouring to submerge she was rammed and sunk by a destroyer. In these latter days a Flanders U-boat could hope for only six voyages before meeting its dark doom. The unceasing presentiment of a sudden and frightful death beyond human sight or succour, the shuddering concussions of the depth charges, the continual attacks of escort vessels, the fear of annihilation at any moment from mines, the repeated hairbreadth escapes, produced a state of nervous tension in the U-boat crews. Their original high morale declined rapidly during 1918 under an intolerable strain. The surrender of more than one undamaged submarine and numerous cases of boats putting back for small repairs a few days after leaving harbour showed that even in this valiant age the limits of human endurance had been reached.\n\nThe various stages of the U-boat war and its strange conditions have now been examined. No sooner had the German war leaders taken their irrevocable decision to begin the unlimited attack on commerce than the Russian Revolution, by rendering their situation less desperate, removed the principal impulsion. No sooner had the unlimited U-boat warfare forced the United States into the field against Germany than the effectiveness of the U-boats began to decline. The month that saw President Wilson jingling among his Cavalrymen to the Senate to cast the life energy of a nation of a hundred and twenty millions into the adverse scales marked also the zenith of the U-boat attack. Never again did Germany equal the April sinkings. Many months of grievous losses and haunting anxiety lay before the Islanders and their Allies, and immense diversions\u2014some needless\u2014of straitened resources hampered their military effort. But with every month the sense of increasing mastery grew stronger. At one time the plotted curves of sinkings and replacements which our graphs revealed seemed a veritable 'writing on the wall.' But the awful characters faded steadily. The autumn of 1917, which was to have seen the fulfilment of German dreams, came, passed, and left us safer. By the end of the year it was certain we should not succumb. It was certain moreover that the war could be carried on until the power of the United States could if necessary be fully exerted on the battlefields of Europe. By the middle of 1918 the submarine campaign had been definitely defeated; and though new U-boats replaced those destroyed, every month added to their perils, to the restriction of their depredations and to the demoralization of their crews. The weapon purchased so dearly by the German war leaders had first been blunted and then broken in their hands. It remained for them only to pay the price, and meet the fury of the world in arms. But from this they did not shrink.\n\n# CHAPTER XVI\n\n# THE GERMAN CONCENTRATION IN THE WEST\n\nThe Man-Power Crisis\u2014The Gathering Storm\u2014Cabinet and G.H.Q.\u2014My Memorandum of December 8\u2014Man-Power and Strategy\u2014Proposals for Increasing the Supply\u2014Further Resources\u2014General Summary of British Resources\u2014My Speech at Bedford\u2014The Policy of the War Cabinet\u2014Extension of the British Front\u2014The General Allied Reserve\u2014The Versailles Committee\u2014Sir William Robertson Dismissed\u2014A Visit to the Canadians\u2014The New Defensive Tactics\u2014Sir Henry Wilson\u2014His Qualities and Services\u2014A Favourable Atmosphere\u2014My Survey of March 5\u2014How to obtain a Decision\u2014Means of Continuous Forward Progression\u2014The Four New Arms\u2014A Different Distribution\u2014Mechanical Developments\u2014The Mechanical Battle\u2014The Reduced Scale and Intensity of the War\u2014The Agonizing Deadlock\u2014The 300 Kilometre Battle.\n\nAn acute crisis in Man-Power followed the prodigal campaign of 1917, and a prolonged and searching examination of our remaining resources was made by the War Cabinet. The British Infantry, on whom the brunt of the slaughter had fallen, were woefully depleted. The battalions were far below their proper strength, and even so, largely composed of new drafts. The losses of the artillery both in men and guns destroyed were also most severe. The loss in officers was out of all proportion even to the great losses of the rank and file. The task had throughout demanded an unprecedented degree of sacrifice from regimental officers. More than five thousand had been killed outright and over fifteen thousand had been wounded in the Passchendaele offensive. This loss was especially difficult to replace; could never in fact be fully replaced. We had every reason to expect that the main fighting of 1918 in France would fall upon Great Britain. The French, who had begun with the unequalled slaughter of 1914 and had ever since been engaged on a scale of nearly one hundred and twenty divisions, must necessarily and naturally be expected to reserve their remaining strength\u2014grand it proved to be\u2014for supreme emergencies. It was now certain that the United States, in spite of their utmost efforts and passionate desire to share the suffering, could not play more than a minor part in the actual battles. Only eight or nine American divisions were in fact due to enter the line before the summer was far spent. Substantial help had been sent perforce from the Western Front to Italy, and none could be expected in return. We had also almost the whole burden of the war against Turkey on our hands; and Allenby, so far from being able to release divisions, was continually pressing not only for drafts but for reinforcements. Additional forces, both British and Indian, were required for the army in Mesopotamia; and finally the Salonica Front, on which we bore our share, was a constant drain. It was in these grave circumstances that we had to anticipate a German onslaught far exceeding in power and fury anything that had yet been experienced.\n\nThe final collapse of Russia had liberated enormous masses of German and Austrian troops. During the whole of the winter the movement of divisions and guns from the Eastern to the Western Front, and to a lesser extent against Italy, was unceasing. How great this movement actually was we could not measure exactly, but the Intelligence reports, with which I endeavoured to saturate myself, revealed week after week an unending flow of men and material to the West. Surveying the forces on both sides in the main theatre, it could not be doubted that by the spring Germany would have for the first time in the war, not even excepting the original invasion, a large numerical preponderance on the Western Front. Moreover, the divisions coming from Russia would, by the opening of the new campaign, have had nearly a year without serious fighting in which to recuperate and train. All our fighting units, on the other hand, had been decimated fivefold in the last six months of 1917. Finally, in addition to the masses of German and Austrian artillery released from the Russian Front, the enemy had captured at least four thousand guns from Russia and two thousand from Italy, together with immense supplies of war material of all kinds.\n\nSir Douglas Haig vehemently and naturally called for all the officers and men required to bring his divisions up to full strength at the earliest possible moment. Robertson supported him, and was evidently seriously alarmed. From my central position between the Army and the War Cabinet, with, I believe, the whole information available in my possession and with constant intimate access to the Prime Minister, I never ceased to press for the immediate reinforcement of Sir Douglas Haig. Mr. Lloyd George viewed with horror the task imposed on him of driving to the shambles by stern laws the remaining manhood of the nation. Lads of eighteen and nineteen, elderly men up to forty-five, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded\u2014all must now prepare themselves for the scythe. To meet the German onslaught when it came\u2014if it came\u2014everything must be thrown in: but the Prime Minister feared lest our last resources should be expended in another Passchendaele.\n\nIt was in December that the shadow fell darkly upon the military mind. Up till then the Cabinet had been assured that all was going well in the West, and that\u2014granted the drafts\u2014the New Year could be faced with confidence. At the Ministry of Munitions we had long been instructed to prepare for a renewed thirty weeks' offensive beginning in the earliest spring. With the end of Passchendaele came the end of illusions. The sudden sinister impression was sustained by the General Staff. The cry for a fresh offensive died away. The mood swung round to pure defence\u2014and against heavy odds. It was a revolution at once silent and complete. I responded to it with instant relief. The War Cabinet however continued for some time to rest themselves upon the confident declarations of the Generals made in September in advocacy of perseverance at Passchendaele. They did not readily conform to the military _volte-face_ and were sceptical of tales so utterly at variance with those of a few weeks before.\n\nI urged that the Cabinet should send all the men that were needed to reconstitute the Army, and should at the same time forbid absolutely any resumption of the offensive. The Prime Minister however did not feel that, if the troops were once in France, he would be strong enough to resist those military pressures for an offensive which had so often overborne the wiser judgment of Statesmen. He therefore held, with all his potent influence, to a different policy. He sanctioned only a moderate reinforcement of the army, while at the same time gathering in England the largest possible numbers of reserves. In this way he believed he would be able alike to prevent a British offensive and to feed the armies during the whole course of the fearful year which was approaching. This was in fact achieved. But I held, and hold still, that the War Cabinet should have been resolute, as I believe it would have been found strong enough, at once to support and to restrain the High Command in France. I set forth in the following secret Memorandum my views in detail.\n\n# MAN-POWER AND THE SITUATION.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_December_ 8, 1917.\n\n1. It is not possible to settle the question of man-power without a clear idea of the plan of campaign. The Ministry of National Service is naturally bound to tabulate the demands of the various Departments, set their existing resources against them, and show the resulting deficit. But these demands are a mere aggregate of separate and independent departmental requirements and not, as they should be, the expression of a general scheme of war. If a plan of campaign suited to the actual facts of next year, as far as we can foresee them, were made out, it seems certain to me that the total demand could be substantially reduced.\n\n2. For instance, the calculations of military requirements have been based upon a continuance of the kind of offensive action which we have pursued during the last two years, whereas the balance of forces next year will clearly not permit a continuance of that policy on the same scale nor to the same degree. It is vital to us to have in the field at the opening of the Spring campaign a British army stronger and better equipped than we have ever had before, because the burden thrown upon it is going to be greater than before. On the other hand, this army, once raised and restored to its full efficiency and strength, must be husbanded and not consumed. It must be an army crouched and not sprawled; an army with a large proportion of divisions in reserve at full strength, resting and training; an army sustained by every form of mechanical equipment, including, especially, tanks and aeroplanes, and possessing the greatest possible lateral mobility. What is required therefore is an immediate large draft of men to raise the army to its fullest strength and to give it the greatest possible springing power and striking power. At the same time this power, when gained, must be scrupulously and jealously guarded and even hoarded, and not reduced or impaired except to meet vital emergencies.\n\nThese two aspects must be kept simultaneously in mind\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) An immediate raising of the army to the highest possible strength; and\n\n( _b_ ) Its jealous conservation when raised.\n\nOur r\u00f4le and only chance of escaping defeat is to bridge the long intervening months before the Americans can become a decisive factor; and as we cannot tell what emergencies we may have to meet in the meanwhile, we must not only mobilize our greatest possible strength, but keep it in hand to guard against unforeseeable contingencies.\n\n3. To say that we should raise our army to the highest possible offensive power by no means implies that it should be immediately launched upon a general offensive. To say, on the other hand, that the general r\u00f4le of the British armies will be 'an active defensive' by no means precludes the striking of sudden heavy blows on our own initiative, nor the power of vehement counter-attack. There is therefore great scope of a certain number of brilliant military episodes of first-rate importance. The dominant principle, however, from which there must be no swerving, is that we shall be a holding force, endeavouring to maintain with the least possible loss, a situation which cannot be improved decisively except by the arrival of a great American army....\n\n5. A Commander-in-Chief in the field is entitled to know from his Government\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) What his general r\u00f4le is to be.\n\n( _b_ ) What are to be his monthly incomes of men and shell tonnage.\n\n( _c_ ) What condition the army is to be left in at the end of the campaign in point of numbers and efficiency.\n\nWithin these limits, his discretion should be unfettered.\n\n6. The Ministry of National Service assumes that the demand of the navy for 90,000 additional men should have priority above army needs, and he makes apparently no provision for combing or dilution, either in the navy or in its civil establishments. Again, it is to be observed that the naval demands for men cannot be considered except in reference to the general plan of war. If the navy had plans for offensive or amphibious action which might be expected to cause the enemy to withdraw large numbers of men from the existing battle fronts, justification for a substantial increase in the man-power at their disposal would be provided. But if, as may well be, it is considered that there are no prudent and practicable means of using the navy in this manner, then it is difficult to see what good reasons there can be to increase the number of men at the disposal of the Admiralty. We are far stronger in proportion to the German fleet than we were at the beginning of the war, when they did not venture to attack us. We are probably employing, apart from shipbuilding, three or four times as many men for naval purposes as they are, and in addition to this, besides the navies of the European Allies, there is the American fleet\u2014the third strongest in the world.\n\nThere are many more detailed aspects of the use of naval personnel which demand instructed and critical examination. In a crisis like this every man counts, and no department or branch of our fighting forces has a right to special privileges.\n\nThe construction of warships other than for anti-submarine warfare also makes a heavy demand on labour and valuable materials.\n\n7. There are at present employed on shipbuilding and munitions work over 3,000,000 men and women. A plan can be submitted for providing from this total 100,000 category A. men for the Army. The plan would include the 'clean cut' for category A, men below the age of 24, who are estimated at about 55,000, in munitions and shipbuilding. The loss on shipbuilding and marine engineering would have to be made good by transferring older men from other munitions work. This would be practicable....\n\n9. The next great resource of man-power which should now be drawn upon is the army at home. This at present comprises upwards of 1,400,000 men who are explained or excused in various ways. In order that this resource shall be rendered effective for the armies on the Western front, we must face the institution of defensive battalions for holding quiet and non-significant sectors of the line. The actual military arrangements obviously require careful but not necessarily prolonged study. 150 battalions of 1,000 men each should certainly be obtained from this source and woven into our scheme for maintaining the Western front and the efficiency of our armies next year.\n\n10. I have already drawn attention to the extraordinary increase in the standards of home defence against invasion which has taken place since the early periods of the war. The continental military crisis now is as intense as it was in the days of the Marne and the Yser. There is no reason to assume that invasion is less impossible now than it was then. There are in fact a wealth of reasons to the contrary which could easily be stated if desired. It is a fair proposition that, apart from any men taken in the shape of garrison battalions from the troops at home not included in the home defence forces, there should also be at least 50,000 men taken, say, in brigades from the existing home defence forces, and used for holding quiet sectors of the front in France.\n\nThe garrison of Ireland requires to be reconsidered from the point of view of the actual work it might have to do; that is to say, not the conduct of military operations in the ordinary sense but the suppression of sporadic disorders and local rebellions. Armoured motor-cars, machine-gun cyclists, the older pattern of aeroplanes, and a few tanks for street fighting seem to be features which require special development. It is for consideration whether 10,000 serviceable men could not be found from this source for service in ordinary or in garrison battalions abroad.\n\nThe total available from the military forces in Great Britain and Ireland should not be estimated at less than 210,000 men.\n\n11. Mechanical engines afford an important means of multiplying man-power. The tanks have proved themselves in appropriate circumstances not only to be a substitute for bombardment but an indispensable adjunct to infantry. In the attack in Flanders we gained 54 square miles with an expenditure of 465,000 tons of ammunition costing 84,000,000 _l._ , and probably over 300,000 casualties. The offensive at Cambrai, depending as it did entirely upon the surprise use of tanks on a large scale, gained 42 square miles with an expenditure of 36,000 tons of shell, costing 6,600,000 _l._ and with a loss of life which, had the operation been confined to its early and fruitful stage, would have not exceeded 10,000 casualties.\n\nThere is much to be said in modification of crude figures and comparisons of this kind. But when everything has been said the conclusion presented is overwhelming.\n\nPowerful as the tanks have proved themselves in surprise offensives on suitable ground, they are still more valuable in counter-attack. In this case they would be moving over ground with which they were familiar, and against an enemy necessarily unprepared with any special arrangements to receive them. They are immune from panic, and in their advance must carry forward with them the infantry counter-attack. It would be lamentable if, for want of men at this stage of the war, and with its lessons so cruelly written, we should not be allowed to develop these weapons to our highest manufacturing capacity. Are we really to keep in being, at a time when every man is precious, when every ton of stores counts, 30,000 or 40,000 cavalry with their horses, when these admirable cavalrymen would supply the personnel for the greatest development of mechanical warfare both for offence and defence in tanks, in armoured cars, and on motor-cycles that has ever yet been conceived?....\n\n12. To sum up, the following proposals are put forward as a basis for examination. Sir Auckland Geddes' figures show that without recourse to fresh legislation there is a deficit on existing naval and military demands of approximately 645,000 men. It is suggested that this should be met as follows:\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Reduction of monthly wastage through the adoption of an active defensive in the place of the continuous offensive of this year. Six months at 30,000 a month instead of 50,000\n\n| = | 120,000  \n---|---|---\n\n( _b_ ) The Navy 'living on its own' and through American resources. Reduced demand\n\n| = | 90,000\n\n( _c_ ) Munitions and shipbuilding (no diminution in total shipbuilding)\n\n| = | 100,000\n\n( _d_ ) Garrison battalions of soldiers serving at home\n\n| = | 150,000\n\n( _e_ ) Garrison or sedentary brigades or divisions from home defence and Ireland\n\n| = | 60,000\n\n( _f_ ) Coal-mines, agriculture, railways, and balance of men as proposed by Sir Auckland Geddes\n\n| = | 80,000\n\nTotal\n\n| = | 600,000\n\n13. It is worth while considering other resources or man-power to which we should look, not merely as alternatives but as supplements and additions, viz.:\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Raising the age to 50, as has long been done in Germany, Austria, and France (apart from larger numbers available for defensive units)\n\n| = | 110,000  \n---|---|---\n\n( _b_ ) Extending compulsion to Ireland\n\n| = | 200,000\n\n( _c_ ) American troops training, first in platoons, then in companies, and next in battalions, with the British army (200 battalions)\n\n| = | 200,000\n\n( _d_ ) Developments of mechanical warfare and lateral mobility multiply men but cannot be numerically appraised.\n\n|\n\n14. It is clear that with these extensive and varied resources at our disposal, we have the means of meeting the prime need of the situation, viz.: to meet the Spring campaign with the British army stronger in every respect than any we have previously put in the field; all its units full; a large proportion of divisions resting and training, thus giving us a strategic reserve, in the Prime Minister's phrase 'an Army of Man\u0153uvre'; an unprecedented development of mechanical and aeronautical warfare; and very large labour forces for defensive works, communications, and services behind the line. This can certainly be done if action is taken now in the same spirit as it would be undoubtedly taken and has in most cases been already taken by the enemy with whom we are fighting. Moreover, it can be done without interfering in any serious degree with our war against the submarines, with our defence against invasion, or with our production of munitions.\n\nNearly all these specific measures, which were at this time contrary to the views of the War Cabinet, were taken or resolved on after the catastrophe of March 21. Taken in January, they would have prevented it.\n\nI also made, under all proper guard, a speech at Bedford on December 11 in the same sense.\n\n'Two months ago I stated in London that the war was entering upon its sternest phase, but I must admit that the situation at this moment is more serious than it was reasonable two months ago to expect. The country is in danger as it has not been since the battle of the Marne saved Paris, and the battles of Ypres and of the Yser saved the Channel ports. The cause of the Allies is now in danger. The future of the British Empire, and of democracy, and of civilization hang, and will continue to hang for a considerable period, in a balance and an anxious suspense. It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to conceal these facts from our enemies. It would be folly not to face them boldly ourselves....\n\n'Anyone can see for himself what has happened in Russia. Russia has been thoroughly beaten by the Germans. Her great heart has been broken, not only by German might, but by German intrigue; not only by German steel, but by German gold. Russia has fallen on the ground prostrate in exhaustion and in agony. No one can tell what fearful vicissitudes will come to Russia, or how or when she will arise, but arise she will. It is this melancholy event which has prolonged the war, that has robbed the French, the British and the Italian armies of the prize that was perhaps almost within their reach this summer; it is this event, and this event alone, that has exposed us to perils and sorrows and sufferings which we have not deserved, which we cannot avoid, but under which we shall not bend.\n\n'There never was a moment in this war when the practical steps which we ought to take showed themselves more plainly, or when the choice presented to us was so brutally clear as it is to-night, or when there was less excuse for patriotic men to make the mistake of being misled by sophistries and dangerous counsels....\n\n'What is the one great practical step we must take without a day's delay? We must raise the strength of our army to its highest point. A heavier strain will be thrown upon this army than it has ever had to bear before. We must see that it is stronger than it has ever been before. Do not put too heavy a burden on those heroic men by whose valiant efforts we exist from day to day. Husband their lives, conserve and accumulate their force. Every division of our army must be raised to full strength; every service\u2014the most scientific, the most complex\u2014must be thoroughly provided; we must make sure that in the months to come a large proportion of our army is resting, refreshing, and training behind the front line ready to spring like leopards upon the German hordes. Masses of guns, mountains of shells, clouds of aeroplanes\u2014all must be ready, all must be there; we have only to act together, and we have only to act at once.'\n\nThese official or public arguments were reinforced by the strongest personal appeals. Nothing however had the slightest effect. The Prime Minister and his colleagues in the War Cabinet were adamant. Their policy was not decided without full deliberation. They were definitely opposed to any renewal of the British offensive in France. They wished the British and French armies to observe during 1918 a holding and defensive attitude. They wished to keep a tight control over their remaining man-power until the arrival of the American millions offered the prospect of decisive success. In the meanwhile action in Palestine, with forces almost inappreciable in the scale of the Western Front, might drive Turkey out of the war, and cheer the public mind during a long and grievous vigil. They were fully informed of the growing German concentration against Haig, and repeatedly discussed it. But they believed that the Germans if they attacked would encounter the same difficulties as had so long baffled us, and that our armies were amply strong enough for defence. Haig was accordingly left to face the spring with an army whose 56 infantry divisions were reduced from a thirteen to a ten-battalion basis, and with three instead of five cavalry divisions, which in the absence of alternative methods were at last to render valuable service.\n\nBut this was not the end of his trials. The French, also living in a world of illusions, now came forward with a vehement demand that the British should take over a larger part of the front. A cursory glance at the map shows that the French with 100 divisions comprising 700,000 rifles held 480 kilometres of front, whereas 56 British divisions comprising 504,000 rifles only held 200 kilometres. In other words, the British with more than two-thirds of the French rifle strength held less than one-third of the front. But this was a very superficial test. Large portions of the French front were in continual quiescence, and the weak railway communications opposite them excluded the possibility of a serious hostile offensive. The British, on the other hand, held nearly all the most active front, and had opposite to them, even in January, a larger proportion of German divisions than were marshalled against the French Army. Against the long French front were arrayed 79 German divisions, while no fewer than 69 stood before the short British sector. Moreover, the German concentration against the British front was growing week by week, and it was already extremely probable that the first and main thrust would be delivered upon them. Further, the French had not fought a heavy battle since April and May, 1917, while the British Army had maintained an almost continuous offensive, suffering, as we have seen, calamitous losses. Finally, the French soldier enjoyed nearly three times as much leave to visit his home as his British comrade; that is to say, there were in proportion three times as many French rifles absent from the line at any given moment as there were British.\n\nUnder pressure both from the French and the British Governments, Haig had agreed in December to extend his front by fourteen miles as far south as Barisis; and this relief was effected in February. A further demand by the French that the British front should be extended to Berry-au-Bac thirty miles farther south-east, though backed with the threatened resignation of Monsieur Cl\u00e9menceau, was successfully resisted under a similar threat by the British Commander-in-Chief.\n\nThe continued friction and want of confidence between Sir William Robertson and Mr. Lloyd George came to a head at the beginning of February. The Prime Minister was moving cautiously but tirelessly towards the conception of a unified command. He did not yet feel strong enough to disclose his purpose. A proposal which obviously involved placing the British armies under a French Commander was one which he judged as yet beyond his strength to carry. It was a hazardous issue on which to challenge the joint resignations both of Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig. It is probable that the War Cabinet would not have been united in its support; and that the Liberal opposition would have been unanimous against it. The Prime Minister had therefore so far suspended his wishes that speaking of an independent generalissimo he told the House of Commons in November: 'I am utterly opposed to that suggestion. It would not work. It would produce real friction, and might produce not merely friction between the armies, but friction between the nations and the Governments.'\n\nNevertheless, Mr. Lloyd George continued by a series of extremely laborious and mystifying man\u0153uvres to move steadily forward towards his solution. On January 30, at the meeting of the Supreme War Council at Versailles, he secured a decision to create a general reserve of thirty divisions and to entrust it to a Committee representing Britain, Italy, the United States and France, with General Foch at its head. This proposal constitutes his answer and that of the War Cabinet to the charge of imprudently lowering the strength of the British Army in France in the face of the growing German concentration. There is no doubt that had this plan been put immediately into execution, and had Foch been armed with thirty divisions specifically assigned to the support of whatever part of the front was attacked, larger resources would have been secured to Haig in his approaching hour of supreme need. Haig did not however welcome the proposal. He declared that he had no divisions to spare for the general reserve, and that there were not even enough for the various army fronts. In such circumstances the earmarking of particular British divisions for service elsewhere could have been little more than a formality. None could have been taken from him unless the attack fell elsewhere.\n\nThe decision, like many others of the Supreme War Council, remained a dead letter; and events moved forward without the British Army receiving either the reinforcements for which Haig had pleaded or the reserves which Lloyd George had laboured to supply.\n\nAlthough the thirty divisions were lacking, the Executive Committee to control them at Versailles was created. Sir William Robertson claimed that he, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, should alone represent Great Britain upon it. This raised an issue upon which the Prime Minister felt himself strong enough to engage. He declared it a matter of fundamental principle that the two posts could not be held by one man. It was his undoubted intention to arm the Cabinet with an alternative set of military advisers whose opinions could be used to curb and correct the Robertson-Haig view, and so prevent a repetition of offensives like Passchendaele. No doubt he would also have used the new body to promote schemes of war outside the Western Front. The arrangement was indefensible in principle, but in the aftermath of Passchendaele its objects were worthy. Into the complications of the dispute and its man\u0153uvres it is not necessary to enter here. On February 11, Robertson, returning to London, which he had somewhat imprudently quitted for a few days, was confronted by the Secretary of State for War with a note signed on February 9 by the Prime Minister. This reduced the functions of the C.I.G.S. to the limits which had existed before the Kitchener breakdown, and it prescribed the independent functions of the British Military Representative on the Versailles Committee. Thirdly, it nominated Sir William Robertson Military Representative, and Sir Henry Wilson Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Robertson, astonished at his supersession, declined the appointment to Versailles on the ground that the arrangement was unsound. The post of C.I.G.S., although originally designed for Wilson, was then incontinently offered to Sir Herbert Plumer, who with equal promptitude refused it. Finally, it was offered again to Robertson on the reduced basis of the Prime Minister's Note. On February 16 Robertson recorded his refusal to agree to the conditions prescribed, and that same evening the Official Press Bureau announced that the Government had 'accepted his resignation.' He had in fact been dismissed. Lord Derby, who did his best to compose the differences, also proffered his resignation, which was not accepted.\n\nThe principles of military duty on which Sir Douglas Haig invariably proceeded prevented him, even at this time of tension with the Government, from adding his own resignation to the dismissal of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. On questions which in his view involved the safety of the British Armies under his command, Sir Douglas Haig\u2014right or wrong\u2014was, whenever necessary, ready to resign. But these constituted the sole exceptions which he allowed himself to make in his obedience. Had any motive of personal intrigue been present in his mind, the crisis between the High Command and the Civil Power would have been gravely aggravated. The position of the Government at this time was strong and the issue one on which they could rely on public support. The Prime Minister did not flinch. Nevertheless Haig's retention, without comment, of his post was received with relief by the anxious War Cabinet; and Sir Henry Wilson was speedily appointed to the vacant chair in Whitehall.\n\nIt would certainly not be just to assume in these transactions that any of the parties were influenced otherwise than by public duty. But beneath the bald record of events the clash is plain. Both the Prime Minister and Sir William Robertson were in deadly earnest, both measured forces, and both knew the risks they ran. It was impossible for the two men to work together any longer. The situation at the centre of power had become intolerable. Action was long overdue. It was a pity it could not have taken a simpler form.\n\nSir William Robertson was an outstanding military personality. His vision as a strategist was not profound, but his outlook was clear, well-drilled and practical. During his tenure he had reintroduced orderly methods of dealing with War Office problems, and had revivified the General Staff system. He had no ideas of his own, but a sensible judgment negative in bias. He represented professional formalism expressed in the plainest terms. He held a conception of war policy wholly opposed to the views set out in these volumes, but honestly and consistently maintained. I was glad, as Secretary of State for War, when after the victory he eventually retired from the Army, to submit a recommendation to the King which enabled his long and honourable career from the rank of a private soldier to end with the baton of a Field-Marshal.\n\nIn the stresses of this internal disturbance I took no part. I was on the front during the whole week busily occupied, and it was only on my return that I learned the inner facts from various actors in the drama. The view which I took of my own work made it necessary for me to keep continually in touch with the actual conditions of the fighting line. The Commander-in-Chief accorded me the fullest liberty of movement in the British zone, and placed every facility at my disposal. I was most anxious to understand by personal observation the latest methods of holding the line which were involved in the preparations for a great defensive battle. I stayed with General Lipsett, commanding the 3rd Canadian Division, and under his deeply instructed guidance examined minutely from front to rear the whole of the sector which he occupied opposite to Lens.\n\nVery different was the state of the line from what I had known it to be when serving with the Guards in 1915 or as a Battalion Commander in 1916. The system of continuous trenches with their barbed-wire networks, their parapets, firing-steps, traverses and dugouts, the first line of which was manned in great strength and often constituted the strongest line of resistance, had vanished. Contact with the enemy was maintained only by a fringe of outposts, some of which were fortified, while others trusted merely to concealment. Behind these over a distance of two or three thousand yards were sited intricate systems of machine-gun nests, nearly all operating by flank fire and mutually supporting each other. Slender communication trenches enabled these to be approached and relieved by night. The barbed-wire networks, instead of being drawn laterally in a continuous belt across the front, lay obliquely with intervals so as to draw the attackers into avenues mercilessly swept by machine-gun fire. Open spaces between important points were reserved for the full fury of the protecting barrages. This was the Battle Zone. Two thousand yards or so farther in the rear were the field battery positions. Strong works to which the long disused word 'redoubt' was applied, and deep grids of trenches and deeper dugouts elaborately camouflaged, provided for the assembling and maintenance of the supporting troops. Behind these again in modest and obscure recesses lay the Brigade Headquarters; behind which again the groups of heavy and medium batteries were disposed in studied irregular array. Favoured by beautiful weather and a quiet day, we were able by taking care to make our way into the ruins of Avion village, in which in twos and threes the keen-eyed Canadian sharpshooters maintained their ceaseless bickering against the German outposts fifty or a hundred yards away.\n\nI must frankly admit that all that I saw, both in the line and of the minutely perfected organization far to the rear, inspired me with confidence in the strength of the defensive system which had gradually developed as the war proceeded. Holding the convictions which this volume describes of the relative power of offence and defence under modern conditions, I looked forward, at least so far as this sector was concerned, to the day when the Germans would taste a measure of that bitter draught our armies had been made to drink so long. Alas, the conditions here were by no means representative of the general state of the line.\n\nIt is no disparagement of the qualities of Sir William Robertson to record the very great pleasure with which I learned of the appointment of Sir Henry Wilson to be Chief of the Staff. We had known each other for many years. I had met him first by the banks of the Tugela in February, 1900, and my first picture of him is a haggard but jocular Major emerging from a bloody night's work in the Pieter's Hill fighting. It was in discussion with him from 1910 onwards that I had studied the problem of a war between France and Germany. Though I recorded at the time somewhat different conclusions about the opening phase from those on which he proceeded, my debt to him was very great. Never shall I forget the memorable forecast which in August, 1911, during the Agadir crisis, he had given to the Committee of Imperial Defence. At this period we were close confederates. The crisis passed away, and the Irish quarrel sundered our personal relations. A devoted son of Ulster, he resented with a passion which knew no bounds the Home Rule policy of the Liberal Government. During the intense days which preceded the British declaration of war upon Germany we were forced to meet on several occasions, but on a purely official basis. The mobilization of the Fleet and the final decision to join France, in which I had played my part, carried all before them in Wilson's heart. But this I did not know, and it was with surprise that one August morning I received at the Admiralty a visit of ceremony from him on the eve of his departure for France. He had come to say that all past differences were obliterated and that we were friends again. He was opposed later on to the Dardanelles expedition. At that time he saw the War only in the light of the struggle in France. Had he commanded the central point of view, he would perhaps have had a different opinion. At any rate his policy as Chief of the Staff was far wider in its scope than the Western Front. But these disagreements did not, so far as I am aware, impair our personal relations; and when later on I served in France as a Battalion Commander, he showed me every courtesy and often discussed the whole situation, military and political, with the freedom we had practised at Whitehall in days when my position was superior. His appointment as Chief of the Staff led immediately to the closest harmony between the spheres of Strategy and Material. The conceptions of war which I held, and which these pages record, received from him a keen and pregnant welcome. Almost his first act was to raise the War Office demand for the Tank Corps from 18,000 to 46,000 men.\n\nIn Sir Henry Wilson the War Cabinet found for the first time an expert adviser of superior intellect, who could explain lucidly and forcefully the whole situation and give reasons for the adoption or rejection of any course. Such gifts are, whether rightly or wrongly, the object of habitual distrust in England. But they are certainly a very great comfort in the transaction of public business. Sir Henry Wilson constantly corrected the clarity of his mind by whimsical mannerisms and modes of expression. He spoke in parables, used curious images and cryptic phrases. He had a vocabulary of his own. The politicians were 'frocks'; Cl\u00e9menceau, always the 'Tiger.' He even addressed him as Tiger. His faithful Aide-de-Camp, Duncannon, was 'the Lord.' He wantonly pronounced grotesquely the names of French towns and Generals. In discussing the gravest matters he used the modes of levity. 'Prime Minister,' he began one day to the War Cabinet, at a meeting which I attended, 'to-day I am Boche.' Then followed a penetrating description of the situation from the standpoint of the German Headquarters. On another day he would be France or Bulgaria, and always out of this affectation there emerged, to my mind, the root of the matter in hand. But some Ministers were irritated. He did not go so far as Marshal Foch, who sometimes gave a military description in pantomime; but their methods of displaying a war proposition had much in common.\n\nI can see him so clearly as I write, standing before the map in the Cabinet Room giving one of his terse telegraphese appreciations. 'This morning, Sir, a new battle.' (The reader will recognize it when it comes.) 'This time it is we who have attacked. We have attacked with two armies\u2014one British, one French. Sir Haig is in his train, Prime Minister, very uncomfortable, near the good city of Amiens. And Rawly is in his left hand and Debeney is in his right. Rawly is using five hundred tanks. It is a big battle, and we thought you would not like us to tell you about it beforehand.' I cannot vouch for the actual words, but this was the sense and manner of it.\n\nWe should be thankful that the future is veiled. I was to be present at another scene in this room. There was no Henry Wilson. The Prime Minister and I faced each other, and on the table between us lay the pistols which an hour before had drunk this loyal man's blood.\n\nI have strayed alike from narrative and chronology to make in deep respect this reference to the most comprehending military mind of our day in Britain and to a soldier who, although he commanded no armies, exerted on occasion a profound and fortunate influence over the greatest events.\n\nWith Sir Henry Wilson, as his deputy, came the brilliant Harington, who at Plumer's side had won for the Second Army its unequalled reputation. I think I may say that in all that concerned the making of the weapons for a campaign in 1919, with their inevitable profound reactions upon its plans, we thought as one. He supported me in all my principal projects for the supply of the armies, and used, under Sir Henry Wilson, the whole power of the General Staff to carry forward the plans for the great mechanical battle which we trusted, however late in the day, would bring finality.\n\nI had also in the War Office at this time a friend in General Furse, the Master-General of the Ordnance. He had commanded the Division in which I had served during the few months I was at the front, and we had many times argued out the kind of projects I was now in a position to put forward. To ensure the closest contact in the vast Artillery sphere I appointed him with Lord Milner's approval to be an actual member of the Munitions Council. Thus all these far-reaching and, though subordinate, yet vital controls pulled together from this time forward, and we had to worry only about the enemy.\n\nIn this favourable atmosphere at the beginning of March I completed a general survey of the War ostensibly from the Munitions standpoint, and unfolded the argument for the mechanical battle.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_March_ 5, 1918.\n\n# MUNITIONS PROGRAMME, 1919\n\n1. So far as munitions are concerned, the year 1918 is settled for good or for ill. No decisive changes in our modes of warfare can be produced in time to influence the campaign now opening. But it is imperative to decide quite soon what the character of the campaign of 1919 is to be. It is no use considering such a question in October or November. Practically a whole year's notice is required for any great development in material. We ought to have made up our minds by the beginning of April what the main principles and general outlines of our munitions programme for 1919 are to be. I would ask that this task may be undertaken at once.\n\n2. We are immediately confronted with the fundamental question 'How are we going to win the war in 1919?' It seems to me a reasonable expectation, if every effort is made and unity prevails, that by the end of this year we shall have established three very substantial facts which are now disputed: (i) either the German will have attacked in the West and have been repulsed, or he will have exposed himself incapable of delivering an offensive on a great scale. (ii) the submarine warfare will have entered upon a phase in which our tonnage will be greater at the end of every month, and not less as at present; (iii) the growing American army will be becoming a real and great military factor. It is possible we may add a (iv) to this, viz., a definite and unmistakable ascendancy in the air both as regards numbers and quality. All these aims have of course to be fought for and worked for during the ensuing months. They are reasonable objects of endeavour. Failure to attain any of them would be disastrous to us. Our success, on the other hand, in attaining all of them will not necessarily be fatal to the enemy.\n\n3. ( _a_ ) We must further assume that a new front will be made against the enemy in the East by Japanese armies being brought as deeply as possible into Russia, and by every conceivable inducement being offered to Japan to come directly into collision and contact with the German forces. It will further be necessary to stop the spread of German influence towards India through Persia. This can only be done by sending without delay sufficient troops to dominate the Persian situation, as was done by the Grand Duke in 1915 with such successful results. ( _b_ ) We must assume that while Germany is absorbing and dragooning Russia, Great Britain will continue to break up and devour Turkey as an offset, albeit unequal. ( _c_ ) We may balance the chances of an internal collapse in Italy against those of an internal collapse in Austria, it being assumed however that we shall do as much to help Italy as Germany has done since the beginning of the war for her allies.\n\n4. All these perilous matters being accomplished will bring us to the campaign of 1919, and if we get so far the question repeats itself, 'How are we going to win then?' If there is no method of winning then which military men can discover, it will certainly be argued by many that it would be better to make peace at the least unfavourable moment in the present year, abandoning altogether the hope of a decisive victory in the war. It therefore becomes of the very highest consequence to discover what is the best plan for 1919, and whether there is any plan or use we can make of our resources which will give us a reasonable hope of a military victory.\n\n5. It is clear that a military victory (apart from internal collapse) can only be reached by offensive action, and that offensive action can only be based on overwhelming superiority in one form or another. Even if all the favourable assumptions made in the earlier paragraphs of this paper are borne out, it is clear that no overwhelming superiority will be available for us in several of the main elements of war. For instance, we cannot expect any sufficient preponderance in man-power in 1919, even with the American armies, to enable us to overwhelm by numbers the German front in the West. The best it is reasonable to hope is that the two sides will be of about the same relative strength as in 1917 before the Russian collapse. Even this is highly disputable. On the other hand, we may fairly reckon on a good superiority in quality, which, added to the improvement in numbers, will give us once again in the West undoubtedly the stronger armies. Still, the margin will not be enough to offer any prospect of a military victory by man-power.\n\n6. There does not either seem to be any good prospect of winning a military victory through an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells. We are already at the limit of our shell production. We cannot expect that the tonnage of 1919 will at the very best do more than enable us, having regard to our depleting stocks, to maintain our 1918 standards. These give us no marked superiority over the enemy. Further, the limits of what can be effected by gun power have been coming very clearly into view. We see that after a certain point it tends to defeat its own purposes as an offensive weapon, for the ground is so ploughed up by the necessary artillery preparation that it is impossible for troops to advance over it. It is a very practical and pregnant question at the moment whether artillery has not been overdone, and whether in the disposition of our resources for 1919 both personnel and material should not be liberated from artillery for other forms of warfare. I will return to this later.\n\n7. Again, it is clear that our policy of blockade on which the Navy have hitherto relied can no longer be counted upon to produce decisive results now that the Germans have got enormous portions of Russia at their disposal. Indeed we are likely during the period under survey to suffer nearly as much inconvenience and political instability through lack of supplies as are our enemies.\n\nI therefore return to the fundamental question. If you cannot starve out your enemy, if you cannot bear him down by numbers or blast him from your path with artillery, how are you going to win?\n\n8. I wish to avow however at this stage in the argument a firm conviction that the method and the means do exist by which in 1919 the German armies in the West could be decisively defeated and their front effectively broken up. No proposition of this kind can be stated in terms of certainty, because there are no certainties in war; but I believe that if the right decisions are taken now, it should be possible to impart to the British armies in particular, and to the Allied armies in general, _a means of continuous_ _forward progression_ in 1919 which if successful would yield decisive results, and that the chances of success are good enough to justify the prolongation of the struggle in the meanwhile. I will proceed to indicate in general terms the lines of thought to which attention should be directed in order to realize the result.\n\n# II\n\n9. Wars have hitherto been conducted by infantry, cavalry and artillery, and these are the three recognized arms of the service. It has also been observed with some truth that 'the infantry is the army, and uses the other arms as its adjuncts.' Whichever way the question is viewed, it is clear that there are no means of obtaining an overwhelming superiority sufficient to enable a continuous advance to be made by any developments which it is in our power to make in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery in 1919. However, in the present war at least four new arms of the highest consequence have come into being, viz.:\u2014\n\nAeroplanes,\n\nTanks,\n\nGas, and\n\nMachine guns.\n\nIf we are to obtain the necessary superiority and the means of effective progression against the enemy, it can only be by developments of a far-reaching character in these new methods of warfare.\n\n10. And let it here be observed that every one of these four new arms has already played or shown itself capable of playing a decisive part in the present war, in spite of the fact that they have only been tardily and partially and doubtingly developed. For instance, it is the machine gun which has made the defensive hitherto invincible. Again, if either side possessed the power to drop not five tons but five hundred tons of bombs each night on the cities and manufacturing establishments of its opponent, the result would be decisive. If the Germans had used poison gas on a sufficiently large scale the first time they used it at all and before we were provided with effective masks, they could undoubtedly have broken up our whole front in the West. Similarly, if we had developed tanks in secret or at any rate in mystery till we had about 2,000, and then had used them as they were used at the battle of Cambrai, only on a much larger scale and with carefully husbanded reserves of infantry to follow them up, we in turn might have broken up the German front and driven their armies into a continuous retreat. We are clearly in the presence of new factors, all of which possess decisive qualities.\n\n11. It must however be remembered that the total quantity of our resources is limited, and that the decision which has to be taken is one which involves the development of these new arms, both in men and material, to a very large extent at the expense of the old. Still, it is contended that this should be boldly faced, that we should create in order to attack the enemy in 1919 an army essentially different in its composition and methods of warfare from any that have yet been employed on either side. This would only be in accordance with the obvious principle that if you cannot get a sufficient superiority over your opponent in the same methods as he employs, you should break away and develop different and unexpected variants. Thus we may contemplate ( _a_ ) relieving the want of man-power in the infantry, especially on defensive sectors of the front, by great increases of machine guns, automatic rifles, and the like; or ( _b_ ) putting most of the cavalry into tanks or other mechanical vehicles; or ( _c_ ) drawing upon the artillery and the material which supplies it, as far as may be needed, to raise chemical warfare to its proper proportionate position in our organization. It is unnecessary to speak of the air, for that is already accepted. We have undoubtedly the power at the present time of making such decisions fully effective for 1919 if we act without delay and upon a carefully thought out and ruthlessly pursued plan. The question is essentially one of proportion, but it is not capable of being solved unless the old proportions are definitely put aside and revolutionary changes in the composition of the armies and in their methods of warfare are unhesitatingly faced.\n\n12. On the other hand, we need not exaggerate the extent of the changes which would be necessary. Let us assume\u2014the figures are of course only tokens\u2014that at the present time our military effort in men and material combined is expressed as follows:\u2014\n\nInfantry, 40 per cent.\n\nArtillery, 40 per cent.\n\nAir, 10 per cent.\n\nCavalry, 3\u00bd per cent.\n\nMachine Guns, 4 per cent.\n\nTanks, 2 per cent.\n\nGas, \u00bd per cent.\n\nThe kind of change that is suggested might be expressed as follows:\u2014\n\nInfantry, 35 per cent.\n\nArtillery, 30 per cent.\n\nAir, 15 per cent.\n\nCavalry, \u00bd per cent.\n\nMachine Guns, 7 per cent.\n\nTanks, 8 per cent.\n\nGas, 4\u00bd per cent.\n\nThis would give us an army substantially different in its composition from that of its opponents, and capable of confronting him with offensive propositions fundamentally different in character from those which he has hitherto disposed of.\n\nAs stated above, the Air expansion is already practically conceded. The development of machine guns and automatic rifles is also to a great extent assured; but the two most vital of the new arms, namely tanks and gas, are at present only used on a miniature and experimental scale.\n\n13. Yet in both of these we have immense advantages, inherent or acquired, over the enemy. Incomparably the most effective method of discharging gas is by liberating it from cylinders to form a gas cloud when the wind is favourable. In no other way can results on the largest scale be achieved. Although for some time we and the Germans have relied instead upon firing gas shells from guns or mortars, there is no doubt that the original method in spite of its difficulty and danger is by far the most formidable. It is undoubtedly possible if the wind is favourable to discharge gas over a wide front which, if the discharge is sufficiently prolonged or intense, will render all existing masks ineffectual. The supreme fact is that the wind is at least six times, and some say nine times, as favourable to us as it is to the enemy. We are mad not to avail ourselves of this overwhelming advantage. But with our present pitifully small gas service of perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 men we are only trifling with the problem.\n\n14. Again, take tanks. Here our advantage is due to our having started far in advance of the enemy and having with painful slowness but extreme thoroughness explored the difficulties, tactical and manufacturing, of this highly complicated arm. The element of novelty has now been thrown away, but numbers, quality, organization, and training still afford us opportunities of the first order if we only had the wisdom and resolution to profit by them. The year 1919 is still at our disposal. It is undoubtedly within our power to construct in very large numbers armoured vehicles of various types, some to fight, some to pursue, some to cut wire and trample trenches, some to carry forward men or machine-gun parties, or artillery, or supplies, to such an extent and on such a scale that 150,000 to 200,000 fighting men can be carried forward certainly and irresistibly on a broad front and to a depth of 8 or 10 miles in the course of a single day. The resources are available, the knowledge is available, the time is available, the result is certain: nothing is lacking except the will. We have never been able to get out of the rut of traditional and conventional methods. We have never been able to plan on a sufficiently large scale, long in advance, and with the necessary force and authority to drive the policy through. We have instead only carried out a series of costly experiments each of which has shown us the chance we have lost and exposed our thought to the enemy.\n\n15. It surely lies with those who shake their heads to say on what alternative method of attack or on what alternative form of superiority they can rely to win a military victory in 1919. Where are they going to get the numerical superiority which they had in the autumn of 1916 and the spring of 1917, and which was then found not to be sufficient? What more can artillery do in offence than it has already done in the great battles of this year and last? What grounds are there for supposing that we possess more staying power or more national discipline than the Germans? What more is to be looked for from the blockade? If there is an alternative plan let us have it. If not, let this one have its fair chance. Let it be backed with as good an effort as was given to the creation of the British artillery in 1915 and 1916. Let other interests be made to concede and conform to its essential requirements. Surely we ought to have a plan for which we can strive, and not simply go carrying on from day to day and from hand to mouth in the hopes of something turning up before we reach the final abyss of general anarchy and world famine.\n\n16. There is a short way of ending this war: it is to defeat the German armies in the West. For this purpose two conditions are necessary: first, we must have stronger and better armies ourselves: that is the foundation on which everything rests, and there is no reason why we should not have it in 1919. Secondly, we must discover a method of the offensive which enables these stronger armies to advance at a certain moderate rate of progression along their selected strategical lines. The problem is therefore definite and precise. Indeed it is mainly mechanical. Discover a method by which a stronger army can regain its rightful power of continuous advance, and decisive victory is won. It is mechanical methods which are preventing that advance. Overcome these by mechanical agency, and courage and quality will once again receive their due.\n\n# III\n\n17. There is one other aspect of the problem to which I referred in my paper of the 21st October last, namely the scale and intensity of a decisive conflict. War between equals in power is not an affair which can be carried to a result merely by quasi business and administrative processes flowing smoothly out month after month and year after year. It should be a succession of climaxes on which everything is staked, toward which everything tends, and from which permanent decisions are obtained. These climaxes have usually been called battles. A battle means that the whole resources on either side that can be brought to bear are during the course of a single episode concentrated upon the enemy. There has not been a battle in this war since the battle of the Marne of which this could be said. We in England particularly are misled by the increasing scale of our casualties, due to the increasing size of our armies, into thinking that the intensity of the conflict is greater now than in the opening stages of the war. The battle of the Somme in the period of its greatest fury involved no more than the engagement simultaneously of about twenty British and French divisions against probably half that number of Germans; and the battle of Verdun ceased when the battle of the Somme had begun. All the great operations of 1916 and 1917, although so prolonged as to cause very heavy losses, have involved the simultaneous employment only of comparatively small forces on comparatively small fronts. The armies have been fighting in instalments; they have engaged perhaps 8 or 10 per cent. of their total strength.\n\n18. The reasons which have led to this are well known. The power of the defensive is such that practically the whole spare artillery of an army has to be collected to support a single attack in which there is no room for more than a tenth of the available troops. There has never been, and there will never be, enough artillery to enable, say, six battles of Messines to be fought at one and the same moment. And thus the war in the West has dwindled down to siege operations on a gigantic scale which however bloody and prolonged cannot yield a decisive result. Thus, when a great battle is raging on the British front, six or eight British divisions are fighting desperately, half a dozen others are waiting to sustain them, the rest of the front is calm; twenty British divisions are remaining quietly in their trenches doing their daily routine, another twenty are training behind the lines; 20,000 men are at school, 10,000 are playing football, 100,000 are on leave. It is the same with the enemy. Obviously we have passed out of the region where the scale and intensity of the operations can be decisive on the great armies which are in presence of each other. Still less can they be decisive on the great belligerent nations. The idea of ending the war by 'killing Germans' is a delusion. You have got to kill or totally incapacitate at least 700,000 Germans in every year, _i.e._ , a number equal to the annual increment, before the slightest progress is made towards wearing down their manhood. And it takes at least one man's life to kill a German. We have to be, in short, merely exchanging lives, and exchanging lives upon a scale at once more frightful than anything that has been witnessed before in the world, and too modest to produce a decision.\n\n19. Contrast this with the first two shocks of the war in the West, namely the first collision on the frontiers or the supreme struggle at the Marne. In the first three weeks of the war, between the 20th August and the 10th or 12th September, the whole of the French and German armies, every division, every available man, were simultaneously, continuously, or repeatedly engaged in open and moving warfare. The battle of the Marne for instance comprised not only those operations near Paris of which we have read, but a general battle on a front beginning 50 kilometres west of Paris right up to Verdun, and then round the corner far down past Nancy into Alsace, a total of certainly not less than 350 kilometres, along the whole of which the armies were at death grips, hurling their last reserves at each other. The French, although ultimately victorious, lost more men in the first twenty days of fighting than in the whole of the year 1917. The _tempo_ of the war has progressively languished. It has steadily declined into a deadlock more perilous and more agonizing, more disintegrating in its effects upon the world, than any decision of armies, however sharp.\n\n20. Until the arrival of the Americans in force, that is to say during the whole of this year, we are not in a position without running a desperate risk, to seek a general battle; but next year, in 1919, we may again be unmistakably superior in strength. It will then be right to fight a battle; that is to say to seek a military decision for which the whole strength of the armies is employed\u2014every man, every gun, every resource\u2014within an exceedingly limited number of days. But how? By what means can we overcome the physical and mechanical difficulties that have hitherto imposed such severe limitations on our actions? Possibly three times as many men as the enemy would be one way: we shall never have them. Three or four times as much artillery as we have at present might be another way: we shall never get it. There only remain these novel methods, good in themselves, better still in combination with the older methods. If on the British front we can only afford the concentrated artillery necessary to sustain say two great simultaneous attacks, and the French an equal number, must we not look for substitutes which will enable other attacks, supported only by the local artillery, to be delivered at the same time? Gas will certainly give you one of these. Tanks, if we develop them, could give us at least two of the highest order. Possibly trench mortars might offer another means. If the French and American armies followed similar methods, there is no reason why we should not once more see a general battle on a 300-kilometre front, applying in its brief course the whole strength of our stronger attacking armies, and yet with each attack supported by some scientific method which overcame the wire and machine guns of the defence.\n\nThat would be war proceeding by design through crisis to decision\u2014not mere waste and slaughter sagging slowly downwards into general collapse.\n\nThe fury of the storm was now about to break upon us, and these arguments were soon to be illustrated and corrected by flaming events. Ludendorff, reintroducing the great Battle period and consuming the German strength in desperate offensives without the necessary mechanical weapons and vehicles, was destined to bring about the Allied 'general battle on a 300-kilometre front' which ended the war; and to bring it about after periods of awful peril one year earlier than our best plans could have achieved.\n\n# CHAPTER XVII\n\n# THE TWENTY-FIRST OF MARCH\n\nThe German Peace Opportunity\u2014Ludendorff's Power\u2014'Michael' and 'Mars'\u2014Hindenburg's Order\u2014At the British Headquarters\u2014The Commander-in-Chief's Anxieties\u2014With the 9th Division\u2014The Barrage Falls\u2014The Scale of the Battle\u2014The First Day\u2014The Battle Zone\u2014Stubborn Resistance of the British Infantry\u2014The Germans cross the Somme\u2014'Mars'\u2014French Assistance\u2014The Last Phase\u2014Ludendorff's Strategic Failure\u2014Where the Blame Lies\u2014In Whitehall\u2014The Doullens Meeting\u2014General Gough\u2014His Supersession\u2014The Munition Workers' Achievement\u2014The Guns Replaced.\n\nAs the Passchendaele struggle died away in the storms and mud of winter, the military rulers of Germany addressed themselves to a new situation. The collapse of Russia had enabled them to transport 1,000,000 men and 3,000 guns from the Eastern to the Western Front. For the first time therefore since the invasion they found themselves possessed of a definite superiority over the Allies in France. But this superiority was fleeting. The United States had declared war and was arming, but had not yet arrived. Once the great masses of American manhood could be trained, equipped, transported and brought into the line of battle, all the numerical advantage Germany had gained from the destruction of Russia would be more than counterbalanced. At the same time the German Main Headquarters knew the grave losses the British Army had suffered at Passchendaele, and felt themselves entitled to count upon a marked decline in its strength and fighting quality. Lastly, the amazing character of the German-Austrian victory over the Italians at Caporetto glittered temptingly.\n\nThis was undoubtedly a favourable opportunity for peace negotiations. Russia down, Italy gasping, France exhausted, the British armies bled white, the U-boats not yet defeated, and the United States 3,000 miles away, constituted cumulatively a position where German statesmanship might well have intervened decisively. The immense conquests which Germany had made in Russia, and the hatred and scorn with which the Bolsheviks were regarded by the Allies, might well have made it possible for Germany to make important territorial concessions to France, and to offer Britain the complete restoration of Belgium. The desertion by Soviet Russia of the Allied cause, and the consequent elimination of all Russian claims, created a similar easement in negotiations for both Austria and Turkey. Such were the elements of this great opportunity. It was the last.\n\nBut Ludendorff cared for none of these things. We must regard him at this juncture as the dominating will. Since the fall of Bethmann-Hollweg, he and Hindenburg, at the head of the German General Staff machine, had usurped, or at least acquired, the main control over policy. The Emperor, inwardly appalled by the tide of events, suspected of being a pacifist at heart, failed increasingly to play his part. Thus on definite trials of strength the military power proved repeatedly to be predominant. It stood on the specialized basis of military opinion, not capable of measuring justly many of the most important forces which were at work internally and abroad. It was all the more dangerous because it was not complete. Ludendorff and Hindenburg by threatening resignation could obtain the crucial decisions they desired. These decisions governed the fate of Germany. But they were only acquainted with a portion of the problem, and they could only carry out such parts of the indispensable resultant policy as fell within their own military sphere. There was altogether lacking that supreme combination of the King-Warrior-Statesman which is apparent in the persons of the great conquerors of history.\n\nLudendorff was bent on keeping Courland, Lithuania and Poland in the east. Had his own fame not been gained in these regions? He was also determined to keep a part of Belgium, including Li\u00e8ge, where he had also distinguished himself. This he felt was imperative if the German armies were to obtain a good strategic starting-point for a future war. So far from ceding any portion of Alsace and Lorraine, he and the General Staff regarded the acquisition of a protective zone west of Metz, including the Briey Basin, as a bare measure of prudence. These postulates and the possession of the new armies regathered from the Russian front settled the course of events.\n\nOn November 11, 1917, a day in the calendar afterwards celebrated for other reasons, Ludendorff, von Kuhl and von der Schulenberg met at Mons. The nominal masters of these great Staff Officers\u2014Hindenburg, Prince Rupprecht and the Crown Prince\u2014were not troubled to attend. The basis of the conference was that there should be a supreme offensive in the West; that there would only be enough troops for one such offensive without any diversion elsewhere; that the offensive must be made in February or the beginning of March before the Americans could develop their strength; and finally, that it was the British Army which must be beaten. Various alternative schemes were discussed and orders given for their detailed preparation. Each received its code name. Von Kuhl's plan of an attack against the front La Bass\u00e9e-Armenti\u00e8res was 'St. George I'; an attack on the Ypres salient, 'St. George II'; one on Arras-Notre Dame de Lorette, 'Mars.' Lastly, there were the 'Michaels' I, II and III. It was not until January 24, after profound detailed study, that the choice was finally made in favour of the 'Michaels.'\n\nThe objective of this attack was to break through the Allied front and reach the Somme from Ham to P\u00e9ronne. The date originally fixed was March 20. The battle was to be extended by the attack 'Mars South,' a few days later, and a subsidiary attack, called 'Archangel,' by the Seventh Army south of the Oise was to be used as a diversion. Preparations for both the 'St. Georges' were also to be completed by the beginning of April. Sixty-two divisions were available for the three 'Michaels' and 'Mars South,' viz. Seventeenth Army: fifteen attack divisions, two ordinary divisions; Second Army: fifteen attack divisions, three ordinary divisions; Eighteenth Army: nineteen attack divisions, five ordinary divisions; Reserve: three attack divisions. In spite of some differences of opinion with von der Schulenberg and with von Hutier as to the direction and emphasis of the offensive in its various stages, Ludendorff adhered to his own conception: 'The British must be beaten.' They could best be beaten by the attack on either side of St. Quentin biting off the Cambrai salient. The Eighteenth Army would thereafter form a defensive flank along the Somme to hold off the French, and all the rest of the available German forces, wheeling as they advanced, were to attack the British in a north-west direction and drive them toward the coast. The two 'St. George' operations remained in hand as further and potentially final blows. On these foundations all the German armies concerned perfected their arrangements.\n\nFinally on March 10 the Emperor approved the following order:\u2014\n\n# CHIEF OF THE GENERAL STAFF.\n\nGreat Headquarters 10.3, issued 12.3.\n\nHis Majesty commands:\n\n(1) That the Michael Attack take place on 21st March. First penetration of the hostile position 9.40 a.m.\n\n(2) The first great tactical objective of Crown Prince Rupprecht's Group of Armies will be to cut off the British in the Cambrai salient and, north of the river Omignon and as far as the junction of that river with the Somme, to capture the line Croisilles-Bapaume-P\u00e9ronne... Should the progress of the attack by the right wing be very favourable it will push on beyond Croisilles. The subsequent task of the Group of Armies will be to push on towards Arras-Albert, left wing fixed on the Somme near P\u00e9ronne, and with the main weight of the attack on the right flank to shake the English front opposite Sixth Army and to liberate further German forces from their stationary warfare for the advance. All divisions in rear of Fourth and Sixth Armies are to be brought forward forthwith in case of such an event.\n\n(3) The German Crown Prince's Group of Armies is first of all to capture the Somme and Crozat Canal south of river Omignon. By advancing rapidly the Eighteenth Army must seize the crossings over the Somme and over the Canal. It must also be prepared to extend its right flank as far as P\u00e9ronne. The Group of Armies will study the question of reinforcing the left wing of the Army by divisions from Seventh, First and Third Armies.\n\n(4) O.H.L. keeps control of 2nd Guard, 26th W\u00fcrttemberg and 12th Divisions.\n\n(5) O.H.L. reserves its decision as regards Mars and Archangel, and will be guided by the course of events. Preparations for these are to be carried on uninterruptedly.\n\n(6) The remaining Armies are to act in accordance with C.G.S. Operation Order 6925, dated 4th March. Rupprecht's Group of Armies will protect the right wing of the Mars-Michael operation against an English counter-attack. The German Crown Prince's Group of Armies will withdraw before any big attack by the French against Seventh (exclusive of Archangel front), Third and First Armies.\n\nO.H.L. reserves its decision as regards the Groups of Armies of Gallwitz and Duke Albrecht concerning the strategic measures to be taken in the event of a big attack by the French or concerning the further withdrawal of divisions for the battle zone.\n\nVON HINDENBURG.\n\nAccompanied by the Master-General of the Ordnance, on March 19 I held a conference in the Armoury at Montreuil with the Chief of the Staff, the head of the Tank Corps, and a number of officers and experts, to settle the scheme of the Tank programme for 1919, and to time and organize the deliveries of tanks in 1918. I stayed with the Commander-in-Chief. After luncheon Sir Douglas Haig took me into his private room and explained on his map the situation as he viewed it. The enormous German concentration on the British front, and particularly opposite the Fifth Army, was obvious. Though nothing was certain, the Commander-in-Chief was daily expecting an attack of the first magnitude. The enemy masses in the north made it possible that the British front from Ypres to Messines would be assaulted. But the main developments were clearly to be expected on the sectors of the front from Arras to P\u00e9ronne and even farther south. All these possibilities had already been amplified to me the day before by General Birch, the Chief of Artillery. His map showed very clearly the areas which the Germans were infecting with mustard gas (presumably to forbid them as man\u0153uvring ground to both sides for some days) and the wide gaps between these areas over which no doubt the hostile offensive would be launched. There were also heavy enemy concentrations, though less pronounced, against the French in the sector of the Aisne. Speaking generally, more than half the German divisions in the west were ranged against the front of the British armies; and over broad stretches, the estimated enemy rifle power, the most significant index, was four times what it was against the French.\n\nThe Commander-in-Chief viewed the coming shock with an anxious but resolute eye. He dwelt with insistence on the undue strain put upon his armies by the arrangement made by the War Cabinet with the French, in which he had reluctantly acquiesced, for the extension of the British front so far to the south as Barisis. He also complained of the pressure put upon him in such a situation to assign a large portion of his limited forces to the general reserve. His forces were inadequate for even sectional and G.H.Q. Reserves. How could he then find troops for a General Reserve? I suggested that if, as he believed, the enemy's main weight were to be thrown against the British, he would get the benefit of the whole of this reserve; and if not, _caderet qu\u00e6stio._ To this he said he preferred the arrangements he had made with General P\u00e9tain, by which seven or eight British or French divisions were to be held ready to move laterally north or south according as the French or British should be found to be the object of the attack. From a general survey of the front it appeared that 110 German divisions faced 57 British, of which at least 40 German divisions faced our Fifth Army; that 85 German divisions faced 95 French; and that 4 German divisions faced the first 9 American divisions, which had entered the line at various points, but particularly in the neighbourhood of St. Mihiel.\n\nOur conversation ended about three o'clock. When I came out, the Master-General of the Ordnance suggested to me that as I had two days to spare before beginning the Chemical Warfare Conference at St. Omer, we should pay a flying visit to our old division, the 9th, which I had served in while it was in his charge, and which was now commanded by General Tudor, a friend of mine since subaltern days in India. We set off forthwith. General Tudor's headquarters were at Nurlu, in the devastated region ten miles to the north of P\u00e9ronne, near the salient of the British line and in the centre of the threatened front. We received a hearty welcome when we arrived after dark upon a tranquil front lit rarely by a gun-flash.\n\nGeneral Tudor was in high expectation. Everything was in readiness. 'When do you think it will come?' we asked. 'Perhaps to-morrow morning. Perhaps the day after. Perhaps the week after.' We spent the whole of the next day in the trenches. A deathly and suspicious silence brooded over the front. For hours not a cannon shot was fired. Yet the sunlit fields were instinct with foreboding. The 9th Division were holding what they called 'The Disaster Front,' i.e. where the line had been stabilized after the successful German counter-stroke following the Battle of Cambrai. We examined every part of the defences from Gauche Wood, held by the gallant South Africans, the 'Springboks' as they were called, to the medium artillery positions on the slopes behind Havrincourt village. Certainly nothing that human thought and effort could accomplish had been neglected. For four miles in depth the front was a labyrinth of wire and scientifically sited machine-gun nests. The troops, though thin on the ground, were disposed so as to secure full value from every man. Rumours and reasonable expectations that the Germans would employ large numbers of tanks had led to the construction of broad minefields studded with buried shells with sensitive fuses amid wire entanglements. Through the narrow paths across these areas we picked our way gingerly. The sun was setting as we left Gauche Wood and took our leave of the South Africans. I see them now, serene as the Spartans of Leonidas on the eve of Thermopyl\u00e6.\n\nBefore I went to my bed in the ruins of Nurlu, Tudor said to me: 'It is certainly coming now. Trench raids this evening have identified no less than eight enemy battalions on a single half-mile of the front.' The night was quiet except for a rumble of artillery fire, mostly distant, and the thudding explosions of occasional aeroplane raids. I woke up in a complete silence at a few minutes past four and lay musing. Suddenly, after what seemed about half an hour, the silence was broken by six or seven very loud and very heavy explosions several miles away. I thought they were our 12-inch guns, but they were probably mines. And then, exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear. 'At 4-30 a.m.,' says Ludendorff in his account, 'our barrage came down with a crash.' Far away, both to the north and to the south, the intense roar and reverberation rolled upwards to us, while through the chinks in the carefully papered window the flame of the bombardment lit like flickering firelight my tiny cabin.\n\nI dressed and went out. On the duckboards outside the Mess I met Tudor. 'This is _it_ ,' he said. 'I have ordered all our batteries to open. You will hear them in a minute.' But the crash of the German shells bursting on our trench lines eight thousand yards away was so overpowering that the accession to the tumult of nearly two hundred guns firing from much nearer to us could not be even distinguished. From the Divisional Headquarters on the high ground of Nurlu one could see the front line for many miles. It swept around us in a wide curve of red leaping flame stretching to the north far along the front of the Third Army, as well as of the Fifth Army on the south, and quite unending in either direction. There were still two hours to daylight, and the enormous explosions of the shells upon our trenches seemed almost to touch each other, with hardly an interval in space or time. Among the bursting shells there rose at intervals, but almost continually, the much larger flames of exploding magazines. The weight and intensity of the bombardment surpassed anything which anyone had ever known before.\n\nOnly one gun was firing at the Headquarters. He belonged to the variety called 'Percy,' and all his shells fell harmlessly a hundred yards away. A quarter of a mile to the south along the P\u00e9ronne road a much heavier gun was demolishing the divisional canteen. Daylight supervened on pandemonium, and the flame picture pulsated under a pall of smoke from which great fountains of the exploding 'dumps' rose mushroom-headed. It was my duty to leave these scenes; and at ten o'clock, with mingled emotions, I bade my friends farewell and motored without misadventure along the road to P\u00e9ronne. The impression I had of Tudor was of an iron peg hammered into the frozen ground, immovable. And so indeed it proved. The 9th Division held not only its Battle but its Forward Zone at the junction of the Third and Fifth Armies against every assault, and only retired when ordered to do so in consequence of the general movement of the line.\n\nIt is possible here to give only the barest outline of the battle. Many full and excellent accounts exist. Many more will be written. Taking its scale and intensity together, quantity and quality combined, 'Michael' must be regarded without exception as the greatest onslaught in the history of the world. From the Sens\u00e9e River to the Oise, on a front of forty miles, the Germans launched simultaneously thirty-seven divisions of infantry, covered by nearly 6,000 guns. They held in close support nearly thirty divisions more. On the same front the British line of battle was held by seventeen divisions and 2,500 guns, with five divisions in support. In all, the Germans had marshalled and set in motion rather more than three-quarters of a million men against 300,000 British. Over the two ten-mile sectors lying to the north and the south of the salient in which the 9th Division stood, the density of the enemy's formation provided an assaulting division for every thousand yards of ground, and attained the superiority of four to one.\n\nThe British troops involved constituted the whole of the Fifth and nearly half the Third Army under the command of General Gough and General Byng respectively. The system of defence comprised a Forward Zone intended to delay the enemy and to break his formations, and a Battle Zone in which the main struggle was to be fought. The average depth of the defensive system was about four miles; behind which again lay a Reserve Zone which there had not been time or labour to fortify, except for the defences of the medium and heavy batteries. Indeed, on the whole of the Fifth Army front, but especially in the newly-transferred sector from the Omignon to Barisis, many of the entrenched lines and points existed only in a rudimentary form. The rear zone, for instance, had a mere line a few inches deep cut in the turf, and communications in the shape of good roads and light railways were still lacking. The method of defence consisted in an intricate arrangement of small posts, machine-gun nests, and redoubts, mutually supporting each other, communicating with each other where necessary by trenches and tunnels, and covered or sustained by an exact organization of artillery barrages. Behind the front of the British lay the wilderness of the Somme battlefield. Their left hand rested in a strategic sense upon the massive buttress of the Vimy Ridge; their right was in touch with comparatively weak French forces.\n\nThere was no surprise about the time or general direction of the attack. The surprise consisted in its weight, scale and power.\n\nAfter a bombardment of incredible fury for not more than two to four hours, accompanied at certain points by heavy discharges of poison gas, the German infantry began to advance. The whole of this region had been in their possession during 1915 and the greater part of 1916, and there was no lack in any unit of officers and men who knew every inch of the ground. The form of attack which they adopted was an extension of the method of 'infiltration' first tried by them in their counter-stroke after the Battle of Cambrai. A low-lying fog, which was in some places dense, favoured their plan at any rate in the initial stages. The system of detached posts on which the British relied, and which their comparatively small numbers had made necessarily rather open in character, depended to a very large extent upon clear vision, both for the machine gunners themselves and to a lesser extent for their protecting artillery. Aided by the mist, the German infantry freely entered the Forward Zone in small parties of shock troops, carrying with them machine guns and trench mortars. They were followed by large bodies, and even by noon had at many points penetrated the Battle Zone. The British posts, blasted, stunned or stifled by the bombardment or the gas, mystified and baffled by the fog, isolated and often taken in the rear, defended themselves stubbornly and with varying fortunes. Over the whole of the battlefield, which comprised approximately 160 square miles, a vast number of bloody struggles ensued. But the Germans, guided by their excellent organization and their local knowledge, and backed by their immense superiority in numbers, continued during the day to make inroads upon the Battle Zone, and even to pierce it at several points. When darkness fell, nearly all the British divisions had been forced from their original fighting line, and were intermingled at many points with the enemy in the Battle Zone.\n\nThe devoted resistance of the isolated British posts levied a heavy toll upon the enemy and played a recognizable part in the final result. From the outset the Germans learned that they had to deal with troops who would fight as long as they had ammunition, irrespective of what happened in any other quarter of the field or whether any hope of success or escape remained. A few instances of these forlorn struggles may record the glories of a hundred.\n\nA platoon of the 2nd London (58th Division) holding Travecy Keep, north of La F\u00e8re, was entirely cut off in the morning and constantly attacked. All through the 21st they maintained themselves. They repulsed three heavy attacks at dusk on the 21st, at dawn on the 22nd and at midday on the 22nd. It was not until 5.30 p.m. on the 22nd that this handful of men, alone in the midst of the hostile army and with their ammunition running short, were compelled to surrender.\n\nA company of the 7th Buffs (18th Division) garrisoned Vendeuil Fort in the same neighbourhood. They were first attacked about 9.45 a.m. on the 21st. The Germans advanced in close formation, and their attack was repulsed with great loss and the capture of some prisoners. The enemy then advanced past the fort in the fog, and its defenders knew they were cut off. Both in the evening of the 21st and after bombardment with field guns at dawn on the 22nd, the German attacks were again repulsed. During the 22nd this company was able to fire on long columns of cavalry, guns and transport passing their fort, and to drive them from the line of march. Not until 4-30 p.m. on the 22nd, when food and ammunition were both exhausted and there was no hope of relief, did they surrender.\n\nOn March 22nd Ricardo Redoubt, near Fontaine-les-Clercs (8 miles north-east of Ham), was held by the remains of the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (36th Division), in all 275 officers and men. During the morning the place was surrounded and repeatedly attacked. About 2 p.m. the Germans brought up field artillery and bombarded the redoubt at close range. About an hour later the enemy gained a footing in the redoubt, and the struggle was continued inside. The Commanding Officer was now wounded, but it was not until 4.40 p.m. that the garrison was crushed after what the history of the German 3rd Guard Regiment describes as 'a most gallant resistance.'\n\nOn the 21st the headquarters and two companies of the 8th Queen's (24th Division) held the village of Le Verguier, seven miles north-west of St. Quentin, in the Battle Zone. During the day heavy frontal and flank attacks were made by the enemy, but all were repulsed. Greatly superior numbers of the enemy lay dead in the wire entanglements. No progress could be made by the Germans in this quarter. At 6.30 a.m. on the 22nd, aided by the morning mist, the enemy renewed his attack. The attack from the east by the German 185th Regiment failed. But the 5th German Guards, attacking from the north, succeeded in penetrating the side of the village and took in rear the defenders of the east face. The eastern part of the village was thus lost; but Fort Greathead and Fort Lees, as these small posts were called, on the western outskirts still held out. All men who could retire from the other posts reinforced these two, and thus strengthened they continued to repulse repeated attacks. The battalion headquarters in a sunken road south of the village was then discovered and attacked by the enemy. Orderlies, servants and cooks were quickly collected, and a spirited fight at close quarters ensued. The Germans were driven off.\n\nAbout 9.30 a.m. the Commanding Officer went towards Fort Lees, the more northerly of the two posts and found it had been lost. The remainder of the battalion was now nearly surrounded, and orders were given to retire. The defenders of Fort Greathead and of the battalion headquarters assembled in the sunken road leading south-westward from the village, and under cover of the mist marched off and rejoined their division with only one further casualty. They had defended Le Verguier for twenty-four hours, and its ruins with their last defenders were taken by converging attacks made by five German battalions from north, east and south, supported by all the available artillery of two divisions.\n\nOn the 22nd one company of the 11th Royal Scots (9th Division) was holding Revelon Farm, near Heudicourt (9 miles north-east of P\u00e9ronne). During the afternoon Heudicourt Station, to the south of Revelon Farm, was taken by the enemy. This enabled him to advance on the farm from the south as well as from the east. The British record can carry the tale no further than that the company of the Royal Scots were last seen fighting hard for their farm at 5 p.m. German accounts however testify to their defence. Bombarded at close range by artillery and trench mortars, bombed by aeroplanes, and kept under ceaseless streams of machine-gun bullets, the survivors resisted to the uttermost; and it was nearly 6 o'clock when parts of three different German regiments stormed the farm. In the soldierly words of the history of the German 123rd Regiment, 'they covered the retreat of the main body to the extent of being destroyed themselves.'\n\nThe conflict was continuous. Fresh German troops poured ceaselessly into action. By the evening of the 22nd the British Fifth Army had been driven completely beyond its Battle Zone and half the Army was beyond its last prescribed defensive line. The British Third Army still fought in and around the Battle Zone. The German penetration south of the Oise had made serious progress. The British losses by death, wounds or capture exceeded 100,000 men; and nearly 500 guns were already lost. An immense slaughter was also wrought upon the German side. At every step they paid the price of the offensive, but their great numbers rendered their losses inappreciable during the crisis. Overwhelming reserves were close at hand. The British on the other hand had only eight divisions in general reserve, of which five were readily available; and the French were too slowly moved or too far away to give effective assistance for several days. Therefore on the night of the 22nd, Sir Hubert Gough ordered a general retreat of the Fifth Army behind the Somme. His orders had been 'to protect at all costs the important centre of P\u00e9ronne and the River Somme to the South' of it. He was fully justified in retiring in a general rear-guard action up to this line. But once the retreat of so thin a line on such a wide front had begun, it was very difficult to stop as long as the enemy pressure continued. The circumstances of each corps or division were so various that those who made a stand found their flanks exposed by others falling back. A great many of the bridges across the Somme were blown up; but enough were left\u2014and among them the most important bridges, confided to the Railway authorities and not to the troops\u2014to enable the Germans to pass artillery rapidly across. Moreover, the river was easily fordable at this time.\n\nBackward then across the hideous desolation of the old crater-fields rolled the British front for five days in succession. The Cavalry Corps filled the gaps in the line, and the Air Force, concentrating all its strength upon the battle, flying low, inflicted heavy losses on the endless marching columns. Meanwhile reserves drawn from other parts of the line, and improvised forces from the schools and technical establishments, continually reached the scene. At the same time, with every day's advance, the strength and momentum of the German thrust abated. The actual fighting gave place to the painful toiling westward of two weary armies; and when the retreating British were sufficiently reinforced to come to a general halt, their pursuers found themselves not less exhausted, and far in front of their own artillery and supplies. By the evening of the 27th the first crisis of the great battle was over.\n\nAll the 'Michaels' had struck their blow. But where was 'Mars'? The Sixth Army and the right of the Seventeenth were to have entered the battle towards Arras and the Vimy Ridge on the 23rd. That they did not attack till the 28th was due to a deeply significant cause. General Byng had secretly withdrawn his troops from the line at Monchy, and already occupied a position four miles in the rear. The Germans bombarded the empty trenches of a false front. It took them four days and nights to bring their artillery forward and mount the assault against the new position. Thus the second great wave did not synchronize with the full surge of the first. The second great battle did not contribute to the intensity of the first, but came as a separate event after the climax of the first was over. Moreover the progress made by the Second and the Seventeenth German Armies in the original attack had not fulfilled Ludendorff's expectations. At 9.30 on the morning of the 23rd he was led to abandon his prime strategic hope, namely the general defeat and driving to the coast of the British armies in France, and to content himself with the extremely valuable definite objective of dividing the British from the French through the capture of Amiens toward which the Eighteenth and Second Armies were progressing. His order given at noon was: 'A considerable portion of the British Army has now been beaten.... The objective of the operation is now to separate the French and British by a rapid advance on both sides of the Somme.' This was already a remarkable contraction of aim.\n\nOn the morning of the 28th the delayed attack against the Arras position (Mars) began. It was delivered on a twenty-mile front by twenty German divisions against eight British divisions. The methods of both sides were the same as on March 21. But the weather was clear, and the machine guns and artillery of the defence could reach their highest concert. Everywhere the attack was repulsed with tremendous slaughter. Even the Forward Zone was held at many points. Nowhere was the Battle Zone seriously affected. No outside reserves were required by the defending divisions. The Germans, who advanced with the utmost bravery, were mown down in heaps. As the result of the eight days' struggle the British Army, virtually unaided by the French, had stemmed or broken the greatest offensive ever launched.\n\nThe French had been coming fitfully and feebly into action on the Southern portion of the battlefield from the morning of the 23rd. At dawn that day one division (the 125th) came into action. A French dismounted cavalry division entered the line in the evening. The 9th, 10th, 62nd and 22nd French Divisions were in line on the afternoon of the 24th, though two of them had no artillery and none of them had 'cookers' or more than fifty rounds of rifle ammunition per man. On the morning of the 25th General Fayolle assumed responsibility for the whole of the Fifth Army front south of the Somme. But up till the 27th the main weight of the fighting, even in this area, still continued to be borne by the exhausted British troops. At no time up till the end of the 28th, when both the first and second crises of the battle were over, did the French have simultaneously in action more than six divisions, and none of these were seriously engaged. The struggle up till its turning point on the 28th was between the British and Germans alone.\n\nIts last phase was now at hand, and in this the ever-gathering strength of the French on those portions of the front still involved played an equal part with the British. The Eighteenth German Army, brushing back weak French resistance, had actually taken Montdidier on the 27th. But this was the farthest point of the German advance. Says Ludendorff: 'The enemy's line was now becoming denser, and in places they were even attacking themselves; while our armies were no longer strong enough to overcome them unaided. The ammunition was not sufficient, and supply became difficult. The repair of roads and railways was taking too long, in spite of all our preparations. After thoroughly replenishing ammunition, the Eighteenth Army attacked between Montdidier and Noyon on March 30. On April 4 the Second Army and the right wing of the Eighteenth attacked at Albert, south of the Somme towards Amiens. These actions were _indecisive._ It was an established fact that the enemy's resistance was beyond our strength.... The battle was over by April 4.'\n\nLet us focus what had actually happened. With whom lay the victory? Contrary to the generally accepted verdict, I hold that the Germans, judged by the hard test of gains and losses, were decisively defeated. Ludendorff failed to achieve a single strategic object. By the morning of the 23rd he had been forced to resign his dream of overwhelming and crumpling back upon the sea the main strength of the British armies, and to content himself with the hope of capturing Amiens and perhaps dividing the British from the French. After April 4 he abandoned both these most important but to him secondary aims. 'Strategically,' he says, 'we had not achieved what the events of the 23rd, 24th and 25th had encouraged us to hope for. That we had also failed to take Amiens... was specially disappointing.' What then had been gained? The Germans had reoccupied their old battlefields and the regions they had so cruelly devastated and ruined a year before. Once again they entered into possession of those grisly trophies. No fertile province, no wealthy cities, no river or mountain barrier, no new untapped resources were their reward. Only the crater-fields extending abominably wherever the eye could turn, the old trenches, the vast grave-yards, the skeletons, the blasted trees and the pulverized villages\u2014these, from Arras to Montdidier and from St. Quentin to Villers-Bretonneux, were the Dead Sea fruits of the mightiest military conception and the most terrific onslaught which the annals of war record. The price they paid was heavy. They lost for the first time in the war, or at any rate since Ypres in 1914, two soldiers killed for every one British, and three officers killed for every two British. They made 60,000 prisoners and captured over a thousand guns, together with great stores of ammunition and material. But their advantage in prisoners was more than offset by their greater loss in wounded. Their consumption of material exceeded their captures. If the German loss of men was serious, the loss of time was fatal. The great effort had been made and had not succeeded. The German Army was no longer crouched, but sprawled. A great part of its reserves had been exposed and involved. The stress of peril on the other hand wrung from the Allies exertions and sacrifices which, as will be seen, far more than made good their losses.\n\nThe recriminations upon this battle left a lasting imprint on British political history. In April, General Maurice, the Director at the War Office of Military Operations, indignant at the failure to reinforce the Army in the winter, accused Mr. Lloyd George of incorrectly stating to the House of Commons the facts and figures of the case. Tension and uncertainty arose not only in the Opposition, but among the Government supporters, and even in its own ranks. When a formal challenge in debate was made by Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister convinced the House that his statement had been founded on information supplied in writing by General Maurice's Deputy. This was decisive on the issue, and the actual merits of the controversy were scarcely discussed. The division which followed was accepted by Mr. Lloyd George as marking the cleavage between his Liberal followers and those of Mr. Asquith. When, eight months later, in the hour of victory, the General Election took place, all who had voted against the Government on this occasion were opposed by the triumphant Coalition, and scarcely any escaped political exclusion. The reverberations of the quarrel continue to this day.\n\nWe may however attempt a provisional judgment. If Haig had not consumed his armies at Passchendaele, or if at least he had been content to stop that offensive in September, he would have commanded (without any addition to the drafts actually sent him from England in the winter) sufficient reserves on March 21 to enable him to sustain the threatened front. But for the horror which Passchendaele inspired in the minds of the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet, he would no doubt have been supplied with very much larger reinforcements. He would thus have gained both in economy of life and also in larger reinforcements. If, notwithstanding Passchendaele, the War Cabinet had reinforced him as they should have done, the front could still have been held on March 21. The responsibility for the causes which led to the British inadequacy of numbers is shared between General Headquarters and the War Cabinet. By constitutional doctrine the greatest responsibility unquestionably rests upon the War Cabinet, who failed to make their Commander conform to their convictions on a question which far transcended the military or technical sphere, and who also failed to do full justice to the Army because of their disagreement with the Commander-in-Chief. In view however of the preponderance of military influence in time of war, and the serious dangers of a collision between the 'soldiers' and the politicians, a very considerable burden must be borne by the British Headquarters.\n\nMy work at the Chemical Warfare School near St. Omer occupied the whole of the 23rd, and I did not reach London till midday on the 24th. No information of any value about the progress of the battle had been available at the Chemical School. I therefore went immediately to the War Office to learn the news from France. Sir Henry Wilson, with the gravest face, showed me the telegrams and his own map. We both walked across to Downing Street, where the Prime Minister was expecting him. It was a bright crisp day, and Mr. Lloyd George was seated in the garden with Lord French. He seemed to think that I had news at first hand, and turned towards me. I explained that I knew nothing beyond what he had already read in his telegrams, and had seen nothing but the first few hours of the bombardment in a single sector. After some general conversation he took me aside and posed the following question: If we could not hold the line we have fortified so carefully, why should we be able to hold any positions farther back with troops already defeated? I answered that every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought. After thirty or forty miles there would certainly come a considerable breathing space, when the front could be reconstituted if every effort were made. It appeared that he had already despatched Lord Milner to France, though I was not aware of this. The Chief of the Staff said that he himself intended to go over that night. We arranged to dine together at my house in Eccleston Square before he left. Only my wife was present. I never remember in the whole course of the war a more anxious evening. One of the great qualities in Mr. Lloyd George was his power of obliterating the past and concentrating his whole being upon meeting the new situation. There were 200,000 troops in England that could be swiftly sent. What about munitions and equipment? Wilson said, 'We might well lose a thousand guns,' and that mountains of ammunition and stores of every kind must have been abandoned. I was thankful to be in a position to say that about these at least there need be no worry. Everything could be replaced at once from our margins without affecting the regular supply. Presently the Chief of the General Staff went to catch his train, and we were left alone together. The resolution of the Prime Minister was unshaken under his truly awful responsibilities.\n\nMeanwhile an event had occurred which, though it did not influence the course of the battle, was nevertheless of capital importance. On the night of the 24th, when the battle was at its worst, General P\u00e9tain, whose weak and tardy assistance was causing grave concern, met Haig and his Chief of Staff at Dury near Amiens. Although sixty-two German divisions had already been identified in the battle, of which forty-eight were fresh from the Reserve, P\u00e9tain asserted that the main blow was yet to fall, and that it would fall on the French in Champagne. He informed Haig that if the Germans continued to press on to Amiens, the French troops then concentrating about Montdidier would be withdrawn upon Beauvais to cover Paris in accordance with the orders of the French Government. He indicated that action in this sense had already been taken. Haig's original orders, given him personally by Lord Kitchener more than two years before, were in brief to 'keep united with the French Army at all costs.' But here at the crisis was a complete abandonment of the basic principle of unity.\n\nOn learning this fatal intention, Sir Douglas Haig telegraphed to the Secretary of State for War and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff to come over immediately. But both, as we have seen, had already started independently. Milner, acting with the necessary energy, after seeing Haig's Chief of the Staff at St. Omer, motored straight through to Paris and collected the President of the Republic, Cl\u00e9menceau and Foch. Together they all proceeded to Compi\u00e8gne on the 25th, examined P\u00e9tain as to his intentions, and finally, bringing P\u00e9tain with them, at noon on the 26th met Haig at Doullens, where Henry Wilson had already arrived. The magnitude of the danger had melted all prejudices and oppositions, personal and national alike. Only one name was in every mind. Foch, a week ago described as a 'dotard,' was the indispensable man. He alone possessed the size and the combative energy to prevent the severance of the French and British armies. Milner proposed that Foch should have control of the forces in front of Amiens. Haig declared that this was insufficient and that Foch must be given actual command of the French and British armies as a whole 'from the Alps to the North Sea.' At a conference in London a month before, the old 'Tiger' had dealt abruptly with the outspoken misgivings of Foch. 'Taisez-vous. I am the representative of France.' Now it was Foch's turn to speak. 'It is a hard task you offer me now: a compromised situation, a crumbling front, an adverse battle in full progress. Nevertheless, I accept.' Thus there was established for the first time on the Western Front that unity of command towards which Mr. Lloyd George had long directed his cautious, devious but persevering steps, and to which, whatever may be said to the contrary (and it is not little), history will ascribe an inestimable advantage for the cause of the Allies.\n\nThe emergency arrangements were confirmed and elaborated a few weeks later in the so-called 'Beauvais Agreement' under which the Commander-in-Chief of a National Army was secured right of appeal to his own Government if he claimed that an order of the Generalissimo endangered the safety of his troops.\n\nHard measure was meted out to General Gough. The Fifth Army from the 28th onwards ceased to exist. Its shattered divisions were painfully reorganized behind the line. The gap was filled by the now rapidly arriving French, by the cavalry, by the improvised forces collected from the Schools, and by General Rawlinson who began, from scanty and diverse materials, to constitute a 'Fourth Army' and to maintain the tottering and fluctuating line of battle.\n\nGough never received another fighting command. The Cabinet insisted on his removal on the ground, probably valid, that he had lost the confidence of his troops. This officer had fought his way upwards through the whole war from a Cavalry Brigade to the command of an Army. He was held to have greatly distinguished himself on the Ancre at the close of 1916. With Plumer he bore the brunt of Passchendaele while it continued, and its blame when it ended rested upon him. He was a typical cavalry officer, with a strong personality and a gay and boyish charm of manner. A man who never spared himself or his troops, the instrument of costly and forlorn attacks, he emerged from the Passchendaele tragedy pursued by many fierce resentments among his high subordinates, rumours of which had even reached the rank and file. For over a year his reputation had been such that troops and leaders alike disliked inclusion in the Fifth Army. There was a conviction that in that Army supplies were awkward and attacks not sufficiently studied. In these circumstances Gough was not in a position to surmount the impression of a great disaster. The sternest critic has however been unable to find ground for censuring his general conduct of the battle of March 21. It appears that he took every measure, both before and during the battle, which experience and energy could devise and of which his utterly inadequate resources admitted; that his composure never faltered, that his activity was inexhaustible, that his main decisions were prudent and resolute, and that no episode in his career was more honourable than the disaster which entailed his fall.\n\nIt was my responsibility to make good the assurance I had given that all losses in material would be immediately replaced; and for this the Munitions Council, its eighty departments and its two and a half million workers, men and women, toiled with a cold passion that knew no rest. Everywhere the long-strained factories rejected the Easter breathing space which health required. One thought dominated the whole gigantic organization\u2014to make everything good within a month. Guns, shells, rifles, ammunition, Maxim guns, Lewis guns, tanks, aeroplanes and a thousand ancillaries were all gathered from our jealously hoarded reserves. Risks are relative, and I decided, without subsequent misadventure, to secure an earlier month's supply of guns by omitting the usual firing tests.\n\nOn the 26th I issued the following notice:\u2014\n\n'A special effort must be made to replace promptly the serious losses in munitions which are resulting from the great battle now in progress. It should be our part in the struggle to maintain the armament and equipment of the fighting troops at the highest level. Our resources are fortunately sufficient to accomplish this up to the present in every class of munitions. But it is necessary to speed up the completion and despatch of important parts of the work in hand. I rely upon every one concerned in the manufacture of tanks to put forward their best efforts. There should therefore be no cessation of this work during the Easter holidays. Please notify your essential sub-contractors to this effect.\n\n'I acknowledge with gratitude the spontaneous assurances already received from the men in many districts that there will be no loss of output. Now is the time to show the fighting army what the industrial army can achieve.'\n\nThe response was so complete that explanations had to be offered a few days later to those who felt their work slighted because they had not been called upon to sacrifice their hard-earned holidays.\n\n'The Minister of Munitions desires to acknowledge in the warmest terms the widespread and indeed general response which has been made from all parts of the country to the appeal to the munition workers to give up their Easter holidays. He would like to accept all the offers that have been made. But military and railway exigencies at this juncture make it necessary to confine acceptance to those classes of work particularly referred to in the Minister's appeal. All firms whose work must be specially accelerated have now been notified individually by official telegram that they should work through Easter. Those who have not been notified should take their holidays now. This will allow the railway facilities to be used to the highest advantage for the most urgent needs. It in no way implies that one class of munitions work is more important than another, and it is vital that all munition outputs should be increased to the maximum which material allows.'\n\nBefore the end of the month I was able, in the facsimile document here reproduced, to assure the War Cabinet and General Headquarters that nearly two thousand new guns of every nature, with their complete equipments, could be supplied by April 6 as fast as they could be handled by the receiving department of the Army. In fact, however, twelve hundred met the need.\n\n# CHAPTER XVIII\n\n# THE CLIMAX\n\nThe Battle of the Lys, April 9\u2014The Portuguese Gap\u2014The Second Wave\u2014The Buttresses stand\u2014The Battle is prolonged\u2014The 'Back-to-the-wall' order\u2014April 12, the Climax\u2014Haig's Appeals to Foch\u2014Reasons for Foch's Obduracy\u2014Munitions and Tanks\u2014The King's Message to the Munition Workers\u2014Two Bleak Hypotheses\u2014My Note of April 18\u2014Tragic Contingencies\u2014Loss of Kemmel Hill\u2014The False Alarm\u2014Ludendorff flinches\u2014Defeat and Losses of the Germans.\n\nOn Tuesday, April 9, the third great battle effort of the Germans against the British began. In order to stem the German advance upon Amiens, Sir Douglas Haig had been forced to thin his line elsewhere. Instead of doing this evenly, he had exercised a wise process of selection. He held in strength the great central bastion from Arras to the La Bass\u00e9e Canal at Givenchy. This comprised the highly defensible and important area of the Lens coalfields, as well as the mass of commanding ground which included the key positions of the Vimy and Lorette Heights. To the north of this it was inevitable that the line should be dangerously weak. Out of fifty-eight British infantry divisions, forty-six had already been engaged on the Somme. The Fifth Army divisions were reorganizing and unfit to enter the line. To hold the front of 40,000 yards between the La Bass\u00e9e Canal and the Ypres Canal, Haig could only provide six divisions. Each of these divisions must be stretched to cover over 7,000 yards\u2014stretched wider, that is to say, than the Fifth Army divisions before March 21; and almost all the troops had fought with most severe losses in the preceding fortnight on the Somme. Since even these precarious dispositions could not be completed in the pressure of events before the German blow fell, nearly 10,000 yards of front by Neuve Chapelle were at the moment held by a Portuguese division of four brigades.\n\nIt was upon this denuded front, the day before the Portuguese were to have been relieved by two British divisions, that Ludendorff struck. By April 3, seventeen divisions had been added to the German Sixth and four to the German Fourth Army. The Sixth Army was to attack towards Hazebrouck and the heights beyond Kemmel, and the Fourth was to support it and exploit success. The town of Armenti\u00e8res, having been smothered with gas shells by a bombardment beginning on the evening of the 7th, constituted an impassable area; and with their northern flank thus protected, ten German divisions in an eleven-miles line marched against the 2nd Portuguese Division and the 40th and 55th British Divisions on each side of it. No less than seven German divisions fell upon the four Portuguese brigades, and immediately swept them out of existence as a military force. The 40th Division, its flank opened by the Portuguese disaster, was also speedily overwhelmed. A thick mist blanketed the British machine-gun nests arranged in depth behind the line. Within two hours of the advance of the German infantry a gap of over 15,000 yards had been opened in the front, through which the German masses were pouring. The 50th and 51st Divisions, who formed the British reserves, moved to their appointed stations in the second line of defence at the crossings of the Lys and the Lawe Rivers as soon as the battle began; but the unexampled suddenness of the break-through, the vehemence of the German advance, the streams of retreating Portuguese, and the general confusion prevented them from fully occupying their prepared positions. They were rapidly absorbed in a moving battle against vastly superior numbers. After a day of violent fighting the Germans had reached the outskirts of Estaires, five kilometres behind the original line, and around this pocket of assault the remains of five British divisions struggled to create and maintain a front against sixteen German divisions all fully engaged.\n\nAt daylight on the morning of the 10th a second wave of German assault was launched by the German Fourth Army to the north of Armenti\u00e8res on a four-mile front. This phase of the offensive had been timed to begin twenty-four hours after the main attack, in the well-founded expectation that the British reserves in this sector would by then have been drawn into the first battle. Four brigades had in fact been diverted, and the whole weight of five German divisions fell upon five brigades of the 19th and 25th Divisions, who had behind them in reserve only the remaining brigade of the 29th Division. The assault was successful. The front was broken. 'Plugstreet' village, the greater part of Messines and the crest of the Wytschaete Ridge fell into the hands of the enemy by noon. The 34th Division was in the greatest danger of being cut off around Armenti\u00e8res, and by the evening of the 10th the Germans were actual or potential masters of the whole British defensive system from Wytschaete to Givenchy. During the day both Lestrem and Estaires had been taken, and night found the survivors of eight British divisions holding an improvised front of thirty miles at death grips with twenty-seven German divisions, of which twenty-one had actually been involved in the battle. The 34th Division extricated itself from Armenti\u00e8res during the night, and only by skill escaped the fast closing pincers.\n\nBut while this formidable inroad had been made upon the greater part of the front assailed, the line on either flank held firm. A Lancashire division, the 55th, perfectly fortified and organized in Givenchy and Festubert, continued to repulse for seven successive days every attack, losing 3,000 men and taking 900 prisoners. On the northern flank of the offensive lay the 9th Scottish Division whom we left unshakable at Nurlu on the morning of March 21. After fighting with the utmost distinction and success in that great battle and losing over 5,000 officers and men, it had been hastily filled with drafts and brought to rest and recuperate in what was believed to be a quiet station. The whole front to the southward having been beaten in, its right flank was turned back, and the resurrected South African brigade, at four in the afternoon of the 10th, drove the Germans from the Messines crest. All efforts to oust this division from the position into which it had clawed itself failed. Thus the buttresses stood immovable, although the wall between them was completely battered in. Upon this fact the safety of the whole front and the final result of the battle unquestionably depended.\n\nOn the 11th the enemy, his Sixth and Fourth Army fronts united, extended his inroads in every direction except the flanks which he could not widen. Villages and townships, which had for more than three years been the home of the British armies or whose names were associated with hard-won victories, fell into his hands. Merville, Nieppe and the rest of Messines were lost. As his front extended the enemy was able to deploy additional divisions and simultaneously to increase the weight of the attack and stretch the thin-drawn fluctuating line of the defence. The 50th and 51st Divisions maintained during the whole of April 10 and 11 a desperate struggle with seven or more German divisions along an oscillating but receding front of 20,000 yards.\n\nBy the end of this day the German line formed a salient or bulge fifteen kilometres deep and sixty-four wide in the original British positions. Meanwhile reinforcements were hurrying to the scene by march, bus and train. The rest of the 29th Division began to arrive on the northern front of attack, and the 4th, 5th, 31st (including the 4th Guards Brigade), 33rd, 61st and 1st Australian Divisions were all moving to the southern sector. Every yard of the ground was disputed, and in the close fierce fighting which never ceased night or day the German losses, like their numbers, were at least double those of the British. Here at last, though perilous, agonizing and unrecognised, was the real battle of attrition.\n\nThe initial success of the German thrust had exceeded Ludendorff's expectations, and during the first forty-eight hours of the battle he formed the resolve to extend the scale of the attack and strike with all his strength for the Channel ports. From April 12 onwards the German reserves were thrown profusely into the conflict, and both the German Army Commanders, Quast and Sixt von Arnim, were encouraged to draw freely from the main concentrations in the north. Begun as a diversion to draw Allied reserves from the Amiens front, the Battle of the Lys had now become a primary operation.\n\nFrom the general not less than from the British point of view, April 12 is probably, after the Marne, the climax of the war. It looked as if the Germans had resolved to stake their fate and their regathered superiority on battering the life out of the British Army. During twenty days they had hurled nearly ninety divisions in three great battles upon an Army which counted no more than fifty-eight, and of these nearly half were fastened to fronts not under attack. With a superiority of numbers in the areas of assault of three and often four to one, with their brilliantly trained shock troops, with their extraordinary skill and enterprise in man\u0153uvring with machine guns and trench mortars, with their new infiltration scheme, with their corroding mustard gas, with their terrific artillery and great science of war, they might well succeed. The French seemed to the British Headquarters sunk in stupor and passivity. Since the Nivelle disaster they had been grappling with mutiny and nursing their remaining resources. With the exception of the 'set piece' battle of Malmaison in the winter, and the stinted and tardy divisions which had been involved south of the Somme in the later stages of March 21, they had only fought in ordinary trench warfare for nearly nine months. During that time the much smaller British Army had fought almost unceasingly, and wisely or unwisely had sacrificed in the common cause, apart from the prolonged Arras-Messines offensive of 1917, more than 400,000 men in the Passchendaele tragedy, and had now lost nearly 300,000 more under Ludendorff's terrible hammer. It was upon an Army bled white by frightful losses, its regimental officers shorn away by scores of thousands, its batteries and battalions filled and refilled with young soldiers plunged into battle before they knew their officers or each other, that the massed might of the desperate German Empire now fell.\n\nMoreover, the shock could not be deadened nor breathing space gained by ceding ground. No large retirement like the ' _Alberich_ ' man\u0153uvre was open to Sir Douglas Haig. A few kilometres might be yielded here and there. The dearly bought ground of Passchendaele could be given up and some relief obtained thereby. Ypres could in the last resource be let go. But in front of Amiens, in front of Arras, in front of B\u00e9thune, in front of Hazebrouck he must stand or fall. Therefore on the morning of the 12th the Commander, usually so restrained and, as it had seemed, unresponsive, published to his troops the order of the day which is printed in facsimile on the opposite page: 'There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.' All units and all ranks of the British Expeditionary Force therefore prepared themselves to conquer or die.\n\nThe convulsion continued. The reinforcements closed the gaps that were hourly torn in the struggling line. Companies, battalions, even whole brigades were obliterated where they stood. Ludendorff, resolute, ruthless, hazard-loving, raised his stakes. More and more of the German reserves were committed to the onset. The roar of the cannonade resounded through Flanders and reverberated across the Channel. But nothing could move the 55th Division on the right nor the 9th on the left. The Australians were coming, but their trains were late; and the 4th Guards Brigade all through the 12th and 13th may be discerned, where all was valour, barring the path to Hazebrouck. So intermingled were the units and formations in the fighting line, that across the Bailleul-Armenti\u00e8res road, Freyberg, V.C., four years before a Sub-Lieutenant, found himself holding a front of 4,000 yards with elements of four different divisions, and covered by the remnants of two divisional artilleries that had drifted back with the line. Neuve Eglise was lost, and Bailleul and M\u00e9teren; and under the intense pressure the front bent backwards. But it did not break. When on the 17th eight German divisions\u2014seven of them fresh\u2014were violently repulsed in their attack on the famous hill of Kemmel, the crisis of the Battle of the Lys was over. The orders of the Commander had been strictly and faithfully fulfilled.\n\nEven before the beginning of the Battle of the Lys, Sir Douglas Haig had convinced himself that Ludendorff meant to make a dead-set at the British Army. He accordingly appealed to Foch for aid.\n\nHe asked the Generalissimo to take without delay one of the three following courses, viz.\u2014\n\n'(1) To open an offensive in the next five or six days with the French armies on a scale sufficient to attract the enemy's reserves, or\n\n'(2) To relieve the British troops south of the Somme (a total of four divisions), or\n\n'(3) To place a group of four French divisions in the neighbourhood of St. Pol as a reserve to the British front.'\n\nHe wrote again on the 10th after the battle had begun that the\u2014\n\n'enemy would without a doubt continue to strike against his troops until they were exhausted. It was vital that the French Army should take immediate steps to relieve some part of the British Front and take an active share in the battle.'\n\nHe renewed his solicitations on the 11th and on the 14th. Finally on the 15th he recorded his\u2014\n\n'opinion that the arrangements made by the Generalissimo were insufficient to meet the military situation.'\n\nIn order to press his demands with greater insistency, and withal to maintain good relations with the Supreme Commander, Haig, as early as April 10, had taken General Du Cane, who was actually commanding the XVth British Corps in full battle on the Lys, and sent him to reside at Foch's headquarters as a High 'Go-between' or Liaison Officer.\n\nThese requests were intensely painful to Foch. His primary endeavour was to gather and husband his reserves. The control exercised over the reserves was, he considered, the main function of a Commander on the defensive. Ten British divisions had already on account of their losses had to be reduced to cadre, and their survivors used as reinforcements for the rest. When could these divisions, he asked, be reconstituted? Could not the British when the crisis of the battle was over start a 'roulement' of tired British divisions to quiet parts of the French front? These counter requests ill accorded with the desperate struggle in which the British were involved. Painful differences developed at a conference held at Abbeville on April 14 between Foch and Haig, at which Lord Milner was present. Foch took the view that 'la bataille du Nord,' as he called it, was dying down, and that his reserves were suitably placed to intervene either in the Flanders battle or in the battle of Arras-Amiens-Montdidier, which he expected would be renewed at any moment. His attitude excited the resentment of the British representatives, and no agreement was reached. He had seen the 1st British Army Corps fight at Ypres in 1914; and the impression that British troops would stand any test if resolutely called upon was indelible.\n\nIt was no doubt the duty of Foch to hoard his reserves and to extort the fullest effort from every part of the Allied armies; but he was at least premature in his judgment that 'the battle in the North was dying down,' nor had he any right to count upon the intense resistance which was in the event forthcoming from the desperately pressed British troops. Foch's doctrine of never relieving troops during a battle may apply to a battle of two or three days; but struggles prolonged over weeks do not admit of such rules. Divisions after a certain point, if not relieved, simply disappear through slaughter and intermingling with the reinforcements who are sent to sustain them; and the individual survivors of many days of ceaseless peril, horror and concussion become numb and lifeless, even though unscathed by steel.\n\nThe British, Government and Headquarters alike, upon whose initiative Foch had just been raised to the supreme control, were already distrustful of the use he would make of his power. It must be conceded however that Foch was vindicated by the event, for the British Armies weathered the storm practically unaided and the German impulsion gradually died away.\n\nSlowly and reluctantly Foch was compelled to part with a small portion of his reserves, and on April 18 a detachment from the French Army of the North (D.A.N.) consisting of five infantry and three cavalry divisions was formed to take over the front Bailleul-Wytschaete. These troops however, even after they arrived on the scene, only gradually came into the line. In the end this French force was raised to nine infantry divisions. But before then the crisis had passed.\n\nWe must descend from the immortal events of the battlefield to the thread of personal narrative which binds together this account. To many in the official circle the series of great battles which had filled these weeks presented the impression of one long frenzy. Men bent to their daily tasks for comfort. But my work kept me so closely in touch with the Army and its Chiefs that I could not fail to comprehend to some extent the meaning and proportion of individual events. For all the criticisms I had made and all the convictions I held about the Somme and Passchendaele, my heart went out to the Commander-in-Chief as he bore the trial with superb and invincible determination On the night of the 12th I telegraphed: 'I cannot resist sending you a message of sympathy and sincere admiration for the magnificent defence which you are making day after day, and of profound confidence in the result.' To which he replied: 'Heartiest thanks for your friendly telegram. Army is in a most determined mood and good spirits. Your old division under Tudor has been doing wonders. Many thanks for the splendid assistance given by your Department.'\n\nCertainly everything in the Munitions sphere was moving forward with smooth celerity. Our organization passed the guns, ammunition, tanks and stores of all kinds to the Chief of the Artillery (General Birch), the Quartermaster-General (General Travers-Clarke), the Tank Corps and other authorities at Headquarters; and I was myself in personal touch with each of them. Through the united effort of all engaged in the supply of the Army it can truthfully be said they lacked nothing. Indeed the incredible efforts of all classes serving under the Ministry more than met the extraordinary strain. The faster material was lost, destroyed or expended, the faster it was replaced and the larger grew the surpluses in the workshops. In our main Tank factory in Birmingham the workers had achieved outputs in excess of all promises and also of the immediate reception capacity of the Tank Headquarters. Seeing the precious weapons multiplying in the yards, the men began to ask questions; and on April 17 I telegraphed to Mr. Dudley Docker:\n\n'Express again to all hands my satisfaction at the admirable deliveries. Tell them confidentially, not for publication, that the losses of Tanks have been larger than previously reported, but that they have exacted a heavy toll from the Germans in many cases and helped our Infantry notably. Explain to them that during the uncertainty of the battle and its intense fierceness, it is not possible for the Tank Corps to take deliveries regularly. The roads are congested, depots are moving, everyone is involved in the fight. When the lull comes, there will be a general refitting; and that is the moment for which we must have ready the largest possible numbers. I am watching for this moment very carefully. They must not be put off their efforts if Tanks accumulate temporarily. The Army is fighting for its life, and we are standing by to put new weapons in their hands the very instant they turn to us. Let there be no misunderstanding therefore, but only confidence and full steam ahead.'\n\nWe had by this time completed the replacement of the material lost in the retreat of the Fifth Army without arresting the ascending scale of our current deliveries; and at the end of April His Majesty was pleased to authorize the following message to our two and a half million workers:\n\n'The Minister of Munitions has received the King's commands to convey to the officials of the Ministry, to the employers and to the munition workers throughout the country, both men and women, His Majesty's high approval of the exertions made during this critical time and his satisfaction at the remarkable results achieved. The King has learned from the Military Authorities that practically all the losses and expenditure of munitions during the battle have already been made good without any undue depletion of normal reserves, out of the resources which had been held in readiness, and by the additional effort which has been made. There are now actually more serviceable guns, machine guns, and aeroplanes with the British Armies in the field than there were on the eve of the German attack. The other supplies of all kinds are forthcoming in abundance. The King has commanded the Minister of Munitions to express his great pleasure to the workers and all engaged in this vital task. Travelling constantly about the country with the Queen from one munition centre to another, the King has had ample opportunity of witnessing the strenuous efforts which are being made by the men, and certainly not less by the women, to keep the soldiers who are fighting supplied with all they need, and also of admiring the organizing ability displayed in so many ways and on so great a scale. The King is deeply impressed by the fact that much-needed holidays should have been cheerfully given up, and additional exertions made, at a time when many severe food restrictions had come into force, and that in spite of large numbers of munition workers having left the workshops for the Army during the last six months, the outputs of every kind should not only have been maintained but steadily increased. Accordingly the King has directed the Minister to convey His Majesty's thanks to all concerned.'\n\nBut the continuance of the battle, the power of the enemy and the obvious jeopardy in which our Army stood forced most grave reflections. Suppose the Germans continued tearing at our throats with all their might, suppose they shook the life out of our Army, suppose the straining front broke or was swept back by an inexorable tide! There were at any rate 'the water lines.' The advanced line ran from Dunkirk back to the second or main line. This ran along the stream of the Aa from Gravelines through St. Omer to St. Venant. A vast amount of work had been done upon it. It was called 'the water line' on account of the great part which inundations could be made to play in its defence. This line would shorten the front and be a substantial relief, but it meant the loss of Dunkirk and the continuous bombardment of Calais. Both these ports played a notable part in the reception of our supplies, and far-reaching checks and complications would follow on their loss.\n\nEven darker possibilities were afoot. Suppose we had to choose between giving up the Channel ports or being separated from the mass of the French armies! In the former case all our best and closest communications would be destroyed. We should have to rely entirely on Havre till other bases could be developed. All our programmes would vanish at a stroke. I was deeply concerned that this issue should be calmly probed before it actually came upon us. I therefore examined it in the following note which I sent to Sir Henry Wilson and the War Cabinet:\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_Very Secret_ ,\n\nA NOTE ON CERTAIN HYPOTHETICAL CONTINGENCIES.\n\n_April_ 18, 1918.\n\n1. If the German offensive continues to prosper, a vital question will be raised, viz., _whether we should let go our left hand or our right._ All the movements of stores, munitions, and depots which are now taking place are affected and ought to be governed by this decision. It is imperative therefore to face the situation in advance and have a clear and profoundly considered view.\n\n2. It is possible that we shall not have a free choice. The course of the German offensive may decide the issue irrespective of our wishes. If they succeeded in an attack along the coast, which made us let go our left hand from the Channel ports one after another, we should be forced to pivot by our right, and would finish up with our left near Abbeville and our right hand clasping the French. If, on the other hand, the enemy succeeded in cutting the British army from the French by an attack through Amiens towards Abbeville, we should find ourselves in a Torres Vedras position covering Calais and Boulogne. Now, which of these two do we dislike most? It is very important to decide, because by our dispositions and exertions we shall be able to influence, and may be able to determine, how the matter shall be settled.\n\n3. To form a reasonable opinion, the first thing to do is to look\u2014not at the map of the existing battleground, but at the map of France as a whole. It then immediately appears what a very small portion of France is involved in the present and threatened invasion. It is evident that however important the Channel ports and Flanders may be, they and all the ground we hold are only a fragment of the country and nation we are defending, and on whose continued resistance the future of the land war depends.\n\n4. The next thing is to consider what strategic developments would best suit the enemy. I say ' _strategic_ ' as apart from the fortune of the battlefield. Of course the break-up of a whole army on the battleground is a short cut to strategic success\u2014is indeed the end at which all strategy aims. But assuming\u2014which is reasonable\u2014there is no such collapse of our army, and that at the worst we make an orderly retirement, presenting a steady front and continuing to fight, what is the best strategy for the Germans to pursue? Which hand would they like us to let go\u2014our right or our left?\n\n5. If the Germans could succeed in sweeping us from the Channel ports and capturing Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne, they would gain all those very great advantages which have so often been explained. They can command the Straits of Dover, close the Port of London to all except northabout traffic, render Dover Harbour uncomfortable, bombard a large part of Kent and Sussex, and deprive our armies of their nearest and most convenient bases. But they would remain confronted by the mass of the still unbeaten British and French armies along a line from the neighbourhood of Abbeville so much shortened that, even with greatly reduced forces, it could be solidly held. And behind these armies would be the whole of France open for dilatory retirement or man\u0153uvre. Until those armies were forced to lay down their arms the land war would not be ended. If France wished to make peace, the facilities of retreat open to the British in several directions to the sea or to neutral territory would afford bargaining power to make a military convention providing for the repatriation of that army; and France would be bound to insist on that, even at territorial loss to herself. Therefore, great as are the advantages which Germany would gain by the conquest of the Channel ports, there would be no reason why the war could not be indefinitely prolonged after their loss, provided the French and British armies remained united.\n\n6. If on the other hand the Germans divide the British and French armies from each other at Abbeville, forcing us to let go our right hand and shut ourselves up in a Torres Vedras, they will have the following choice open to them, viz.: whether to wire in and so mask the British and throw their whole force against the French and Paris, or alternatively to hold the French in check while they drive the British into the sea. What would their choice be? What was it at the beginning of the war? Did they not absolutely disdain the Channel Ports while there was a chance of taking Paris and smashing the main army? Had we any difficulty in deciding, when it came to the pinch in those days, whether our\u2014then little\u2014army should cover the Channel ports, or hold on firmly to the French and fight the main battle out in their company?\n\n7. Although the British army thrown back on the Channel ports might be seriously weakened, yet to drive it into the sea, or to destroy it in its entrenchments, would require an enormous effort. For the Germans to lay siege to such an army, with the almost intact French army striking at their backs, would seem to be an unwise proceeding. ' _Frappez la masse_ ' is a maxim to which the Germans have always given an understanding allegiance. And that would be their shortest road to end the war. It therefore seems probable that they would leave the weakened and exhausted British army cooped up in its lines around the Channel ports, and try the main conclusion with the French army. On the morrow of such a victory over the French the British army would be at their disposal. They could deal with it at their convenience.\n\nAll this appears to follow the elementary lines: Divide the enemy's forces into two parts: hold off the weaker part while you beat the stronger: the weaker then is at your mercy.\n\n8. Do not all these considerations go to show that the vital and supreme need is for us to keep connection with the French? Does not experience generally show that armies which get separated from the main army are disposed of at leisure? Is not the sound rule to stand together, retire together, turn together, and strike together, as we did at the Marne? What would have been the position of a British army which, after Mons, had retreated on the Channel ports, if in its absence the battle of the Marne had been lost by the French? How long would the Belgian army have held out if they had been cut off in Antwerp? What happened to the Roumanian army once it was isolated?\n\n9. To sum up: the choice in the hypothetical circumstances now being examined presents itself as follows: (1) To let go the left hand, lose the Channel ports, keep contact with the French, save our army, and continue the land war indefinitely; or (2) to let go the right hand, lose contact with the French, watch them being defeated, then be driven into the sea ourselves, and lose the Channel ports after all.\n\n10. Happily these bleak alternatives are not yet before us, and there are good hopes they will never be. But it is necessary that the question should be promptly examined with the fullest knowledge of the capacities of the various French ports and of the strength of the armies which could be based on each of them.\n\nWilson replied: 'I agree, as you know, and have asked the Admiralty to get out a paper on their side of the question.'\n\nThis issue was put to Foch at the meeting of the Supreme War Council which met at Abbeville on May 1 and 2. Both Wilson and Haig felt that a decision from the Supreme Commander was necessary in order that precautionary preparations could be made. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff persuaded the representatives of the British Government to press insistently for an answer. The utmost that Foch could be induced to admit was that it was more important to retain touch between the two armies than to retain possession of the Channel Ports. But he returned resolutely to his main contention: 'I mean to fight for both. The question, therefore, cannot arise until I am beaten. I will never give up either. Ni l'un ni l'autre. Cramponnez partout.' He hazarded a great deal upon the endurance of the British Army. But he was not disappointed.\n\nOn the 25th an unlucky event occurred. The French divisions which from the 18th onwards had deployed behind our front, had taken over a portion of the line, which they held in strength with divisional fronts of no more than 3,000 yards. Included in this sector, the French 28th Division held the invaluable height of Scherpenberg and Kemmel, the latter defended by one battalion of the 99th regiment. At dawn the Germans concentrated upon the hill and the trenches round its foot a most astonishing storm of high explosive and gas shells from cannon and _minenwerfer._ It is said that the French masks were only partially proof against the gas. Whatever the cause, the French troops on either side of the hill, after repulsing three infantry attacks, and sustaining heavy losses, gave way and were streaming back by seven o'clock in the morning. Their retirement left the troops on the summit, including some of our own trench-mortar batteries, to be cut off. A similar fate overwhelmed the British brigade who were holding the trenches on the French left. They were rolled up from the flank, and none escaped death or captivity. The disaster might have taken a still worse turn but for the promptitude with which the Highland Brigade next in succession threw back its right and formed a defensive flank.\n\nThere is no doubt that the relations between the French and British commands during the battle period which began on March 21 were not remarkable for a high appreciation of each other's military qualities. The French staff considered that the British had failed and caused a great disaster on the common front, and they openly expressed the opinion that the quality of the British troops at this time was mediocre. The British, on the other hand, felt that the help given under a terrific strain had been both thin and slow, and that the entry of French relieving divisions into the battle was nearly always followed by further retirements. Instances are given by Colonel Boraston of joint attacks which miscarried through the French divisions not being set in motion, although their British comrades were already committed.\n\nHe also records a curious incident of which I was myself a witness. At about ten o'clock on April 29 I was breakfasting with Sir Douglas Haig. Sir Herbert Lawrence, his Chief of the Staff, and two or three Aides-de-Camp were present. The Commander-in-Chief had just sat down to his coffee when the following message was put in his hand: 'G.O.C. 39th French Division reports that there is no doubt but that the enemy holds Mont Rouge and Mont Vidaigne. Troops on right of Scherpenberg badly cut up.... Enemy reported to be pushing between the Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge.' Simultaneously there arrived from Plumer a confirmatory message requesting the Chief of the Staff to come at once to the Headquarters of the Second Army. No Reserves of any kind were available and the news if true involved the grim issue discussed in my Memorandum of the 18th. The room was rapidly emptied. Haig disappeared into his office observing, 'The situation is never so bad or so good as first reports indicate': and Lawrence vanished in a motor-car.\n\nI thought I would go and see for myself what was happening, and accordingly I motored to the area of Sir Alexander Godley's Corps, which was the nearest to the reported break-through. A violent cannonade loaded the air; but at the Corps Headquarters faces were beaming. The French Commander had telephoned that it was all a mistake and that nothing of importance was occurring. Such accidents from time to time are inevitable. But this is an illustration of the tension under which both the French and British leaders were living in these very hard times.\n\nHowever, the worst was over for the British Headquarters though they did not know it, and the rest of the war with all its slaughters and exertions contained for them only hopes and triumphs. The capture of Mount Kemmel was the last effort of the Germans in this battle. It is astounding that after having gained so great a prize at so high a cost they did not use it. The decision was Ludendorff's. The war diaries and archives of the German Fourth Army for the period April 9-30, captured by the French, show that so far from urging the Army Staff to press on to victory, it was Ludendorff who suggested that they stand fast and prepare to meet a British counterstroke. 'In view of the solidarity of the defence,' he wrote, 'it should be considered whether the attack should be interrupted or continued.' To this General von Lossberg, Chief of the Fourth Army Staff, replied that 'our troops encountered everywhere in the field of attack a very solid defence, well distributed in depth and particularly difficult to overcome on account of the numerous machine-gun nests.... With the forces at present at our disposal the operation offers no chance of success. Better interrupt it.' And Ludendorff approved. The stubborn defence had succeeded at the moment when it had sustained its most dangerous wound.\n\nSo ended the most fierce and intense grapple of the British and Germans. For forty days, from March 21 to the end of April, the main strength of Germany had been ceaselessly devoted to the battery and destruction of the British Army. One hundred and twenty German Divisions had repeatedly assaulted 58 British, piercing the front, gaining great successes and capturing more than a thousand cannon, and seventy or eighty thousand prisoners. During these forty days the British Army had lost in officers 2,161 killed, 8,619 wounded, and 4,023 missing or prisoners: and of other ranks 25,967 killed, 172,719 wounded, and 89,380 missing or prisoners: a total loss of 14,803 officers and 288,066 men. This was more than one-quarter of the whole number of British fighting troops under Sir Douglas Haig's command on March 21. But these terrible losses concentrated in so short a period on a relatively small military organism had not quenched its life-force. No vital position had been wrested from its grip. No despondency had overwhelmed the troops or their leaders. The machine continued to function, and the men continued to fight. Doggedly and dauntlessly they fought without a doubt that whatever their own fate, Britain would come victoriously through as she had always done before. By their stubborn and skilful resistance at every point, by numberless small parties fighting unchronicled till they were blotted out, the British inflicted upon the Germans losses even greater than those they themselves endured, losses irreparable at this period in the war, losses which broke the supreme German effort for victory at the outset, and rang the knell of doom in the ears of the overwrought German people. There fell of the Germans against the British in these same forty days, 3,075 officers killed, 9,305 wounded, and 427 missing or prisoners; and 53,564 other ranks killed, 242,881 wounded and 39,517 missing or prisoners; a total of 12,807 officers and 335,962 men. An advancing army always gathers the prisoners and missing on a scale far exceeding its retreating opponent. These cut off units are the heavy price of retirement, and they are a permanent loss to the defenders. But if\u2014under these reserves\u2014the missing and prisoners are deducted from each side, the fact emerges that the British shot 308,825 Germans during these battles at a cost of 209,466; or briefly three Germans shot for every two British.\n\nIt was now to be the turn of our Ally. The flail under which we had suffered was soon to be uplifted against the French. If we had known beforehand what their ordeal was to be, we should have been thankful they had nursed and guarded their remaining strength to face it.\n\n# CHAPTER XIX\n\n# THE SURPRISE OF THE CHEMIN DES DAMES\n\nDwindling German Objectives\u2014Foch and Strategic Proportion\u2014Disposition of the Allied Reserve\u2014The Chemin des Dames\u2014The First Warning\u2014Battle of May 27\u2014The American Arrival\u2014Relations between British and French\u2014Paris and its Workshops\u2014Improved Defence System\u2014The Battle of Noyon\u2014Alteration of the Strategic and Numerical Balances\u2014Foch's Personal Position\u2014A General Survey\u2014The Past\u2014The Present\u2014The Future\u2014The Question.\n\nAt the end of April when the battle in the north died down Ludendorff, finding too many troops in front of him, looked elsewhere. 'The most favourable operation in itself,' he writes, 'was to continue the attack on the English Army at Ypres and Bailleul.... Before we could attack here again, the enemy must become weaker and our communications must be improved.' He had thus resigned all the decisive strategic objects for which the German armies had been fighting since March 21. He had first abandoned the great roll-up of the British line from Arras northwards and the general destruction of the British armies, in favour of the more definite but still vital aim of taking Amiens and dividing the British from the French armies. Arrested in this, he had struck in the north to draw British reserves from the Amiens battlefield. But the Battle of the Lys, begun as a diversion, had offered the lesser yet still enormous prize of the northern Channel ports. Now he must abandon that; and his strategic ambition, already thrice contracted, must henceforward sink to an altogether lower plane. The fourth German offensive battle of 1918 was to a large extent a mere bid for a local victory, and apart from its usefulness in diverting Allied troops from the fateful fronts, offered no direct deadly strategic possibilities.\n\nMarshal Foch saw with unerring eye the grand and simple proportion of events. Not deceived by the vast mass of frightfully important but irrelevant considerations which obscured the primary issues, he ranged the strategic necessities of the Allied armies in their true order. Of these the first beyond compare was the union of the French and British armies; second, the preservation of the Channel ports; and third, though in a less decisive sphere, the defence of Paris. P\u00e9tain on the other hand showed on more than one occasion that his valuations were different. His attitude on the night of March 24, which precipitated the Doullens Conference, proves that he would have rated the loss of Paris as a greater misfortune than the severing of the connection between the French and British armies. We shall see later a still more glaring example of this error, which in so accomplished a soldier can only be attributed to the intrusion of sentiment. Paris could have been occupied by the Germans in June, 1918, without preventing the collapse of the Central Empires in November. But the loss of the Channel ports and the consequent halving of the British military effort would have meant another year of war; and the severance of the British and French armies might easily have led to their total and final defeat. Mercifully the good sense of Foch pierced through the fog of false appearances. From the moment when he obtained the supreme command, he steadily massed the reserves, in full harmony with the British view, to safeguard the junction of the British and French armies. And behind him, with equal comprehension, Cl\u00e9menceau when the need came declared: 'I shall fight in front of Paris. I shall fight in Paris. I shall fight behind Paris.' Thus these great men were able to exalt their minds above the dearest temptations of their hearts, and thus we found the path to safety by discerning the beacons of truth.\n\nIt followed from Foch's decision to gather the reserves in Flanders and between Compi\u00e8gne and Amiens that dangerous denudations must be accepted on other important parts of the front. The movement northwards of so many French divisions was viewed with deep anxiety by P\u00e9tain and the French Army Headquarters. P\u00e9tain indeed made a strenuous effort to retain the last instalment. But Foch insisted. Thus Ludendorff found, when the Battle of the Lys ended in deadlock, that it was not open to him to renew the battle of Amiens. He was already committed to two great bulges which he had conquered at the cost of heavy drafts upon the superior reserves he had gathered for the campaign. In neither could he advance in face of the strength against him, and from both he was unwilling to retire lest he should shatter the glittering but, as he knew well, already brittle confidence of Germany. Each of these bulges had its special disadvantages for the German troops. In the Somme region they were condemned to dwell amid their own devastations, and with communications which although improved, made the mounting of a first-class offensive impossible. In the Bailleul salient the conditions were far worse. The scale was smaller, but for this very reason the discomfort was more intense. The whole of the conquered ground was commanded by the encircling British artillery. And this artillery, fed with unlimited ammunition and fresh guns, raked and swept the German salient night and day from three quarters of the compass. In this cauldron nearly twenty German divisions must be constantly maintained at a cost which melted the reserves apace.\n\nIt must have been with darkening misgivings that Ludendorff selected the point of his next attack. Outwardly all seemed to be going well. Actually all had miscarried. But the consolation of spectacular vengeance yet remained. Immense resources were still in hand. A dazzling victory could yet be won which, though barren in consequences, would still preserve the illusion of increasing success. As early as April 17 the Crown Prince's Army group was ordered urgently to prepare an offensive on the Chemin des Dames, with the object of breaking through between Soissons and Rheims. The arrangements were made with the customary thoroughness and science and with unexampled secrecy. The Seventh and First German Armies assembled twenty-nine divisions for the battle. No less than 1,158 batteries were deployed, and the moment was fixed for 2 a.m. on May 27.\n\nFoch knew as well as P\u00e9tain the forfeits to which his wise dispositions exposed the French armies, and both Generals were during the whole of May unable to divine where the blow would fall. Blame has been attributed to the staff of the French Sixth Army. The choleric temperament of its Commander General Duch\u011bne had discouraged and estranged his subordinates, and the machine worked with friction. At this time above all others efforts should have been made, without regard to losses, to pierce the enemy's screen by sudden raids, now here now there, and gain the indispensable information. But nothing of this kind was done successfully either by the Sixth Army or elsewhere along the French front. Four French divisions were in line on the Chemin des Dames, with four more in reserve behind the Aisne. On their right was the Ninth British Army Corps under Sir Alexander Hamilton Gordon, comprising three divisions in the line (the 21st, 8th and 50th), also the 25th Division in reserve, all shockingly mutilated in the northern battle, and sent at Foch's earnest desire to what was stated by the French to be the quietest sector of the front in order to refit and train their recruits. In reply to formal warnings from the British General Headquarters that an attack had been mounted against the Aisne front, the French Sixth Army Staff stated on the morning of May 25: 'In our opinion there are no indications that the enemy has made preparations that would enable him to attack to-morrow.'\n\nWhat followed is exciting. At daybreak on the 26th two German prisoners were taken by the French. One was a private and the other an _officier-aspirant_ , belonging to different regiments of J\u00e4ger. On the way to Divisional Headquarters their captors entered into conversation with them. The private said there was going to be an attack; the officer contradicted him. Arrived at the Army Corps Intelligence centre the prisoners were examined separately. The officer, questioned first, was voluble, and declared that the Germans had no intention of making an offensive on this front. The interrogation of the private followed. He said that the soldiers believed that they would attack that night or the following night. He was not sure of the date. Pressed, he said that cartridges and grenades had already been distributed, but not the field rations. He had seen the previous day near his billets soldiers belonging to Guards regiments. He knew no more. The officer was then recalled. He was told that the laws of war had in no way forced him to speak, but that he had volunteered statements for which he would be held responsible. To give false information was the act of a spy. On this he became visibly perturbed, and under pressure gave in the end the most complete details of the attack which impended the next day. It was already three o'clock in the afternoon of the 26th. The alarm was given, and the troops available took up their battle positions.\n\nPierrefeu has described the terrible hours which P\u00e9tain and the French Headquarters Staff now endured far away at Provins. They knew that an immense disaster was certain. They knew that no reinforcements could reach the scene for several days, and thereafter for a still longer period only at the rate of two divisions a day. Meanwhile there was nothing in human power that could be done. All through the night they sat in their silent offices, bowed under the blow about to fall and suffering another form of the tortures to which the troops were doomed. At one o'clock next morning the German barrage descended on a thirty-kilometre front, and three hours later eighteen divisions advanced upon the four French and three refitting British divisions. Although the troops on the ground were alert, the strategic surprise was complete and overwhelming.\n\n'After three-and-a-half hours' artillery and trench-mortar preparation,' says the Crown Prince, 'the divisions surged forward against the Chemin des Dames.... The small enemy force holding the position, six French and three English trench divisions, were overrun and the Chemin des Dames and the Aisne-Marne Canal reached in one swoop. As early as the afternoon our leading units were over the Aisne. By the evening the centre of the Third Army had already reached the Vesle on both sides of Fismes. A break-through with a depth of twenty kilometres had been attained in one day. The Aisne-Marne Canal was also crossed by the left wing of the Seventh Army.'\n\nA most stubborn defence was made by the three British divisions which were in the line, and by the 25th Division almost immediately involved. On their right stood the 45th French-Algerian Division which, not being itself attacked, gave energetic assistance. Hinging on this, the British line swung back under immense pressure on its front and with its left continually compromised. The retiring British found behind them fortunately the hilly and wooded country to the west of Rheims, which helped the defence in a receding battle. The 19th British Division had also luckily arrived at Chalons for rest and recuperation, and on the fourth day they sustained the British line. The 21st Division was by then practically destroyed, and by June 1 the whole five British divisions were hardly equal to the full strength of one. All the troops bore themselves as on the Lys a month earlier. Battalions were completely exterminated, and a large portion of the artillery perished with their guns upon the field. The French villagers in their ignorance and terror assailed the retreating troops with hostile demonstrations.\n\nMeanwhile upon the British left the German punch had smashed right through. General Duch\u011bne's staff delayed too long the destruction of the bridges across the Aisne, and most of them fell intact into the hands of the invaders. By June 2 Soissons had fallen and the Germans had reached the Marne at Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry.\n\nPierrefeu has described in a moving passage the next event. Now suddenly the roads between Provins and the front towards Meaux and towards Coulommiers began to be filled with endless streams of Americans. The impression made upon the hard-pressed French by this seemingly inexhaustible flood of gleaming youth in its first maturity of health and vigour was prodigious. None were under twenty, and few were over thirty. As crammed in their lorries they clattered along the roads, singing the songs of a new world at the tops of their voices, burning to reach the bloody field, the French Headquarters were thrilled with the impulse of new life. 'All felt,' he says, 'that they were present at the magical operation of the transfusion of blood. Life arrived in floods to reanimate the mangled body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.' Indeed the reflection conformed with singular exactness to the fact. Half trained, half organized, with only their courage, their numbers and their magnificent youth behind their weapons, they were to buy their experience at a bitter price. But this they were quite ready to do.\n\nThe misfortunes of the Battle of the Chemin des Dames had the remarkable effect of improving the relations between the British and French armies. After a surprise so glaring and a retreat of twenty kilometres in a single day\u2014the record for all battles on the Western Front\u2014the French were in no position to maintain the airs of superiority which they had been unable to conceal from the Italians after Caporetto or altogether from the British after the 21st of March. Up till the moment when they in their turn felt the force of a Ludendorff offensive, they had complacently assumed that the French Army contained the only troops who could really hold a front under modern conditions. These illusions had been swept away by the German scythe. The intensity of their common tribulations united the Allies more closely than ever. Moreover, the French command were deeply grieved at the destructive losses suffered by the five British divisions committed to their care for a period of recuperation. They paid their tribute in generous and soldierly terms to the fighting achievements of these troops. The words of General Maistre, the Commander of the Group of Armies concerned, may be here transcribed: 'With a doggedness, permit me to say thoroughly English, submerged by the hostile flood, you have reconstituted without failing new units to carry on the struggle which have at last enabled us to form the dyke by which this deluge has been mastered. That achievement no Frenchman who was a witness will forget.' The 2nd Devons and the 5th Battery of the Forty-fifth British Field Artillery Brigade were awarded the Croix de Guerre in consequence of their having fought until only the memory remained.\n\nThe advance of the Germans to Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry, barely a hundred kilometres from Paris, confronted me with problems almost as serious and quite as imminent as those which had glared at us during the Battle of the Lys. I was responsible among other things for the whole supply of aeroplanes and aviation material of all kinds. The Ministry of Munitions was a gigantic shop from which the Air Ministry ordered all they wanted. Under the incredible activities of Sir William Weir, then Secretary of State, the Air Force demands became staggering. We discovered that the French had a large surplus manufacturing capacity. I had therefore, in agreement with Loucheur, directed Sir Arthur Duckham to place enormous orders with them. The French factories on which we depended for an essential part of our programme were mostly grouped around Paris. The danger to the capital required elaborate plans for moving these establishments southwards in case of need, and at the same time a very nice decision whether and when to put them into operation. If we moved without cause, we interrupted production. If we tarried too long, we should not be able to get our machinery away. Paris was calm and even pleasant in these days of uncertainty. The long-range German cannon, which threw its shells about every half-hour, had effectively cleared away nearly all those who were not too busy nor too poor. The city was empty and agreeable by day, while by night there was nearly always the diversion of an air raid. The spirit of Cl\u00e9menceau reigned throughout the capital. 'We are now giving ground, but we shall never surrender. We shall be victorious if the Public Authorities are equal to their task.'\n\nLudendorff had now made a third bulge in the Allied front. In all three the German troops were uncomfortable, their communications extremely inferior, and their general strategic position delicate. It seemed probable that they would try to bite off or beat in the French salient which jutted out between Montdidier and Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry as far as Noyon. The deep forest region about Villers-Cotterets and the fact that there was only a single line of railway for all the Germans in the Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry bulge, made an attack from an eastern direction unlikely. The front before Compi\u00e8gne from Montdidier to Noyon was clearly the most interesting. M. Cl\u00e9menceau had authorized and even urged me to go everywhere, see everything, and 'tell Lloyd George what we are doing.' Accordingly as the work of the Inter-Allied Munitions Conference which was then proceeding permitted, I visited the armies of Generals Humbert and Debeny, who awaited the expected shock. I knew both these Generals personally, and was still better acquainted with General Fayolle who commanded the Army Group. One could reach the front line from Paris in less than three hours, and I followed with the closest attention the improved methods of defence which the French were adopting. Nothing of consequence was now offered to the German opening bombardment. A strong picquet line of detached machine-gun nests, carefully concealed, was alone in contact with the enemy. Behind these devoted troops, for whom an assault could only mean destruction, was a zone three or four thousand yards deep, in which only strong points were held by comparatively small forces. It was not until at least 7,000 yards separated them from the hostile batteries that the real resistance of the French Infantry and Artillery was prepared. When one saw all the fortifications and devices, the masses of batteries and machine guns, with which the main line of defence bristled, and knew that this could not be subjected to heavy bombardment until the stubborn picquets far in front had been exterminated, it seemed difficult to believe that any troops in the world could carry the whole position from front to rear in a single day.\n\nOn the evening of June 8 I walked over the centre of the French line in front of Compi\u00e8gne. The presage of battle was in the air. All the warnings had been given, and everyone was at his post. The day had been quiet, and the sweetness of the summer evening was undisturbed even by a cannon shot. Very calm and gallant, and even gay, were the French soldiers who awaited the new stroke of fate. By the next evening all the ground over which they had led me was in German hands, and most of those with whom I had talked were dead or prisoners.\n\nEarly on the morning of the 9th the Eighteenth German Army began what they have called the Battle of Noyon, and at the same time the Seventh German Army attacked south-west of Soissons. The whole of the threatened front was thus on fire. The severity of this onslaught lasted for two days only. The Germans penetrated to a depth of fifteen kilometres, and set their feet on the heights before Compi\u00e8gne. But the methods of defence exacted a heavy toll, and a wise elasticity in the use of ground enabled the French to economize losses. From the 11th onwards Fayolle began to launch carefully prepared counter-attacks in great force, particularly in the direction of M\u00e9ry. These continued throughout the 12th and 13th; but already on the 11th Ludendorff had felt the task beyond his power. 'In consequence,' he says, 'of the great accumulation of enemy troops G.H.Q. directed the Eighteenth Army to break off the attack on the 11th, in order to avoid casualties. It was quite evident that the attack commenced in the meantime by the Seventh Army south-west of Soissons would not get through. The action of the Eighteenth Army had not altered the strategical situation... nor had it provided any fresh tactical data.'\n\nSo far in all this year the Allies had experienced nothing but recoil. The martial might of Germany lay heavy on all. The sense of grappling with a monster of seemingly unfathomable resources and tireless strength, invulnerable\u2014since slaughter even on the greatest scale was no deterrent\u2014could not be excluded from the mind. No one hoped for a swift result. But the idea that the war could reach any end other than the total defeat of Germany was strictly excluded even from private conversation. All the dominant personalities were resolved to fight on to victory, and the soldiers with simple faith took this for granted. Says Ludendorff: 'It was certainly discouraging that our two great attacks had not forced a decision. That they had been victories was obvious.... The evil effect of disillusionment was doubled by the fact that we could not overcome it in our then state of mind.' But they were not victories: they were only placards. Of the five great battles which had been fought, the first three against the British had failed to achieve any one of the progressively diminishing strategic results at which they had aimed. The fourth against the French was a local victory, very spectacular but without strategic consequence; and the last, the Battle of Noyon, was a very decided arrest. The Supreme offensive was in slack water. The 11th of June on the French front had marked just such a milestone in the war as had the 12th of April with the British Army. On the German side, in spite of sensational triumphs, all was 'disillusionment.' Behind the Allied front, with all their bitter experiences, the foundation of confidence was solid.\n\nThese three months of ceaseless battle had indeed witnessed a profound alteration of the strategic balance. The main forces of Germany were now deeply committed. The sovereign element of surprise, without which no great offensive was possible, depended upon the power to have simultaneously in readiness on different parts of the front four or five attacks of the first magnitude. This had been the baffling factor to the Allies before the 21st of March. But most of these had now already been let off. The remaining possibilities open to Ludendorff were restricted and to a large extent defined. His reservoirs were low; ours were filling full.\n\nThe balance of numbers had turned heavily. The British had actually killed and wounded or captured nearly four hundred thousand Germans in the five weeks' grapple, while all their own losses in men and material had by the activities of their Government been more than replaced. Indeed our Army at the end of June was somewhat stronger than on the eve of the 21st of March. Divisions had been drawn from Italy, from Salonica and from Egypt. Masses of troops had been released from home by the War Office rising superior at long last to the absurd fear of invasion. Sedentary divisions of older men had been formed to hold the trench lines. When the time came they proved they could march as well as stand. Sir Douglas Haig was conscious of a continued accretion of strength; and as the event was to prove, he was able to measure it better than anyone else.\n\nThe resources of France, so prodigally spent at the beginning, so jealously husbanded in the later years, were sufficient for a final effort. And behind them the Americans gathered in tens of thousands day by day. By this date the British Marine alone, military and merchant, had carried and convoyed to France, with scarcely any loss of life from enemy action, nearly three-quarters of a million American troops. All these facts justified confidence in the successful termination of the year's campaign, and that the next year would be decisive.\n\nThe personal position of Marshal Foch after the 27th of May was not however entirely unshaken. On him France fixed the prime responsibility of having diverted the French reserves to cover the juncture of the British and French armies. The appointment of a Generalissimo had only been carried in the face of serious and natural oppositions. The first fruits of 'unity of command' and of Foch's personal direction of the front had been a blazing disaster. Strong undercurrents ran of complaint and reproach. The British did not think they had been well treated in their intense trial. Moreover, there were reasonable grounds for misgiving. Unlike Haig or P\u00e9tain, Marshal Foch had not at his disposal the great machinery of a General Staff. He acted only through what he has pleasingly described as 'ma famille militaire,'\u2014a small band of devoted officers who had throughout the war shared his varied fortunes. At their head stood a certain young General Weygand, alert, discreet and silent in manner, afterwards to become better known. Whether this extremely restricted circle would be able to inform their Chief upon the vast and innumerable masses of technical detail which must be mastered before the operations of great modern armies can be weighed and selected from among alternatives, was a question at that time without an answer. On this account also many doubts were entertained. Nevertheless Marshal Foch, building his house on the rock of strategic truth, possessed his soul in patience.\n\nDuring this period of hard tension the Imperial War Cabinet comprising the Prime Ministers of the Dominions was frequently in Session in London. Sir Henry Wilson one day in presenting to them an appreciation of the whole position went back to the beginning, and took occasion to refer to my work with him in the years before the war. This led me to prepare for the Dominion Ministers a short general survey of past, present and future as I saw them then. I print it as I wrote it. It is a record of that darkest hour which we are told precedes the dawn.\n\n# A NOTE ON THE WAR.\n\n_To the Imperial War Cabinet._\n\n_June_ 22, 1918.\n\n1. Before the war the British military authorities forecasted with accuracy what the German plan of campaign would be, and Sir Henry Wilson in particular, as early as August, 1911, unfolded to the Committee of Imperial Defence a completely true picture of the German attack in the West, through Belgium towards Paris, and also of the Russian weakness and tardy mobilization in the East. On the other hand, our military advisers took a far too sanguine view of the relative strength and efficiency of the French and German armies. On the outbreak of war, the overpowering need was to stem the German rush, first on Paris, and secondly on the Channel Ports, and no one could think of anything else on land till this was done. By the end of November, as the Chief of the Staff has explained, Paris and the Channel Ports were saved, and the German onslaught brought to a standstill. The first phase of the war, which may be called 'stemming the rush,' thus came to an end.\n\n2. The second phase covered a period of 18 to 20 months, viz., from the end of 1914 to the Battle of the Somme in July, 1916. During the whole of this period the position in the West was that the Anglo-French armies were strong enough to hold the Germans, but not strong enough to attack them with any chance of piercing their fortified lines. The main theatre, _i.e._ the theatre where the main forces are gathered, ceased to be for the time being the decisive theatre, _i.e._ the theatre where an important decision can be obtained. These conditions were clearly recognized in the British Cabinet. They were disputed by both the British and French military authorities. The divergence of view arising from different estimates of forces and values led to the loss of opportunities which will never recur.\n\n3. The politicians were in the main generally convinced that the deadlock in the West would continue until a great British army could be called into being, and equipped with a powerful artillery and plentiful munitions. They therefore immediately looked for other theatres in which our forces could gain decisive results in the interval. Two great operations, each involving the concerted action of our naval, military and diplomatic resources, presented themselves: first, the rallying of the group of small States at the northwestern corner of Europe, thus turning the enemy's right flank, obtaining command of the Baltic, and forming contact with Russia in the north; or secondly, rallying the group of small States at the south-eastern corner of Europe, striking down Turkey before Germany could organize her, and establishing contact with Russia from the south. Of these two policies, the first was clearly the more difficult, and was never perhaps possible, having regard to our resources. The second however was not only possible but easy of accomplishment if the proper measures had been taken. Turkey was isolated from Germany by the Balkan States. She was ill-organized and ill-prepared. She was menaced by Russia. We held better cards than the Germans in regard to every single one of the Balkan States. The partition of the Turkish Empire offered the means of satisfying every appetite. Lastly, the naval situation was entirely favourable. Our margins in the North Sea had been greatly increased since the declaration of war. The German submarines had not become formidable, and the destruction of Von Spee had completed the clearance of the German warships from the surface of the oceans. An amphibious operation to strike down Turkey before she could raise her head, and to unite the Balkan States against their natural foes, the Turkish and Austrian Empires, was well within the scope of the naval and military resources at our disposal, after providing an ample superiority over the Germans in the North Sea and sufficient forces to defend actively the front in France and Flanders. It was therefore towards the southern flank of the enemy's line, to Turkey and to the Balkans, that our operations were directed\u2014but alas half-heartedly.\n\n4. The natural tendency of the naval and military point of view is to confuse the main and the decisive theatres. Where-ever the main part of the army or the main part of the fleet is assembled, always claims their partisanship. Accordingly, the professional opinion of the navy grudged and resisted the employment at the Dardanelles of every unit, even the most worthless; and the professional opinion of the army delayed, grudged, and stinted the employment of every soldier and of every shell required for the Eastern campaign. These tendencies, which would have been overborne by success, became at the first check overpowering. The Eastern enterprise was therefore cast away, with consequences of measureless disaster.\n\nBulgaria, always the key of the Balkans, remained undecided while the fate of the Dardanelles hung in the balance. Her course was determined by the loss of the Battle of Suvla Bay. The destruction of Serbia followed immediately, and the destruction of Roumania a year later. Turkey was gripped and organized by the Germans, entailing great diversions of our forces to Egypt and Mesopotamia. Adding the loss involved by these diversions to the loss arising from the destruction of Serbia and Roumania, the paralysis of Greece, and the hostility of Bulgaria, our failure to prosecute the Eastern enterprise successfully may well have equalled the addition of two million soldiers to the ranks of our enemies. Besides this we lost the means to succour and animate Russia by direct contact.\n\n5. The third phase of the war supervenes upon the second. After the year 1915, there were no hopes of gaining any good results in Turkey or the Balkans. The Germans were everywhere in complete communication and control. In consequence, Allied armies large enough to achieve success in those theatres were too large for the carrying capacity of our seaborne tonnage. Moreover, the submarine had become formidable in the Mediterranean, and the military weakness of Russia was plainly apparent. Half the soldiers lost and half the shells fired in Artois in May, and at Loos and in Champagne in September, 1915, resolutely used, would have achieved for us the whole south-eastern theatre of war in that year; but in 1916 four times their number could not have retrieved the position. The extinction of other possibilities left France therefore the only theatre open to us.\n\nMeanwhile however a great British army had come into being, abundantly supplied with munitions. The third or as it may be called 'The Slogging Phase' then began. This lasted from the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st July, 1916, to the end of the Passchendaele attacks in November, 1917. During the whole of this period the British armies, sometimes alone and sometimes assisted by the French, were hurled almost continuously, or with the briefest intervals for recovery, in assaults upon the fortified German lines. I have personally always held the view that at no time in this period were we strong enough, in the absence of some entirely novel method of attack applied on a gigantic scale, _e.g._ tanks or gas, to break through the skilful German defence, reinforced as it always was, and still is, by the power of giving ground where-ever necessary without serious consequence. Still, such was the heroic gallantry of the armies and the determination of their leaders, so powerful was the artillery of which they disposed, that the hope of victory and the sense of mastery were never quenched in the hearts of our troops until the mud deluge of Passchendaele.\n\nThe most hopeful climax of these operations was however probably reached at the end of the year 1916 in the later phases of the Battle of the Somme. At this time the enemy were at their greatest strain. They were weakened by their folly at Verdun. They were attacked simultaneously by the British and French armies astride of the Somme. Brusiloff gained his great victories on the Austrian front, and Roumania plunged into the war. The exertions which the Germans made in this emergency should make us realize the strength of our foe. By dint of them they managed to reach the winter, striking down Roumania meanwhile.\n\n6. The Germans did not feel themselves strong enough in the spring of 1917 to withstand the renewed onslaught of the British and French armies. They therefore ruptured the Anglo-French plans for combined action by suddenly withdrawing their line from the Somme battlefields almost to St. Quentin and Cambrai. They thus placed a broad belt of devastated country between them and their would-be assailants, and also between the British and French armies. By this man\u0153uvre they avoided the kind of long-prepared accumulated blow they have struck at us this year, and only had to face through the rest of 1917 disconnected attacks by the British, and occasionally by the French. The campaign of 1917 therefore became very disastrous to us. Although each military episode, taken by itself, wore the aspect of a fine success, with captures of ground and guns and prisoners, in reality we were consuming our strength without any adequate result.\n\n7. Late in the year a false naval argument played its part in swaying military policy. The harbours of Zeebrugge and Ostend were represented as being the source of the submarine warfare, and their capture or suppression was alleged to be vital. As a matter of fact, these harbours of course have never been and could never be the main base of submarine warfare. That has only been directed and can only be directed from the permanent naval bases of Germany in the estuaries of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Ems. Ostend and Zeebrugge were serious annoyances, but as objectives they were utterly inadequate to the sacrifices demanded of the army in order to secure the Flanders Coast. Moreover, the season of the year was advanced. The Russian collapse had taken place; nobody else was fighting; the numbers of the enemy on the front attacked were almost equal to our own; the direction of the attack was perceived and thoroughly prepared against by elaborate semi-permanent fortifications. In these circumstances the amazing efforts of the British armies could have no other result than to weaken themselves.\n\nThe incidental disaster which happened to Italy was not so harmful as it looked. Her renewed effort more than made up for the heavy losses sustained.\n\n8. While our commanders were intent upon the battle and in hopes of gaining successes in the nick of time, they do not seem to have realized the awful consequences of the collapse of Russia. But in November and December this apprehension grew with politicians and generals, both British and French. The flow of German divisions and batteries from Russia to the West was unceasing for many months until finally a power had been accumulated which, after marking down every division of which we could dispose, left the enemy with a punching force of nearly fifty divisions. The enemy's military methods differ from our own. In attack the German uses Surprise, in defence he uses Concrete. Our defensive problem this year is far more difficult than that which the Germans solved successfully in 1917. On every occasion in 1917 (except at Cambrai) the Germans knew where the attack would fall. Every attack (except Cambrai) was indicated by several days' bombardment, apart from every evidence of ill-camouflaged preparation. Every German position was defended by lines of solid shell-proof structures sheltering machine guns, and ample reserves were held in rear to arrest a successful advance beyond the limits of our offensive barrage. Lastly, the Germans could always afford to give up some of the territory they overran so easily at the beginning of the war.\n\nOur position this year has been very different. The initiative has passed completely to the enemy. His attack is mounted actually or in dummy over practically the whole battle-front, and besides we can never exclude his irruption at some quite unexpected point. We, on the other hand, have at least four places\u2014Calais, Amiens, Paris, Verdun\u2014which we regard as capital. The enemy can therefore ring the changes on a succession of vital points, before each one of which we have little or no ground to spare. Meanwhile the use of gas and smoke has given new facilities to the offensive, and our methods of fortifications are still primitive compared with those of the Germans.\n\nIn this dire situation nothing has saved us except the stamina of our armies and the physical difficulties of persevering in an offensive after a certain distance. The stubborn resistance which the enemy has encountered, the bloody repulses which in spite of his successes he has sustained on the greatest scale, and the resources in men and material which the threat of utter ruin has extorted from the Allies, have gone far to equalize the struggle. It is even probable that we shall end this campaign of agony and disaster in far better posture than we began it. But what are we going to do then?\n\n9. This is the question to which I have been leading up. If I have tried to pick out as I see them the salient points in the past, it is with the object of showing that there are now and in the immediate future just as vital decisions to be taken if we can only secure the necessary vision and command. It may be that the Imperial War Cabinet will be able to impart to the Allied conduct of the war that general design and true selection of vital objectives which we have never yet been able to obtain.\n\n10. There are two perfectly simple things to do. They have long been staring us in the face. Everybody sees them, but they see so much else at the same time that nothing effective has yet been done: (1) Above all things reconstitute the fighting front in the East; (2) make a plan for an offensive battle in France in 1919, choosing the period of climax and subordinating, as far as pressure of circumstances will allow, every intervening event to that supreme purpose.\n\nIf we cannot reconstitute the fighting front against Germany in the East, no end can be discerned to the war. Vain will be all the sacrifices of the peoples and the armies. They will only tend to prolong the conflict into depths which cannot be plumbed. We must not take 'No' for an answer either from America or from Japan. We must compel events instead of acquiescing in their drift. Surely now when Czech divisions are in possession of large sections of the Siberian Railway and in danger of being done to death by the treacherous Bolsheviks, some effort to rescue them can be made? Every man should ask himself each day whether he is not too readily accepting negative solutions. May we not assume that President Wilson will regard the rescue of the Czechs as an obligation of honour? Who can rescue them except the Japanese?...\n\n11. Secondly, we must organize the offensive battle for 1919. It will be no use thinking about this in the winter when we may hope our present anxieties will be at an end. It will be too late then. Unless while we are fighting for our lives all this summer we can look ahead and plan for 1919, we shall be in the same melancholy position next year as we are this. In this war the initiative can only be seized as the result of plans made nearly a year ahead and through the successful overcoming of some great difficulty. Is it not possible at the present time to conceive and visualize a victorious offensive battle in the summer of 1919, to manufacture all the apparatus necessary to that battle, and to subordinate intervening arrangements, as far as daily needs will let us, to bringing about a situation favourable to that battle? Do the means of beating the German armies in the West in 1919 exist? Can the men be procured? If so, the mechanisms can be prepared. We still have the time. Have we the will-power and the command?\n\n# CHAPTER XX\n\n# THE UNFOUGHT CAMPAIGN\n\n' _The God of the Bees is the future_.'\n\nMAETERLINCK.\n\nTwo Practical Steps to Finality\u2014Need of American Troops\u2014General Pershing's Fine Decision\u2014My Mission to Cl\u00e9menceau\u2014President Wilson's Valiant Response\u2014Equipment of the American Armies\u2014Mr. Stettinius\u2014Mr. Baruch\u2014Nitrates and Diplomacy\u2014The American Artillery Problem\u2014Its Solution\u2014Cordial Co-operation\u2014A 'Gentleman's Agreement'\u2014Munition Workers' Unrest\u2014The Coventry Strike\u2014Ch\u00e2teau Verchocq\u2014The Mechanical Battle\u2014My Letter to General Harington\u2014The Man-Power Problem 1918 and 1919\u2014July and August Memoranda\u2014The 10,000 Caterpillars\u2014Foch's Endorsement\u2014Future Hopes.\n\nDuring these tremendous struggles, while the fate of the Channel ports and even of the union between the British and French armies hung in the balance, by far the greater part of my duties and thoughts lay in the future. Throughout the summer the Munitions Council worked for a campaign which, in God's mercy, was never fought. To make sure of victory in 1919 was an aim at once possible and imperative. Dominated by this conviction, I concentrated all time and thought that could be spared from day-to-day emergencies upon the task. I had neither the responsibility nor the power; but with such influence as I possessed I tried to turn British and Allied policy to two great practical steps: first, to bring American manhood into Europe on the largest scale as fast as possible; secondly, to devise the plan and prepare the apparatus of a mechanical battle of decisive magnitude. In this chapter, between the stemming of the German onslaught and the beginning of the brilliant period which all unknown was now approaching, I shall endeavour to give the reader some account of both these measures.\n\nI had long been disappointed at the slow rate at which American troops were being transported across the Atlantic. I did not believe that the resources either of the Admiralty or of the British Mercantile Marine were being used to the full. I always held that first importance should be assigned to the transportation of American soldiers, and that all the formidable difficulties of their training, equipment and supply could be surmounted later in their turn. A week before Ludendorff struck his first blow I had minuted to the War Cabinet as follows:\u2014\n\nAMERICA AND SHIPPING.\n\nMarch 14, 1918.\n\nI trust that the War Cabinet will not allow themselves to be deflected by the serious difficulties which no doubt exist from their resolve to transport the additional American divisions in British ships to Europe. The infantry of the British Army has been reduced by 25%, or approximately 170 battalions. The addition of 72 American battalions will still leave that Army substantially smaller than it was last year, and therefore well within the compass of our cross-channel transportation and railway system on the British Front.\n\nThe immense political and military advantages of drawing American manhood into the war, and of thus partially filling the gap caused by the diminution of our own forces, ought to outweigh all other considerations and make us ready to submit to the further reduction in food, civil imports and munitions rather than lose the benefit which should now be reached. It is emphatically a case where the difficulties ought to be surmounted and mastered, and not recoiled from as soon as they present themselves. A true sense of relative values at the present time would assign supreme priority to the rapid augmentation by every conceivable means of the numbers of American soldiers in France.\n\nQuite apart from the imperious military need, the intermingling of British and American units on the field of battle and their endurance of losses and suffering together may exert an immeasurable effect upon the future destiny of the English-speaking peoples, and will afford us perhaps the only guarantee of safety if Germany emerges stronger from the War than she entered it.\n\nThe Prime Minister had from the beginning formed these general views independently. He used all his powers at every stage to give effect to them. He had already arranged for 72 American battalions to be attached in the first instance to British Units. The intense peril in which we seemed to stand after the Twenty-first of March spurred him to renewed exertions, and at the same time rendered those exertions fruitful. Confronted with the extreme crisis, General Pershing and General Bliss presented themselves to General Foch on March 28 and spontaneously, in the finest manner, placed the whole of their resources in France for the time being at his disposal. Their plans for the development of the great American Army would be subordinated to the emergency wherever necessary. The American divisions, or battalions if need be, would enter the line forthwith in spite of their training and organization being incomplete. This decision was at the true height of circumstances, and in itself went far to repair the injuries of Ludendorff's inroad.\n\nAs soon as I was able to report that all measures to make good the losses of material had been taken and would be immediately effective, the Prime Minister sent me again to France upon a somewhat delicate mission. On the morning of March 28 I started for Paris with instructions to see Cl\u00e9menceau and if possible Foch, and find out whether the French were willing to make a vigorous attack on the Southern flank of the battlefields to take some of the pressure off our armies. Such a direct but irregular inquiry might well have encountered a rebuff. Arrived in Paris, I therefore asked our Liaison Officer, General Sackville-West, to explain matters to Cl\u00e9menceau. But the Tiger brushed all formalities aside. We would start together for the front, he said, at 8 o'clock the next morning. We would visit Foch at Beauvais, Rawlinson at Dury, and all the French Headquarters within reach. We would learn for ourselves on the spot and through all the responsible persons exactly what the effort of the French army would be.\n\nWe spent the whole of the 30th at the front, saw all the commanders, got sufficiently near the shells to satisfy the President of the Council, dined with P\u00e9tain in his Headquarters train, and returned to Paris after midnight. Tired out, I was about to go to bed when a long cipher telegram from the Prime Minister arrived. Mr. Lloyd George repeated the message he had that day sent to President Wilson appealing for the despatch of American troops on the largest possible scale, whether formed in divisions or in the smallest formations, or even as drafts to British units. He directed me to see Cl\u00e9menceau at once and to urge him in a separate telegram to support this appeal in the strongest manner. The Tiger received me at 9 a.m., quite unaffected by the fatigue of the previous day, and wrote while I waited a most vigorous and moving appeal. The action which President Wilson took in response to these requests was courageous in the last degree. Henceforward the main effort of the United States was to send men to France up to the fullest limit of ocean transport. In large formations or in small, trained or half-trained, without regard to armament, equipment or supplies, American manhood was to proceed to the war. The use to be made of all these great numbers of men, their organization, their training, their ammunition, their food and clothing\u2014all were questions to be solved later on. This was an act of faith of the highest merit. No one who did not possess that intense form of power which comes from expressing the will of a free people could have dared to decree a policy in appearance so improvident and even reckless. A hundred valid arguments existed against it, but all were relegated to a lower plane. From this moment the United States poured men into France, and by this action more than any other which it was in their power to take helped to bring the war to a speedy termination.\n\nTo fight in defence of his native land is the first duty of the citizen. But to fight in defence of some one else's native land is a different proposition. It may also be a sacred obligation, but it involves a higher conception. Willingly to cross the ocean and fight for strangers, far from home, upon an issue in the making of which one has had no say, requires a wide outlook upon human affairs and a sense of world responsibility. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, drawn by common citizenship under the Crown, had from the outset revealed this noble power of comprehension, and had made their decision good across broader spaces on the battlefields of three years. They had endured slaughters which no American army was destined to know, and their achievements are upon record. But the decision which in the emergency President Wilson took to remedy the consequences of previous long delay involved personal deprivations of a peculiar kind for the soldiers of the United States. To serve in one's national army, under one's own leader, amid a great mass of men animated by a common spirit is one ordeal. To serve in isolated divisions or brigades or even regiments under the orders of foreign Generals, flanked on either side by troops of different race and language and of unknown comradeship or quality, is another. Amid the hardships and terrors of war the soldier is accustomed to find his last remaining comfort of mind in being with his own friends and fellow-countrymen, sustained by the esprit de corps at least of 'The Battalion.' But in the dire need of the great struggle and in a loyal desire to share the tribulations of their allies, American soldiers by scores of thousands readily obeyed orders from their Government to serve, albeit under the general supervision of Pershing, as isolated companies or even platoons in British or French units in order that the largest number might come under the fire of the enemy at an earlier period.\n\nSuch conduct required from the Allies the utmost loyal exertions to equip the forces so trustfully sent. At this I laboured incessantly. My duties brought me into intimate and constant contact with the leading representatives in Europe of the United States Supply Services, as well as with General Bliss and upon occasion with General Pershing. From the first we worked together without a single misunderstanding or disagreement. No Government could have found a more able servant than Mr. Stettinius, the representative of the American War Department. To business aptitudes of the highest order, he added a delightful simplicity and directness of character. He was already experienced in the munitions sphere, having handled the bulk of the great affairs which the British Government transacted through Messrs. Morgan before the American declaration of war. This event changed fundamentally our arrangements for buying American supplies. Morgans ceased to be our agents, and in August, 1917, an agreement was signed under which all our requirements from the United States were to be undertaken by an Official Purchasing Commission. This consisted of three members of the War Industries Board, Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, Mr. Robert S. Lovett and Mr. Robert S. Bookings. The War Industries Board, of which Mr. Baruch was Chairman, had exceptional powers as a final executive authority in the determination of priority between competing military and other claims, in the allocation of materials and manufacturing resources, and also in the fixing of prices and the control of capital issues. Sir Charles Gordon and Mr. Brand acted in Washington as my principal representatives in dealing with this body.\n\nThe arrangements worked excellently. We 'carried on the war in common' in every sense of the expression. We transferred masses of every kind of material, in every stage of production, from one ledger to the other in accordance with our very different needs as easily as two friends might share a luncheon-basket. There was no rigmarole or formalism in our affairs. We ransacked our cupboards to find anything the American troops in France required, and the Americans on the other hand, once the case was clearly explained in conversation, drew without hesitation from their own remoter programmes for our more urgent needs. We built common factories for tanks and aviation material. The Americans offered us their earliest supply of mustard gas. At the end I accepted from Mr. Stettinius a contract of over \u00a3100,000,000 sterling to supply the whole requirements of the United States Army in medium artillery (6-in. guns and howitzers) for the campaign of 1919. The principles of this contract were simple. We guaranteed the United States we would make no profit, and they guaranteed us we should suffer no loss, however the event might turn.\n\nIt was not until after the war was over that I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Baruch, the Chairman of the War Industries Board; but almost daily telegrams soon put us on excellent terms. I could feel at the other end of the cable a strong clear mind taking quick decisions and standing by them. After a few months' co-operation he paid me the very high compliment of placing in my hands the whole business of purchasing nitrates for the United States from Chili. The Headquarters of the Inter-Allied Nitrate Commission were necessarily in London, and although the American Government was buying at least five times our requirements at this period, Mr. Baruch in a laconic telegram placed American interests in my hands. I now became the Nitrate King\u2014the greatest there will ever be; and I reigned for nearly a year, apparently with acceptance. I formed a small department under my personal direction to cope with this entirely novel responsibility. At its head, under Sir Edmund Wyldbore-Smith, was a gifted young officer, Major Stomm, now lost to us, to whom I am deeply indebted. I used the potent influence which the control both of British and American purchases gave me, not only to procure nitrates, but to persuade the Chilian Government to hand over the sixteen valuable German ships which had taken refuge in Valparaiso Harbour. Two or three times a week I sent telegrams as long as letters to Mr. Baruch explaining exactly what we were doing, and he helped me and supported me throughout. The correspondence and its developments were only interrupted by the conclusion of the War. I print the culminating telegram:\u2014\n\n_Mr. Churchill to Mr. Baruch._\n\n_September_ 12, 1918.\n\nSecret and Personal.\n\nThe disablement by sabotage of German ships interned in Chilian ports appears to have been the immediate response to our nitrate agreement with the Chilian Government. It reveals that the Germans regard this agreement as a blow against themselves.... I therefore look forward hopefully to the negotiations I now propose to begin about the 1919 purchases, throughout the course of which my endeavour will be to secure the use of the German ships.... I cannot of course tell whether with the limited means at our disposal these objectives can be secured, but I am sure they are the ones to make for. I hope you agree. Meanwhile the first thing to do is to press the Chilian Government to put guards on the ships. It should be pointed out that if the Germans sink these ships in the fairway of the ports, the Chilian Government may be prevented from carrying out its nitrate contract. British and American interests in the execution of this contract give us each a right to make representations in this sense and within these limits. The acts of sabotage already committed afford the Chilian Government ample grounds. The British Foreign Office have at my request pressed the Chilian Minister in London strongly to have the ships guarded, and he has telegraphed accordingly to his Government. I hope you may find it possible through the channels open to you to make similar representations. We need not commit ourselves any further than this at the present time. Pray let me know if any of your ships are hung up for want of nitrates. The Chilians have assured me they will do everything in their power to secure immediate cargoes being available.\n\nVery Private.\n\nI am becoming embarrassed by the difficulty of getting a definite answer from the American War Department as to what help they want us to give them in their artillery programmes for next year. You will understand that it is very difficult to keep my programmes in suspense for so long. I do not know whether you can say a helpful word to accelerate decision one way or the other, but if so I should be very grateful. Many thanks for your friendly message about the nitrate deal. I am so glad you approve of my negotiations.\n\nWhen we met in Paris during the Peace Conference, I found that Mr. Baruch apparently considered me an authority upon the deeper technical aspects of the nitrate trade. He one day asked me my advice upon an urgent and complicated question concerning it. But reputations are easier lost than gained. I thought I would let well alone, and disengaged myself with suitable modesty.\n\nDay after day Stettinius, Loucheur and I grappled with the problem of the United States artillery. The American War Department now aimed at placing in the field eighty divisions, numerically equal in infantry to two hundred British or French divisions, by the end of June, 1919. The rate at which American troops were landing in France was already far ahead of their munitions programme. They hoped to have forty-eight divisions in France by the end of 1918. The transformation of their industry was still incomplete, and they could only arm from American sources a fraction of the men they were devoting to the struggle. Armies of eighty divisions required nearly 12,000 guns of various natures, with an unceasing flow of ammunition thereafter. Towards this the United States could not count on supplying more than 600 medium and heavy guns and howitzers. They could however provide the material out of which the immense established gun plants of France could make 8,000, and those of Britain 3,000 pieces. By the adoption of a proportion of the British pattern, all the American and Canadian factories which we had hitherto used could be made immediately available for United States needs, both in guns and ammunition. The well-known disadvantages of a mixed armament lose much of their importance when armies are upon the giant scale, especially if each nature of gun is uniform throughout the national forces.\n\nAll was finally arranged, and the following is my report to the War Cabinet of the British share in these large transactions:\u2014\n\n# SUPPLIES TO THE UNITED STATES ARMIES.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_September_ 25, 1918.\n\nThe United States in response to our appeals are sending men to Europe far in advance of their general munitions programme. Their shell programme is hopelessly in arrear [of these increased numbers]. Their gun programme is even worse. Not only in the main staples of equipment, but in a very large number of minor supplies, they will find themselves deficient. Unless therefore the arsenals of Great Britain and France can supply these deficiencies, the Americans cannot be expected to continue pouring in men, and the armies available for 1919 must be proportionately reduced. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that, working together, the French and British munition works can supply fully the needs of all the United States troops which can be brought by our maximum carrying capacity to Europe, and can supply them with good weapons and ample ammunition, provided only that the necessary raw materials are sent by America to be made up in our factories. No undue strain will be imposed upon our munition factories. The gun plants and the shell plants are running so smoothly now that, given raw material, they can easily meet their share of American needs. The processes of dilution and of releases of men will continue, in spite of this extra work, at a moderate rate. I am therefore pursuing the policy of doing everything possible to equip the United States armies, and offering every assistance in my power. I have agreed to supply them with more than 2,000 guns in 1919, and to make the ammunition for all these guns if they will send the raw materials. By this deal alone, considerably more than one hundred millions of British indebtedness to America will be extinguished. It seems to me indispensable that this process, to which we are deeply committed, should continue.\n\nThe longer we worked with the Americans, and the more interdependent our affairs became, the better grew our relations. In October we got rid of all sorts of rules prescribed in the early days of our association, and fell back on a 'gentleman's agreement' to help each other by every conceivable means, the sole test being the relative importance of particular services to the common cause.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_October_ 3, 1918.\n\nI have been approached by various officers of the American Expeditionary Force on the question of replacement from the United States of material used in supplies produced in this country for the American Army.\n\nMore than a year ago we insisted upon the policy of replacement for three reasons:\u2014\n\n(1) At a time when a number of officers were asking for quantities of goods, estimated on a basis which we could not test, we found it useful to insist that these officers should get an assurance of replacements from Washington as some sort of guarantee of urgency.\n\n(2) At that time we were not certain to what extent our own orders would be squeezed out by the competition of the American programme.\n\n(3) The Shipping Controller naturally insisted that we should claim an allocation of an equivalent American tonnage.\n\nAs regards (1), the urgency of requirements is now much more fully understood both by the American staff and by ourselves, and is examined by Inter-Allied organizations set up for the purpose.\n\nAs regards (2), we are still apprehensive about our supplies from the United States. But we are compelled to admit that during the last eighteen months we have never, in fact, been denied supplies which have been really urgent, and we must assume that the United States Government will continue to meet us in the same spirit. In fact, they do their utmost to help us, and in spite of our special counter-claims we are heavily in their debt.\n\nAs regards tonnage, the Shipping Controller is making bargains with the American Government on much broader lines than the exchange of tens of thousands of tons, and I understand he no longer wishes us to bargain ton for ton as before.\n\nIn these circumstances, I propose to accede to the wishes of the American Army, to waive the question of replacement of specific quantities of material for particular cessions, and to rely on the broad principle that we are to help each other to the utmost of our ability. I shall however keep a full account of the material used in the goods supplied to the United States, and shall naturally continue to put these figures before the United States representatives when discussing with them the allocation from the United States of bulk supplies to Great Britain. I am sure this is the wisest course to pursue, and the most likely to secure American assistance. _Nothing in the above proposals affects the question of money payments, which are all adjusted in the regular way._\n\nI should be glad however to have the concurrence of the War Cabinet before definitely informing General Pershing that I am waiving our claim to specific replacement.\n\nIt is pleasing to revive these memories in years no longer terrible but sometimes bleak. No British Minister had, I believe, a greater volume of intricate daily business to conduct with United States representatives than I had during 1918. It is my duty to record the fact that no Ally could have given more resolute, understanding, and broadminded co-operation than the Ministry of Munitions received from the War Industries Board of the United States. These sentiments were reciprocated. I enjoy the honour of being the only foreign member of their post-war Association, and with the King's permission I wear the United States Distinguished Service Medal presented me by General Pershing.\n\nI have described the admirable behaviour of the munition workers during the crisis of the twenty-first of March. Misfortune and a sense of emergency seemed always to bring out their highest qualities. But once the situation at the front became easier, a wave of unrest swept across the factories. In the main this was born of overstrain; but beneath the surface, always ready to exploit any psychological reaction, lurked the pacifist and subversive elements of the labour world. In July a whole series of strikes broke out in the munition industries at centres as widely separated as Sheffield, Avonmouth, Oldham, Coventry, Gateshead, Farnham, Birmingham, Manchester, Hendon, Gainsborough and Newport. Most of these disputes were composed, and many others prevented, by the ceaseless and skilful activities of the Munitions Labour Department under Sir Stephenson Kent. But Coventry proved intractable. We were confronted with a widespread cessation of work by the highly paid men engaged in the production of aeroplane engines, thus seriously endangering our programmes. After consulting the Prime Minister I decided to take the step from which we had hitherto always abstained of withdrawing from men who would not work, their munitions protection against being taken for the Army. In order that the case might be fully explained to the public and to the workers throughout the country, I assembled, as was the custom on critical occasions in the war, the representatives of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association. Fifty or sixty gentlemen attended, covering virtually the entire Press. I could see from their faces as I proceeded that they viewed the decision with concern, deepening in some quarters into consternation. Despite their misgivings all undertook to sustain the national policy, and the Prime Minister continued resolute. On July 16 I therefore issued the following notice which was displayed everywhere in Coventry.\n\n_July_ 16, 1918.\n\nOwing to the scarcity of skilled labour in the country created by the needs of the Army and the grave emergency of the war, it became necessary some time ago to make sure that the skilled labour available was fairly shared among munition firms, and in some cases to place a limit on the number of skilled workers which particular employers or firms were entitled to engage. If this had not been done, employers, instead of making reasonable efforts to economize skilled labour so that what we have might be used to the best public advantage, would have been led to scramble against each other for skilled men regardless of the national interest. One firm would have been overcrowded with skilled men; another doing equally important war work would have been stopped for want of them. The Defence of the Realm Act therefore gives power to the Government to limit the right of employers to engage skilled labour beyond their proper needs, and the use of this power was approved by the War Cabinet and announced on June 8th.\n\nIt is also the law that trade disputes in time of war shall be settled by arbitration without a stoppage of work. But the strike which is threatened at Coventry is not a trade dispute. It does not arise out of the ordinary relations of Capital and Labour. It cannot be settled by arbitration. It can only be regarded as an attempt to subvert and deflect the avowed policy of the State in time of national danger.\n\nIn consequence of this fact, the Minister of Munitions finds it necessary to state at the earliest moment that men who abandon their work in these circumstances will by that very act divest themselves of any protection against recruitment for the Army if they are liable to serve. It is already hard that men between forty and fifty should be called up for the Army while younger men are left to earn high wages in the munitions factories. Only the fact that these men are absolutely needed at their work has induced the nation reluctantly to put up with what is from any other point of view unfair. It would indeed be wrong that a young man who is given special protection from recruiting to enable him to do work of great importance should refuse to do that work and yet that his protection should continue.\n\nThe Minister has therefore obtained the authority of the War Cabinet, not only to proceed with the utmost rigour of the law against all persons conspiring or inciting to such a cessation of work, but also to make it clear that the protection from military service of all or any men who cease work in these circumstances will be allowed to lapse immediately.\n\nAn anxious week-end intervened. On the Monday considerable numbers of men from the Seamen and Fireman's Union, many of whom had been submarined more than once, entered Coventry headed by Mr. Havelock Wilson and preceded by bands; and at the same time the organization of the former Women's Suffrage Societies, under the fiery guidance of Miss Christabel Pankhurst, descended in a cloud of speakers, propagandists and canvassers. Patriotic meetings were held in all parts of the town. Under these varied pressures the strike collapsed, and by Tuesday night all Coventry was at work again.\n\nFrom May onwards the Commander-in-Chief had assigned me regular quarters in the zone of his armies. I had a few rooms and facilities for a mess in an old French country-house amid wonderful avenues of trees near the village of Verchocq. I could reach this by aeroplane in two hours from Hendon, and so could upon occasions work at the Ministry of Munitions in the morning and follow the course of a great battle in the afternoon. I could come and go where I pleased on the front, and so far as it was possible without undue risk, could see all that there was to be seen. About one-fifth of my business lay at Headquarters or in Paris, where the Ministry of Munitions had large establishments. One way or another, either with General Tudor or with General Lipsett until he was killed, and also with Sir Alexander Godley, or with General Birdwood and the Australian Corps in which my brother was serving, or with Rawlinson's army, I managed to be present at almost every important battle during the rest of the war. Once I flew in a fighting plane between the lines while a considerable action was in progress below. But from the height of 7,000 feet to which we had to keep on account of the German artillery, there was nothing to see but the bursting shells of the barrages far below. It is impossible to see a modern battle. One is always either much too far or much too near.\n\nMeanwhile the schemes and preparations for 1919 were moving steadily forward. Maeterlinck says the God of the bees is the future. At the Ministry of Munitions we were the bees of Hell, and we stored our hives with the pure essence of slaughter. It astonishes me to read in these after years the diabolical schemes for killing men on a vast scale by machinery or chemistry to which we passionately devoted ourselves. ' _Les bons p\u00e8res de famille sont capables de tout_.' We denied ourselves nothing that the laws of war with their German applications allowed. The Germans had installed the cylinders of poison gas. We had followed them swiftly in these sinister experiments. In the end many more Germans died from British gas than British from German. In 1918 the enemy had far the larger supplies of the irritant mustard gas, but our outputs were broadening daily. Although the accidentally burned and blistered at the factories exceeded 100 per cent. of the staff every three months, volunteers were never lacking.\n\nThe Mechanical Battle now took definite shape.\n\n_Mr. Churchill to General Harington (Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff)_.\n\nSecret.\n\n_June_ 21, 1918.\n\nThe considerations principally I have in mind are of a more general nature.\n\nThe first thing to visualize is:\u2014\n\n(1) The future battle: when it is to be fought: by what methods, and on what scale.\n\n(2) To answer this you must have some general idea of the resources and possibilities of Supply. If we continue working on present lines and existing programmes, we should have produced by April 1, 1919, 3,629 tanks of the Mark V and later varieties of heavy and medium. Working on till June on repeat orders would add 810 heavy and 370 medium. Ch\u00e2teauroux should produce by April 1, 975, and on the existing scale and repeat orders could add by June 900 heavy tanks. To these totals can be added the surviving Mark IV tanks, estimated at 482; total heavy and medium tanks 7,166, from which must be deducted any fresh battle casualties from now on, which perhaps we might take as three or four hundred. These are maximum figures _on existing lines._ Unless special efforts are made in regard to man-power, their realization might well be somewhat retarded. But if special efforts are made, these programmes can probably be counted on. If fighting tanks are required in any large numbers in addition to these, altogether new and special arrangements would have to be made. It would not be impossible to make such arrangements if a decision were taken during the next month, but it means an entirely new effort on top of one which is already serious.\n\nBesides the big fighting and medium fighting tanks of all kinds above enumerated, there should be available a very large number, possibly from 8,000 to 10,000, less battle casualties, of little tanks (Renaults).\n\nThirdly, there are the cross-country vehicles and tractors. I think you should assume at this stage and for the purposes of your battle plan that you can get all you are likely to require of these, even for an operation on the greatest scale, if the measures are taken not later than July.\n\n(3) Taking the above as a general guide, it should be possible to formulate a definite tactical scheme comprising\n\n( _a_ ) the length of front to be attacked;\n\n( _b_ ) the locality suitable for this form of attack;\n\n( _c_ ) the method of the attack;\n\n( _d_ ) the number of troops to be (i) employed, and (ii) carried in the attack;\n\n( _e_ ) the distance to be traversed by the attack;\n\n( _f_ ) the use to be made of all our other military resources before and during the attack; and\n\n( _g_ ) the military policy necessary to bring about the situation favourable to the attack.\n\n(4) In this study it would be right, provisionally and within limits, to vary the data so as to reach the best possible form of attack. It should be possible for instance, by special efforts, to make for you the actual weapons which you require, and to make them in their true proportion. If the existing types do not meet all the needs that may be foreseen in certain parts of the field or certain phases of the battle, there is time now to make new ones. It is not impossible to do anything that is desired, if sufficient importance is attached to it and adequate time and resources are assigned. There must however be behind exceptional exertions in material the driving power of a great military conception supported by the highest professional authority.\n\n(5) If the General Staff are able to formulate their requirements after the sort of process indicated above, I am prepared to take all the steps necessary to secure a punctual, abundant and exact supply of what is requisite.\n\n(6) It is evident that as soon as the main outlines of the plan have been decided a complete unity of purpose must be established between the British Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff at the War Office.\n\n(7) Until the plan has been worked out both on its tactical and supply side and can be presented as a whole on the joint authority of the C.I.G.S. and the British Commander-in-Chief, it seems scarcely worth while to discuss it with the French or Americans. For the purposes of the plan their co-operation should be presumed. The unity and integrity of a military conception should not be marred by a succession of compromises and amalgamations. Afterwards, when the plan is ready as a whole, improvements may be suggested or modifications may be necessary as the result of consultation with the Allies.\n\nThe above seems to me to be the proper sequence of action. The time is passing, the weeks are slipping remorselessly away. Every one's mind is absorbed in averting defeat in 1918, and meanwhile we are losing the chance of gaining victory in 1919. In the autumn it will be already too late. I have seen this melancholy process repeated year after year since the beginning of the struggle. In this war, the initiative can only be regained by looking and planning at least one year ahead, and patiently subordinating intervening events to the supreme climax.\n\nIf action is settled on the main lines, the details of organization of the Tank Corps in the War Office and in the field, its association with Design and Supply, and its liaison with the Allies, will all fall smoothly and easily into their places; but without a central and dominant purpose, culminating in an aggressive battle, nothing is possible, and we shall continue to be the sport of circumstances and of our enemy.\n\nThe man-power problem was at this time most complex. The War Office and General Headquarters, although neither anticipated an end of the war in 1918, continued to press incessantly for the release of men, and of skilled men, from munitions to the Army. On the other hand their demands for output of all kinds\u2014particularly in the highest class of material\u2014speedily increased. I had convinced myself that all should be staked upon a battle in the spring and summer of 1919. It was too late to strengthen the man-power of the Army during the campaign of 1918. Men taken in July could not be trained and reach the front in time to affect the operations already in progress. I wished therefore to develop the greatest munitions production in the autumn and winter of 1918, and to release the largest possible numbers for service in the field from January, 1919, onwards. The following extracts from notes, the first written by me in July and the second in August, explain the two stages of this policy which was, broadly speaking, adopted.\n\nMUNITIONS AND THE LIMITS OF RECRUITING.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_July_ , 1918.\n\nSince the beginning of this year we have released no fewer than 100,000 men, nearly all of whom are skilled men, for military service. We have been deprived of all the Grade I. men of 19 and 20 without excepting even draughtsmen, men employed in making gauges, breech mechanisms, optical instruments, and vital pivotal men.\n\nHitherto I have done everything in my power to support the policy of the War Office and the Ministry of National Service. But I consider the time has now come when that policy requires to be the subject of a general reconsideration. Last autumn it was obvious that Russia would be out before America could come in, and that consequently the most strenuous efforts should be made to enable our Army to meet the attacks which would come upon it in the spring. The disasters of the spring rendered it still more imperative to provide men to carry us through the summer. I consider therefore we were right to run very great risks in all other directions in order to maintain the fighting front.\n\nWe have now to take into consideration a period where the conditions are entirely different from those of last autumn and this spring. The immediate crisis is not over, and indeed the worst may have yet to come. But men taken from industry after July will not reach the battle-front in time to influence the decision. So far as man-power is concerned, the die is cast. Secondly, the Americans, who have ten million men between 20 and 30 on whom to draw, are now arriving in great numbers, more than 270,000 having disembarked in a single month. The main contribution to our manhood next year must be derived from them. If we are to obtain any effective superiority in numbers, it can only be by American aid. No contribution that we can make, can substantially alter the situation in a numerical sense. The question for us therefore is how to use the last remains of our man-power so as to develop the greatest possible military effort. This will not necessarily be by making the largest possible number of infantry soldiers.\n\nSince the subject was last considered, the American forces in Europe have risen to 1,000,000 men. It is stated that more than 2,000,000 Americans have already been enlisted, that 3,000,000 will have been enlisted by the 1st September, and that the War Department is preparing clothing for 4,000,000 as from January 1. It is evident that the solution of the man-power problem lies in the speedy transportation to France of these great numbers, their training and organization on the battle-front, and lastly their equipment and supply. The first 1,000,000 who have come have been almost entirely equipped by Britain and France. But for the fact that we were able to supply them with artillery, machine-guns, rifles, trench mortars, &c., and to feed them with munitions of all kinds, no use in the present crisis could have been made of this first million. My latest report from America states that the American army in France will be almost entirely dependent during the whole of 1918 on British and French artillery production. If we are to continue to put, as we must do, the most extreme pressure upon the American Government to pour its men over, we must be in a position to guarantee them thorough and immediate equipment when they arrive, and ample supply thereafter....\n\nThe limiting factors are perpetually changing. During the rest of 1918 and the first half of 1919 the limiting factor on the employment of American troops will not be men or tonnage or food, but equipment of all kinds. For the time being the American munitions programme, particularly in guns and aeroplanes, is woefully behind their available resources in man-power. Unless we and the French are able to supplement promptly every deficiency in the American munitions programme, the despatch of very large numbers of their troops may be retarded from this cause. On the one hand, there are available in America enormous numbers of men in the prime of life; on the other, in Great Britain, for the sake of getting comparatively small numbers of men of inferior physique who will not be much use, or of superior skill who cannot be spared, we run the risk of endangering production of munitions on which not only our own Armies, but the rapid importation of American troops, depend. The situation has in fact undergone a very marked change, and we shall commit another of the great mistakes of the war if we do not adapt our policy to it in time....\n\nIt seems to me evident that we are now going too far and over-shooting our mark in regard to man-power. Once the emergency of this summer has been surmounted, we ought not to rupture our munitions supply, particularly our supply of vital modern appliances, for the sake of adding 20,000 men more or less to our Army of over 3,000,000. We ought on the contrary to make sure that our great plants here are kept working at their fullest possible capacity in order that our own Army may be equipped with the most perfect, scientific, and life-saving weapons, and in order that we may be able to place in the field the largest possible number of Americans.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_August_ , 1918.\n\nThe number of divisions available on either side at the commencement of the battle-period must be considered in relation to the power of replenishing those divisions with drafts....\n\nIf the numbers of divisions expected by Sir Henry Wilson are realized, they will afford us by 1st July [1919] a moderate superiority. But this superiority could be greatly enhanced by the holding in readiness of an exceptionally large number of men not in divisional formations but as drafts. Although the American military organization may not be able to achieve the formation of more than 80 divisions by the date mentioned, there is no reason why another million American soldiers trained only as individuals should not be available for the climax.\n\nOnce the foreseeable needs of the American divisions on the basis of three replenishments during the battle period have been provided for, we should make the strongest possible appeal to President Wilson to supply an additional 200,000 or 300,000 men\u2014over and above everything else\u2014for service with British cadres, and we should adapt our own organization to profit by this. Above all, we should ask continually for the attaching of an American battalion to each British brigade.\n\nWhat is going to win a battle like this is the intensity of the fighting effort during a limited period of time. The only way to save life is to secure the superiorities necessary for _speedy_ victory. The way to incur the greatest amount of slaughter is to continue waging war at three-quarter speed with well-matched forces. It is much better not to try at all, than to three-quarters try a plan we three-quarters believe in.\n\nClearly the dominating factor is the enormous reserve of American manhood which may be made available by wise and energetic action from now on.... I am of opinion that if it is decided to make an effort of this character everything should be subordinated to it; that the output of munitions, and consequently the requirement of coal, should be drastically reduced during the summer months of 1919, that we should cut in very largely upon our reserves of ammunition, &c., and that we should liberate from the mines, the munitions works, and the shipyards for the period of the battle a large number of men, as many as possible of whom would be returned the moment the main decision had declared itself. It seems to me that a scheme of this kind might be elaborated and surveyed. We are justified in running great risks to win an early and complete victory, because, even if we fail, we shall be steadily up-borne by the growing military power of America.\n\nVery often things are started because they are necessary at the time, and then afterwards they are kept going indefinitely, eating up men, although the need which brought them into existence may have diminished or gradually changed. If we really believe in the possibility of winning a decisive battle in 1919, we must narrowly scrutinize every establishment in this country to see whether it can release forces for the decisive phase....\n\nOnce the leading personalities of the General Staff at the War Office lent themselves to the scheme of the mechanical battle, it advanced steadily. I had appointed General Seely, who had been during the whole war in the fighting line, to be head of the Trench Warfare Department. I found myself strong enough in July to negotiate the placing of a block order for 10,000 cross-country caterpillar vehicles in the United States. Mr. Henry Ford's vast organization was capable, with other important American firms, of executing this contract without detriment to their other obligations. Mr. Perry, one of Mr. Ford's most trusted assistants, who had for some time been serving in the Ministry of Munitions, was sent on a special mission to Washington to unfold by word of mouth to Mr. Baruch alone the full scheme and purpose of our request. Mr. Baruch, having consulted the President, swiftly cleared all obstacles from the path. No questions were asked by subordinates, and full delivery of the whole 10,000 was guaranteed by the spring. Such a degree of mutual confidence among the high British and American personnel had been attained, and such was the authority they exerted, that not more than three or four people had to know the strategic object for which these machines were designed. The matter was opened to Foch, on whom it produced a favourable impression. On July 24 he addressed a communication to all the Allied armies, asking to be furnished as soon as possible with the total forces they could put in the line on January 1 and April 1, 1919, respectively. He asked for this return under five heads: (1) the number of divisions and their flow of drafts; (2) the artillery\u2014field, heavy and very heavy ( _A.L.G.P_ ), together with the necessary ammunition; (3) the number of aeroplanes of combat, observation and bombing; (4) _chars de combat_ (tanks)\u2014light, medium and heavy, excluding _chars de service_ (supply tanks); (5) _mechanical means of cross country transport for artillery, munitions and supplies of all kinds._ He added:\u2014\n\n'To reach the final decision of the war as early as possible in 1919 each of the Allied nations should prepare for the commencement of that year its maximum effort. For that:\n\n'The British and French armies should maintain and nourish their present number of infantry divisions; the American Army should increase its number to the utmost extent.\n\n'Munitions should be prepared in quantities sufficient to permit of the prosecution of a battle of long duration. Aviation and tanks should receive the greatest development possible.'\n\nThus at last the highest authority was engaged behind the true ideas, and the objections of half-informed potentates could be shouldered out of the way without the need of dangerously elaborate explanations. Although around us great battles raged and the thunder of the guns was unceasing, my mind amid a vivid life of movement and activity always rested on one picture of the future: 10,000 fighting tanks, large and small, specially adapted to the ground they had to traverse, moving forward simultaneously behind the artillery barrage on fronts of assault aggregating 300 or 400 kilometres; behind them, working with them, British, French and American infantry; and behind these again, 10,000 caterpillar vehicles unarmed and unarmoured, but each carrying forward across country, over fields and trenches, all the food, ammunition, kit and supplies of every kind which one platoon would require, while the roads remained clear and free for the advance of artillery and reserves.\n\nBut fortune had earlier and happier solutions in store.\n\n# CHAPTER XXI\n\n# THE TURN OF THE TIDE\n\nThe Sombre German Outlook\u2014The Ordeal of the Emperor\u2014The Rheims Plan\u2014Foch's intervention\u2014The Curtain rises\u2014The Battle of Rheims\u2014The German Repulse\u2014Foch and P\u00e9tain\u2014Foch and Haig\u2014The 18th of July\u2014The XXII Corps\u2014Mangin's Counter-stroke\u2014His Comment\u2014Rupprecht suspended\u2014Foch's Policy\u2014The Decisive Battle\u2014August 8\u2014'Rawly'\u2014The Battlefield.\n\nA drear panorama confronted the rulers of Germany in the month that followed the Battle of Noyon, and a growing sense of the inevitable began to chill all hearts. No rift, no crack, no crevice appeared in the mighty concourse of States, almost the world in arms, which glared stonily across the lines of battle at Germany and her Allies. France under Cl\u00e9menceau was flint. The British Army was known to be rapidly recovering, and under Lloyd George's leadership the whole Empire resounded with the clang of redoubled exertion. The Americans were pouring in across the open seas. Italy, so nearly extinguished in the preceding winter, renewed her strength. Meanwhile from every quarter dark tidings flowed in upon Great Headquarters. Turkey was desperate. A sinister silence brooded in Bulgaria. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was upon the verge of dissolution. A mutinous outbreak had occurred in the German Navy. And now the valiant German Army itself, the foundation and life of the whole Teutonic Powers, showed disquieting symptoms. The German nation had begun to despair, and the soldiers became conscious of their mood. Ugly incidents occurred. Desertion increased, and the leave men were reluctant to return. The German prisoners liberated from Russia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk returned infected with the Lenin virus. In large numbers they refused to go again to the front. A campaign of unmerited reproach was set on foot against the German officer class. Their painstaking and thorough routine, which had enabled them on all the fronts to exact two Ally lives for every German, was no protection from the charge that they did not share the privations of the troops. The British fire had bitten deep in March and April, and for the first time since the earliest days of the war Germany felt the swift blood-drain she was accustomed to exact from others. Still the majestic war machine obeyed the levers of authority, and the teeth of its thousand wheels, in spite of occasional jars and tremors, kept grinding on remorselessly.\n\nAnd in Ludendorff was found a hardy gambler incapable of withdrawing from the game while he still had heavy stakes to play. Who shall say whether at this moment he was right or wrong? He could not tell whether the adoption of a defensive policy, of great strategic retirements, of gaining at all costs the winter for negotiation, might not have been the signal for the collapse he dreaded. No, it was better to brazen it out to the bitter end. He had gathered the strength for one more plunge. Was there not still one more good chance? A crashing victory against the French, the advance to Paris, and then, when all Allied reserves had been interposed to shield the Capital, a sudden right-handed drive against the British and the Channel ports. Such at least was his resolve.\n\nThe ordeal of the German Emperor during the great Battle of Rheims has been the subject of an imaginative but profoundly instructive study by a German writer of distinction. The story is confined to the hour to hour doings and experiences of the Emperor during the period of less than ten days in which the battle was launched and decided. And with German thoroughness more than five hundred closely printed pages are devoted to this theme. The arrival of the Imperial train at a wayside station; the supreme War Lord's meeting with his Generals, Hindenburg solemn, deferential, vague; Ludendorff preoccupied, terse, reserved, the man at the wheel\u2014such is the opening picture. The Imperial trappings are become threadbare. These men are grappling with doom. They do not seek to add a third to their confidence. The Emperor is ceremoniously relegated to a tall wooden tower specially constructed in a wood, from whose platform above the level of the treetops the All Highest would be in the most favourable position to witness what might happen. And here with his immediate retinue he must dwell perched for six whole days, eyes glued to telescopes that show nothing but distant fumes and blurs and smudges, while his throne totters and his people's fortune is decided, utterly helpless and useless, a prey to the worst anxieties, but at any rate out of the way.\n\nLudendorff's plan for the battle of Rheims followed the usual German pincer model, and was in itself almost on the scale of the 21st of March. Two separate simultaneous attacks, with a silent gap of 20 kilometres between them, were launched on each side of Rheims with the object of biting off that city and the difficult hilly region around it. The Seventh German Army attacked across the Marne to the west of Rheims, and the First and Third German Armies to the east. Fifteen divisions were assigned to the first wave of each attack. The total width of the offensive, including the gap, was nearly 70 kilometres. Its general convergence was upon Chalons. If this battle prospered, the growing threat to Paris would draw the Allied reserves southward to defend the capital. Whereupon, when the situation was ripe, the Crown Prince Rupprecht with thirty-one divisions would fall on the British in Flanders and resume the battle of the Lys and the drive at the Channel ports. The conception was vast, and the forces employed in the whole combination the most widespread used since the original invasion.\n\nThe secret of these designs was not hidden from the Allies. The concentrations of the enemy were correctly defined. Information from deserters and from prisoners taken in organized raids supplied the French and British Headquarters with full confirmatory details, while time for the necessary preparations yet remained. Haig braced himself to meet Rupprecht, and P\u00e9tain organized the Rheims front with minute and studious care. The French line was held to the west of Rheims by the army of Berthelot and to the east by that of Gouraud, both comprised in the army group of Maistre. These measures taken, the general concert of the gigantic battle rested with Foch.\n\nThe intervention of the supreme control was decisive. Neither Haig nor P\u00e9tain, with their own intense preoccupations, could have achieved the general view. Nor is it likely that from a discussion between two equally threatened equals, each with vital objectives to guard, the right arrangements would have emerged. Between co-operation, however loyal, and united action, there is a gap wide enough to turn victory into defeat. Foch, trusting to the information to hand in spite of all its uncertainty, resolved to allow the Rheims battle to develop, and then at its height to strike at the right flank of the advancing Germans with a heavy counter-stroke. For this purpose he massed with all possible secrecy in the forests around Villers-Cotterets an army of more than twenty divisions and 350 small French tanks. He drew these forces from the reserves which P\u00e9tain wished to keep to guard Paris. He also on the lath asked that four British divisions should be moved into the French zone, two south of the Somme and two astride of that river to ensure the connection between the French and British armies about Amiens, and to enable him to move four French divisions farther to the east and nearer to the impending battle. This was agreed to by the British Headquarters and orders were given accordingly. On the 13th Foch demanded that these four divisions should be immediately placed unreservedly at his disposal for the battle, and further that four more British divisions should be despatched to take their places.\n\nThese were serious requests. Opposite the Hazebrouck sector, perilously near the coast, Rupprecht was known to have eight divisions in the line, and twenty-three, of which twenty-one were fresh, divisions in reserve. Against this already mounted attack the British could muster only fifteen divisions, including reserves, and of these two were half-trained and one of second line personnel. Sir Douglas Haig moved immediately the two additional divisions which were to replace those astride of the Somme, but he then dwelt upon the accumulating preparations of the Germans to attack the British front and the uncertainty as to where the next blow would fall, and declared himself against despatching any troops to Champagne at the moment. He asked that at least decision should be deferred on this last point till he could meet Foch at Mouchy as had been arranged for the 15th.\n\nMeanwhile the British Government were alarmed by the substantial weakening of the British Reserves when unquestionably a series of enormous attacks could be launched at any moment upon our much tried troops. They were also deeply offended by the diversion from the British zone of almost all the American troops who had arrived. The Prime Minister called a meeting of the War Cabinet on the evening of the 13th at Hassocks, and as the result General Smuts was sent to Haig to say that if he considered it desirable to invoke the 'Beauvais agreement' the Government would support him. Matters were in this position when the battle began.\n\nAs the curtain rises on the new scene we may take a sweeping glance at the principal characters. The Emperor before the dawn of July 15 is on his leafy perch among the tree-tops. Ludendorff is at Avesnes on tenterhooks. P\u00e9tain's attention is riveted upon his front, and the capital city which lies only 90 kilometres behind it, on which the storm is about to break. Haig and his Chief of Staff think on the whole that the second, rather than the first blow, is reserved for them; but that it will be terrible they have no doubt. The French line, they believe, will hold after bending; but the possibility of a French counter-stroke is too good to be true. East of Rheims behind a false front elaborately maintained lies Gouraud, a fiery spirit in a war-shattered frame, skilful, knightly, accurately informed. He knows even the German zero; and three hours before the German bombardment begins, all his artillery open counter-preparation fire on the crowded batteries and assembly trenches of the assault. In the forests of Villers-Cotterets crouches the army of Foch's counter-stroke\u2014two strong American divisions, and eighteen of bitter Frenchmen. At its head we see again the impetuous Mangin. Dark days have come to him since Douaumont was recaptured; the Nivelle disaster of which he was the scapegoat, dismissal from his command, indeed from all commands, a Ministerial order not to reside within 50 kilometres of Paris, afterwards petty employment while Armageddon rages\u2014horrible to endure. Suddenly Cl\u00e9menceau, above scapegoat-making, reaches down a strong hand. Foch, then only an adviser, proposes 'To Mangin a Corps.' Opposition and prejudice are swept aside. After six months' probation in command of the IXth Corps, 'Mangin the Butcher' is placed once again at the head of an army. And now, like a hungry leopard on a branch, sees Incomparable Opportunity approaching and about to pass below. And last of all in the beautiful Ch\u00e2teau of Bombon, where the sunrise bathes the lawns and the ripple of waters joins the accompaniment of summer, sits Marshal Foch with Weygand at his side and his 'military family' around him. He has battles to fight behind the line as well as in front of it.\n\nDown from beyond the German parapets leaped the cataracts of fire and steel. Forward the indomitable veterans of the Fatherland! It is the Marne that must be crossed. Thousands of cannon and machine guns lash its waters into foam. But the shock troops go forward, war-worn, war-hardened, and once again ' _Nach Paris_ ' is on their lips. Launching frail pontoons and rafts in a whistling, screaming, crashing hell they cross the river, mount the further bank, grapple with the French; grapple also with the Americans\u2014numerous, fresh and coolly handled. After heavy losses they drive them back, and make good their lodgments. They throw their bridges, drag across guns and shells, and when night falls upon the bloody field, 50,000 Germans have dug themselves in on a broad front 4 miles beyond the Marne. Here they stop to gather further strength after performing all that soldiers have ever done.\n\nBut it was otherwise to the east of Rheims. Gouraud's counter-preparation smote the First and Third German Armies even before the signal to advance was due. The General had unmasked all his batteries on the hazard of his information. Would he be justified by the event? His Chief of Staff entered his room at Chalons watch in hand. 'They have not begun. It is past zero. We have been betrayed by the prisoners.' 'There are still two minutes,' answered Gouraud, also watch in hand: and thus the two men stood waiting breathlessly for a new cannonade to supervene upon the muffled thunder of the French bombardment. Punctually as Gouraud's watch pointed to the hour, a roar like a railway train passed overhead, and with deafening detonation a gigantic German shell shattered the neighbouring lighting plant and plunged the Headquarters in total darkness. The two French officers received this unmistakable message with feelings of profound thankfulness and relief Their batteries had not been exposed in vain.\n\nVery heavy losses were inflicted upon the assembled Germans by the forestalling fire. The advance began under heavy disadvantages. The false French front resisted ruggedly and must be laboriously exterminated. And then, beyond the range of their own artillery, the Germans collided with the real front, flaming, impenetrable, alive with counter-attacks. All along the line from end to end without exception, the advance of the First and Third Armies withered before the French defence; and after a day of frightful slaughter, nothing of consequence had been gained. The check was decisive. 'By noon of the 16th,' says Ludendorff, 'G.H.Q. had given orders for the suspension of the offensive to the First and Third Armies and for their organization for defence by withdrawing certain divisions for this purpose.... Once the difficult decision to suspend the offensive of these armies had been taken, it was useless to attempt to advance further across the Marne or to leave our troops on the Southern bank. We had to make arrangements for crossing before the retreat could even begin.' The retreat was fixed for the night between the 20th and 21st. He still hoped however to make progress up the valley of the Ardre towards Rheims.\n\nThese decisions of Ludendorff were not of course known to Foch or P\u00e9tain, and the 15th was a day of great stress for General Foch. The first reports of the battle on the morning of the 15th from Gouraud's army were so satisfactory that Foch set off for his rendezvous with Haig at Mouchy. There can be little doubt that Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral was lukewarm about the Mangin counter-stroke. It is at least certain that they strove to delay it. In later years it has been said that P\u00e9tain argued: 'It is too soon. Let the Germans advance further. Let them engage their reserves fully in the main battle, and your counter-stroke will be all the more effective.' Whether this was the real motive or an after explanation to cover undue sensitiveness about Paris, will long be disputed. But there can be no dispute about the action of General Foch. On his way to Mouchy he stopped at General Fayolle's headquarters at Noailles. There he heard that Grand Quartier G\u00e9n\u00e9ral had issued instructions for all available French reserves to be held in readiness to go to Rheims. He immediately cancelled these orders and said that the preparations for Mangin's attack should be pressed on with all speed and that the attack should take place as soon as possible. He wanted it to take place on the 17th, but acquiesced reluctantly in the date being finally fixed for the 18th.\n\nFurther protests were raised by the French Headquarters. Whether they emanated directly from P\u00e9tain is not certain; but at 12.25 Foch telephoned to P\u00e9tain from Mouchy\u2014'There can be no question of any slowing down, still less of stopping the Mangin preparations. In case of urgent, extreme need you may take troops absolutely indispensable, informing me at once.' This done he opened his discussion with Haig. The British Headquarters believed that the defeat of the 27th of May had grievously affected the morale of the French Army. They were extremely sceptical of the ability and resolve of the French to deliver a heavy offensive punch. They feared lest their own reserves should be reduced, not for the purpose of a decisive counter-stroke at the proper moment, but merely to add to the mass of troops between Paris and the enemy. The British and French High Commands were in close touch with each other, and the defensive views of P\u00e9tain were well known to Haig. The Generalissimo had nothing to his record but the disaster of the 27th of May, and no machine at his disposal beyond his group of personal staff officers in the Ch\u00e2teau of Bombon. Haig might sympathize with Foch's conception. But would it be translated into action? In the crisis of the battle on the Rheims front, with Paris perhaps in the balance, would not the known views of P\u00e9tain and the power of the French staff organization prevail? Nevertheless Haig agreed to move the whole of the second four British divisions to the aid of the French, and the first two of them were actually ordered to complete the XXIInd Corps south of the Somme.\n\nLate that same night General Smuts, member and envoy of the War Cabinet, arrived upon the scene. He explained his mission to the Commander-in-Chief, and offered him the support of the British Government, if he thought he was being unduly pressed. Haig replied 'that he would take the risk, that he accepted the responsibility, and that he had acted in the main interest of the Allied cause.' He even gave Smuts a written note that he 'took the risk and fully realized that if the dispositions (of Foch) proved to be wrong, the blame will rest on me. On the other hand, if they prove right, the credit will lie with Foch. With this,' he added pointedly, 'the Government should be well satisfied!'\n\nMeanwhile a tense discussion was in progress at Provins. After the dismissal of General Anthoine in the aftermath of the 27th of May a new figure had appeared at the French Headquarters. The young and audacious Buat, chosen by Foch and Cl\u00e9menceau, had been appointed the Major-General of the Armies and, independently of P\u00e9tain's wishes, had become his right-hand man. Buat, as he was no doubt expected to do by those who had selected him, hurled his weight upon the side of the immediate counter-stroke; and in the end P\u00e9tain and the French staff consented to obey the orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.\n\nThe battle on the Marne raged during the whole of the 16th with heavy French counter-attacks. On the morning of the 17th Foch sent General Du Cane with a letter to Haig on the subject of the attack threatening on the British front, and the precautionary disposal of the British reserves to meet it. As Du Cane was stepping into his car, Weygand, who had followed him through the doorway, said: 'General Foch authorizes you to tell Sir Douglas Haig that Mangin's army will attack to-morrow morning, at 8 a.m., with twenty divisions.'\n\nThe British Headquarters Staff were filled with the deepest misgiving upon the dispersal of their Reserves. Fortified by the Smuts visit they had made the strongest representation to the Commander-in-Chief during the 16th. General du Cane was confronted on arrival with the draft of a letter which awaited Haig's signature, demanding the immediate return to the north of the Somme of all the four divisions of the XXIInd Corps. His personal interview with the Commander-in-Chief did not prevent the signing and sending of this letter. But Haig, convinced that the great counter-attack was now certain, added a verbal message that 'If the British troops were wanted to exploit a success, they should of course be used.' This in the event was all that was needed.\n\nI have described these transactions in some detail, because they mark the crucial moment in Foch's career as Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, and show, as it is right to do, alike his difficulties and the dominating personal part he played in victories which all henceforward were to share. They show also the important aid which in a crisis of terrible uncertainty was given him by Sir Douglas Haig and the British Army.\n\nLet us now for a moment cross the lines.\n\n'In the night of the 17th\u201318th,' writes Ludendorff, 'I myself went to the Headquarters of the Army Group of Crown Prince Rupprecht, to review once more the state of their preparations. The attack was intended as a continuation of that which had been suspended at the end of April. It was to be made by the Fourth and Sixth Armies north of the Lys, its objectives being the possession of the commanding heights between Poperinghe and Bailleul, as well as the high ground round Hazebrouck. During the discussion with the Army Group of Crown Prince Rupprecht on the morning of the 18th I received the first news that, by means of an unexpected tank attack, the French had pierced the line south-west of Soissons.... I concluded the conference at the Army Group of Crown Prince Rupprecht (naturally in a state of the greatest nervous tension) and then returned to Avesnes.'\n\nAt the appointed hour Mangin's army had sprung. His battle followed the Cambrai model. There was no artillery preparation. Three hundred and thirty small Renault tanks came out of the woods and ground their way through the German line. Behind them the French infantry rolled forward in immense superiority. Upon a wide front the enemy were overwhelmed. Behind the front the German troops were placidly harvesting the abundant crops. They cast down their sickles and fought where they stood. The high corn hampered their machine-guns except where occasionally provided with special tripods, and the small tanks continued murderously to break up the defence. By nightfall Mangin's army had advanced an average of 5 kilometres on a front of 45. The decisive blow on the Western Front had not yet been struck; but from this moment onwards to the end of the war, without exception, the Allies continued to advance and the Germans to retreat.\n\nDuring these tremendous days the British, French, American and Italian Munitions authorities had been in continuous conference in Paris. The distant rumble of the cannonade and the dull crash of the half-hourly Bertha shells reminded us that the campaign of 1918 was going on. But all our work was concerned with 1919. The provision and division of steel, of coal, of nitrate; the manufacture of artillery, shells, machine-guns, tanks, aeroplanes, poison gas, upon the greatest possible scale and under the most harmonious arrangements kept us, and the enormous technical staffs we directed, at the Conference table every day and all day. And of course while the battle hung in the balance I waited ready to set in motion, if it must be so, the far-reaching, elaborate scheme for evacuating and reconstituting the Paris munition factories in which we were concerned. In the last week of July we were invited to take a day off and visit the scene of the victory. Passing through Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry and along the pulverized front, we repaired to Mangin's headquarters at Versigny. We approached the General's house through a long avenue of captured German cannon and trench mortars. Mangin received us with cordiality. His modest bearing did not conceal his joy. After luncheon I found myself alone with him, and knowing the ups and downs which he had survived, I offered some few words of admiration upon his signal victory. I record his reply exactly as he gave it: 'Le Mar\u00e9chal Foch l'a con\u00e7ue. Le G\u00e9n\u00e9ral Gouraud l'a rendue possible. Moi, je l'ai faite.' Some years afterwards when I repeated these words to General Gouraud, he considered them for an appreciable moment and then said: 'That is quite true.' And indeed I think they may well serve as an epitome of this memorable event.\n\nUnseen upon the surface, the turn of the tide had now begun. Nevertheless Ludendorff persevered, and the Crown Prince and his staff were found capable of stemming the French inroad on their flank. The divisions which would have backed the drive on Paris rapidly formed a front to the French counter-stroke; and after the first surprise very few more kilometres were taken away from the stubborn enemy. In a fortnight of hard fighting the Germans skilfully extricated their masses of men and material from the perilous Marne salient. But Rupprecht, whose hammer was actually uplifted in Flanders, was frozen where he stood. At first it was a mere postponement: a week or two while the German position in the Marne salient was re-organized. And then a few divisions were taken from his army to help in the re-organization; and then a few more; and then another week's delay. Thus Rupprecht remained for twenty days, waiting for the signal. But the signal never came. The scale in which the struggling armies and the nations behind them were weighed had tilted. The inclination was imperceptible to the public eye, but the controlling minds of the German Headquarters registered a definite sensation.\n\nBut now an event was to occur which would resolve all doubts. 'August 8,' writes Ludendorff, 'was the black day of the German Army in the history of this war.... The 8th of August opened the eyes of the staff on both sides; mine were certainly opened.... The Emperor told me later on, after the failure of the July offensive and after August 8, he knew the war could be no longer won.'\n\nOn July 24 the only conference ever held between the Allied Commanders took place at Bombon. Foch presented to Haig, Pershing and P\u00e9tain a document setting forth in outline his policy for the rest of the year. His plans may be shortly described as follows:\u2014First, to reduce the three principal salients on the enemy's front\u2014Amiens, Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry and St. Mihiel\u2014with a view to improving for the campaign of 1919 the lateral railway communications along the whole front from the Vosges Mountains to the sea, and by a subsidiary action to free the Bruay coalfield, and certain other minor enterprises. Secondly, if successful in these operations, to carry out a general offensive with all the troops available. It is said that he had among his intimates already begun to dwell on the hope of obtaining final victory in 1918. His favourite expression at this time was 'L'\u00e9difice commence \u00e0 craquer. Tout le monde \u00e0 la bataille!' On the other hand his memorandum stated that it would depend on the measure of success gained in these various operations whether that success could be more fully exploited 'before the winter sets in.' All his plans aimed at the summer of 1919. In August, when asked when the war would end, his official answer was 'about next autumn\u2014in twelve months'; and as late as the middle of October his Staff made the answer 'in the spring.'\n\nThe British Headquarters had been agreeably surprised by the success of Mangin's counter-stroke. Their scepticism was however fortified by the failure of the French, in spite of the initial surprise of July 18, to make effective progress against the Germans in the Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry salient or to prevent the Crown Prince from extricating his troops from their dangerous position. Nevertheless Haig was resolute for attack, and entirely agreed with the Generalissimo upon the immediate practical steps. He had as early as July 13 directed Rawlinson to prepare an offensive by the Fourth Army against the German salient before Amiens. Rawlinson's plans were in consequence well advanced. He had accepted with logic and conviction the whole model of a Tank battle. There were available in all nearly 600 tanks, of which, apart from spare machines, 96 were supply tanks, 22 gun carriers and 420 fighting tanks. Of the fighting tanks 324 were of the new Mark 5 pattern of superior speed and man\u0153uvring power, and weighed over thirty tons apiece. Everything was subordinated to the surprise of the tank attack. One hundred and twenty brigades of British artillery of all natures were assembled, but all preliminary bombardment was prohibited. Not a shot was to be fired even for registration. The tanks were to advance, unfettered and unprejudiced, simultaneously with the infantry and about 200 yards behind the creeping barrage. Their approach was assisted by special noise barrages, by the morning mist, and by artificial fog. The British heavy and medium artillery was mainly to be directed upon the enemy's similar guns. The infantry, closely accompanied by numerous field batteries and with large bodies of cavalry at hand, were to exploit the success of the tanks. The essence of the whole plan was surprise. Rawlinson's army had a restricted position of assembly, and German counter-preparation, if it caught our troops in the act of assembling, would have serious results. For these reasons Rawlinson did not wish to fight hand in hand with the French on his right. He feared lest secrecy should be endangered by a joint operation. Moreover, Debeney's French army had few tanks and could not attack without artillery preparation. To ensure complete co-operation Foch placed all the troops, British and French, under Sir Douglas Haig. The danger lest the French preliminary bombardment should spoil the surprise was overcome by timing the French infantry attack three-quarters of an hour later than the British. Thus not a shot would be fired before zero. On the second and third days of the battle the rest of Debeney's army and Humbert's army were in succession to intervene.\n\nAt 4.20 a.m. on August 8, in the half light of a misty dawn, the British tanks rolled forward into No Man's Land, and simultaneously the Allied artillery opened fire. Four Canadian, four Australian and two British divisions, followed by three more in reserve and the Cavalry Corps, advanced on the British front. Eight French divisions co-operated later in _\u00e9chelon_ on their right. All along the line, but especially in the centre where the Canadians and Australians fought, victory declared itself forthwith. Ludendorff had taken special measures to strengthen the German line. 'In this storm-centre,' he writes, 'the divisional fronts were narrow, artillery was plentiful, and the trench system was organized in depth. All experience gained on the 18th July had been acted upon.' It was of no avail. The Germans were unable to resist the tanks. 'Six battle-worthy divisions' collapsed almost immediately before forces scarcely superior in numbers. In less than two hours 16,000 prisoners and more than 200 guns were taken by the British, and by noon tanks and armoured motor cars, followed by cavalry, were scouring the country 14 kilometres behind the German front. The French, who attacked without tanks, advanced about half as far. But the British advance enabled Chaulnes junction to be brought under close fire and consequently destroyed the German communications on which their whole front from Montdidier to Lassigny depended. This was decisive. Two days later, when Humbert's army joined the battle, the high ground near Lassigny was found abandoned; and the advance of the Allies was general along a front of 120 kilometres.\n\nI spent the 9th and 10th on this battlefield. I had been at the War Cabinet the day before when Sir Henry Wilson had announced the opening of the attack, and when in the afternoon the first reports of a great Tank victory began to come through, I decided to get into my aeroplane and take a couple of days' holiday. Rawlinson's Headquarters were at Flixicourt, near Amiens. I was much delayed in reaching them by enormous columns of German prisoners which endlessly streamed along the dusty roads. No one who has been a prisoner of war himself can be indifferent to the lot of the soldier whom the fortunes of war condemn to this plight. The woe-begone expression of the Officers contrasted sharply with the almost cheerful countenances of the rank and file. All had passed through a severe experience, the crashing bombardment, the irresistible on-rush of the tanks spurting machine gun bullets from every unexpected quarter, the catastrophe of surrender, the long march from the battlefield with many claims to consideration in front of theirs, night in the advanced cages\u2014now another long march since dawn. 'A la guerre, comme \u00e0 la guerre!'\n\nThe General received me with his customary good humour, and at luncheon, while the tramp of new columns of prisoners proclaimed his victory, explained how it had been achieved. It was, truly, _his_ victory, and that of the Fourth Army which he directed. He had put aside old-fashioned ideas, he had used new weapons as they should be used, he had reaped swift and rich reward.\n\nThis is perhaps the place where I may give the reader some slight impression of Sir Henry Rawlinson. I had known him since Omdurman, where he was one of Kitchener's leading Staff Officers. In the Great War we had met in every variety of fortune. First on the Aisne in September, 1914, before he had any command at all, when we lay on an unfinished haystack watching the shells play on the Soissons road: next at Antwerp, where he arrived to take over the command at the moment when further defence had become extremely questionable: next in my room at the Admiralty, after the Seventh Division under his command had been virtually destroyed in the first battle of Ypres and when many were ready to lay blame on his tactics. In April, 1918, I had been with him at Dury in the last extremes of the 21st March, when with a few cavalry and machine guns and details from the training establishments, he was covering and enduring the dissolution of the Fifth Army. Now we met at the zenith of his career, when he had largely by his personal contribution gained a battle which we now know ranks among the decisive episodes of war.\n\nDuring these vicissitudes he was always the same. In the best of fortunes or the worst, in the most dangerous and hopeless position or on the crest of the wave, he was always the same tough, cheery gentleman and sportsman. He had always the same welcome for a friend, be he highly or lowly placed, and the same keen, practical, resolute outlook on facts however they might be marshalled. The readers of Rawlinson's 'History of Assyria' and another Rawlinson's 'Herodotus' will trace with confidence the hereditary source of his strongly-marked capacity.\n\nThe battle was still in full blast and I asked how best to see it. There is a road well known to the Royal Air Force which runs straight as a die for 50 kilometres due East from Amiens to Vermand. 'It is being shelled, but there is no congestion, you can go ahead along it as far as you care.' So off we went along this famous road, through deserted, battered, ghostly Amiens; through Villers-Bretonneux, a heap of smouldering wreckage, threading our way through the intervals of an endless convoy which moved slowly forward from one shell-hammered point to another. The battlefield had all its tales to tell. The German dead lay everywhere, but scattered in twos and threes and half-dozens over a very wide area. Rigid in their machine-gun nests, white flaccid corpses, lay those faithful legionaries of the Kaiser who had tried to stem the rout of 'six battle-worthy German divisions.' A British war balloon overhead burst into a sheet of fire, from which tiny black figures fell in parachutes. Cavalry cantered as gaily over the reconquered territory as if they were themselves the cause of victory. By a small wood seven or eight Tanks with scattered German dead around them lay where a concealed battery had pierced them, twisted and scorched by the fierce petrol fires in which they had perished. 'Crews nearly all burned to death,' said the Officer of the burying party. 'Those still alive are the worst off.'\n\nFinally where bullets began to cut the leafage and freshly wounded men streamed back from an advancing fighting line, an Australian soldier said: 'It's the best we've ever had. We went hard all day yesterday, but this morning we have been relieved, and _an Imperial brigade_ ' (note the phrasing) 'is now attacking.'\n\n# CHAPTER XXII\n\n# THE TEUTONIC COLLAPSE\n\n' _...and from the charge they drew_ ,\n\n_As mountain waves, from wasted lands_ ,\n\n_Sweep back to ocean blue_.'\n\nSCOTT, _Marmion._\n\nEndurance\u2014After Jena\u2014The Chance of Retreat\u2014Impedimenta\u2014Foch and Haig\u2014The Battle of Bapaume\u2014Its Consequences\u2014Inadequate Recognition at Home\u2014The Cabinet View\u2014The General Vindicated\u2014A 1919 Climax\u2014My Letter to the Prime Minister\u2014Artillery\u2014Air\u2014Tanks\u2014The Drocourt-Qu\u00e9ant Switch\u2014Ludendorff's captured Order\u2014The First Sure Sign.\n\nBefore the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end. We seemed separated from the old life by a measureless gulf. The adaptive genius of man had almost habituated him to the horrors of his new environment. Far away shone a pale star of home and peace; but all around the storm roared with unabated and indeed increasing fury. Year after year every optimist had been discredited, every sober hope cast down, and the British nation had doggedly resigned itself to pursue its task without inquiry when the end would come. In the circles of Government, where so many plans had to be made for more than a year ahead, this mood formed the subconscious foundation of our thoughts. Ultimate victory seemed certain. But how it would come, and whether it would come in 1919 or in 1920, or later, were inquiries too speculative to pursue amid the imperious needs of each day. Still less would anyone dare to hope for peace in 1918. Nevertheless, when from time to time the mental eye fell upon these puzzles, this question immediately presented itself: Would Germany collapse all of a sudden as she had done after Jena, or would she fight it out to the bitter end like the French under Napoleon or the Confederates under Lee? The Great War came when both sides were confident of victory. Would it continue after one side was sure it had no hope? Was it in the German nature, so valiant yet at the same time so logical, to fight on in revengeful despair? Should we have a year of battle on the Rhine, the march to Berlin, the breaking up of the armies in the open field, the subjugation of the inhabitants; or would there be some intense nervous spasm, some overwhelming and almost universal acceptance of defeat and all that defeat involved? We had always fancied it would be Jena. But all our plans were for a long-drawn alternative.\n\nCertainly the highest interests of Germany, once all hope of victory was closed, required the orderly retreat of the greater part of her armies to the Antwerp-Meuse line, and thence to the German frontier. To secure this at all costs became, after the battle of August 8, and the conclusions drawn from it by the rulers of Germany, the paramount duty of soldiers and statesmen, and of all parties and classes. Moreover, such a retreat could assuredly have been accomplished, provided the decision was immediate. Apart from all the methods of delaying a pursuit which tactics and strategy suggest, the Germans possessed at this time a simple mechanical device, the full use of which would with certainty have gained them a breathing space until the spring of 1919. They had developed time fuses for exploding mines or shells, which could be regulated to retard the explosion, not merely for days or weeks, but actually for many months. It would therefore have been possible for the retreating invaders to have sown the roads and railways behind them with mines and buried shells so that they would be continually destroyed day after day by a fresh and inexhaustible series of explosions at points and moments which their pursuers could never foresee. The only method of dealing with a railway thus mined would be to build an entirely new line out of such material as could be salved alongside the original. It would therefore not have been possible for the Allied armies to advance to the German frontiers until they had reconstructed the whole intervening railway system. This could certainly not have been completed before the end of the year. Not till then could the process of dragging forward the ponderous mass of material necessary to mount a grand offensive have even been begun.\n\nThere might therefore have been gained for Germany a period of perhaps six months before the full strength of the Allied armies could have been brought to bear upon her frontiers and before she was exposed to actual invasion. The time was sufficient for strong positions to be selected and prepared, and for the whole remaining resources of the nation to be marshalled in defence of its territory. But far more important than any military advantage was the effect which Germany, by admitting defeat and withdrawing completely from France and Belgium, would have produced upon the cohesion and driving power of the Allies. The liberation of the soil of France was the dominating impulse which held the French people to the war. The rescue of Belgium was still the main rallying point of the British war resolve. Had Germany therefore removed both these motives, had she stood with arms in her hands on the threshold of her own land ready to make a defeated peace, to cede territory, to make reparation; ready also if all negotiation were refused to defend herself to the utmost, and capable of inflicting two million casualties upon the invader, it seemed, and seems, almost certain that she would not have been put to the test. The passion for revenge ran high, and stern was the temper of the Allies; but retribution, however justified, would not in the face of real peace offers have been in itself a sufficient incentive to lead the great war-wearied nations into another year of frightful waste and slaughter. In the lull and chill of the winter with the proud foe suing for terms and with all his conquests already abandoned, a peace by negotiation was inevitable. Even in this last phase Germany need not have placed herself in the appalling position of yielding to the discretion of those upon whom she had inflicted the utmost injuries of hate.\n\nMany factors and influences were no doubt simultaneously at work upon those who still ruled Germany. But it is probable that the last chance was lost for a very inadequate reason. The German Headquarters could not make up its mind to face the consequences of a swift and immediate retreat. Foch is reported to have said at the end of August, pointing to the war map: 'This man (the German) could still escape if he did not mind leaving his luggage behind him.' The immense masses of munitions and war stores of all kinds which the Germans had in four years accumulated in France and Belgium became a fatal encumbrance. The German Staff could not bear to sacrifice them. Their railways soon became congested with mountainous impedimenta. Meanwhile the supreme policy of the State was paralysed, and the hard-strained fighting front began to quiver and rock and crack.\n\nIt is possible in these pages to do little more than mention the series of great and bloody battles and other events by which the German armies were now to be driven out of France and Belgium and the German Empire into collapse, unconditional surrender and internal revolution. The victory of August 8 was no sooner ended, than both Foch and Haig sought to renew the attack. But some divergence arose upon the method and direction. Foch's Directive of August 10 prescribed the immediate advance of Rawlinson's Fourth British and Debeney's First French Armies towards the Somme in the general direction of Ham. The Third French Army was ordered to prolong the attack and profit by the advance of the First; and Haig was directed to launch at the earliest moment the British Third Army (Byng, lying northward of the Fourth) in an offensive towards Bapaume and P\u00e9ronne Haig had other ideas. He did not consider a further immediate advance towards the Somme by Rawlinson and Debeney practicable. The hostile artillery fire, he said, had greatly increased. The enemy had established themselves in their old front line of 1914\u201315, which was still in good order and well wired. The ground was broken and unsuitable for tanks. At least sixteen German divisions were holding this sector of the front. In these circumstances and after personal inspection, Haig directed that the attack should be postponed until the heavy guns could be brought forward and a full artillery battle mounted. He was however in complete accord with the attack of the British Third Army, and had in fact upon his own initiative given orders to General Byng before the issue of Foch's Directive of the 10th. He now planned to use the right of the British First Army (Horne) as well.\n\nFoch reiterated his instructions on August 14. He saw no need to delay the Rawlinson-Debeney frontal attack till Byng could participate. He had not considered the possibility of using Horne. Haig continued to refuse to attack until his artillery preparation was complete. 'Nothing,' he said, 'had happened to cause him to alter his opinion... He declined to change his orders to either of the armies in question.' Meanwhile he was rapidly and secretly transferring his reserves to Byng and reinforcing Horne with the fresh and powerful Canadian Corps. In short, Foch called for a continuance of the frontal attack south of the Somme, and Haig insisted on opening a new and wider battle to the north (on the front Monchy-le-Preux-Miraumont). The difference between the two plans was fundamental. A conference was held at Sarcus on the 15th. Haig adhered to his intentions, and though 'observing a most friendly tone,' emphasized his 'sole responsibility to his Government and fellow-citizens for the handling of the British forces.' Foch saw no headway could be made, and submitted. In his Directive issued after the conference he accepted the British plan and its argument. But he withdrew forthwith the First French Army from Sir Douglas Haig, and from noon on August 16 it reverted to the command of General P\u00e9tain.\n\nHaig may have exaggerated the resisting powers of the Germans south of the Somme (on the front Roye-Chaulnes); but his reasons were as solid as his refusal, and the event proved most fortunate. On August 21 the Third British Army began the important battle of Bapaume. Reinforced by 100 tanks and striking south-southeastward over country not unsuited\u2014as would have been the crater fields of the Somme\u2014to the operations of these sovereign weapons, General Byng pressed back the German line. The German Seventeenth Army, on whom the onset fell, was disposed three miles behind a false front on the Gouraud model. This Army counter-attacked along the whole line on the 22nd. But the British having themselves warily engaged at first only a part of their forces, strongly reinforced their assault, beat off the counter-attack and maintained their forward movement. Albert was recovered on the 22nd, and on the 23rd Haig was able to order a general advance on a 33-mile front. The battle was unrelentingly contested, but the British progress was continuous. On the 26th the right of the British First Army from Arras intervened and added another 7 miles to the breadth of the attack, which thus became the longest unbroken front of any offensive battle yet fought in the West. The Fourth Army was also by now in motion again.\n\nThat same day, yielding to the pressure from the north, the Germans retired from Roye and fell back to the line of the Somme. Thus the immediate objective which Marshal Foch demanded, and would have sought through a frontal attack of the Fourth British Army, was gained automatically by the attack of the Third. The ruins of Bapaume were retrieved on the 29th. From P\u00e9ronne to Noyon the Germans stood fast; but on the night of August 30\u201331, the 2nd Australian Division by a remarkable feat of arms captured Mont St. Quentin, the key of P\u00e9ronne, and thus compromised the whole of the river line. P\u00e9ronne changed hands again on September 1. On the 2nd, the left of the British First Army came into the battle, and with the Canadian Corps and the British 4th Division, after a bloody conflict, broke through in the north the strong system of entrenchments known as the 'Drocourt-Qu\u00e9ant switch.' Whereupon the Germans abandoned the whole line of the Somme, and from the Oise River to the Sens\u00e9e retreated towards the Hindenburg Line.\n\nThis great British drive may be said to have ended on September 3, by which date the three British armies and particularly the Third Army had advanced on their wide fronts an average of 20 miles, and had captured 53,000 German prisoners and 470 German guns. The German movements, not only during this battle, but till the end of the war, resembled those of a squad of soldiers trying to align themselves by their right, and kept in a continual shuffle by the fact that their right-hand man was himself thrust violently backward by British pressure, every time they tried to take up their correct position.\n\nMangin's Tenth Army had meanwhile pressed with increasing force north-east through Soissons; and although neither the scale nor the results of his operations were so large as those of the British, the double movement was followed by the general retreat of the German centre. Thus the rest of the Fourth British Army and the First and Third French armies on its right moved forward abreast without heavy losses, and by September 3 the Allied front stood along a line running almost north and south from below Douai to the gates of La F\u00e8re. The success of the British attacks exceeded Foch's imperious expectations, and with a magnanimity not always exhibited by great Commanders he was unrestrained in his approval. He sent General Du Cane to tell Sir Douglas Haig that 'the operations of the British Army in August and the early part of September would serve as a model for all time.' But these operations were by no means at an end.\n\nIt was galling to the British Headquarters, justly conscious of the predominant part which our armies were beginning to play in these great successes, to find the credit ascribed by their own Cabinet and public opinion to Marshal Foch. The part the Prime Minister had played in establishing unity of command led him unconsciously to dwell upon the brilliant conceptions of the Generalissimo, and to view only in a half light the potent forward heave of the British Army without which the results would have been mediocre. The Press and public at home followed the lead thus given, and the prevailing impression during these months\u2014\u2014and never since effectually corrected\u2014was that after many disasters and much mismanagement, an extraordinary genius had obtained the supreme command and had almost instantaneously converted defeat into victory. Care has been taken in this account to describe some of the splendid decisions on which the fame of Marshal Foch is founded; but this in no way diminishes the services in this campaign of the British Commander-in-Chief. His armies bore the lion's share in the victorious advance, as they had already borne the brunt of the German assault. Foch took a wider survey because he had a higher sphere. It was Haig's duty to take a more restricted view.\n\n'Act well thy part; there all the honour lies.'\n\nBut nevertheless, as has been and will be shown, on more than one cardinal occasion Haig by strenuous insistence deflected the plans of the Supreme Commander with results which were glorious. And ever his shot-pierced divisions, five times decimated within the year, strode forward with discipline, with devotion and with gathering momentum.\n\nReaction from the mood in fashion at home led the British Headquarters into some disparagement of the French contribution to the final advance. In this they were as far from the truth in one direction as their own Government in the other. In the victorious period from July to November 11, the French suffered no less than 531,000 casualties themselves, and inflicted 414,000 upon the enemy. That an army and a nation engaged at their full strength from the beginning of the war, which had sustained 700,000 casualties in the first few weeks and nearly 3 millions in the first three years, should have been capable of so noble an effort at the end will ever command the admiration and gratitude of their Ally.\n\nNone of the British Authorities, military or civilian, at home or in France, was induced by these remarkable victories to predict an early end of the war. General Headquarters, Sir Henry Wilson, the Imperial War Cabinet, the Prime Minister, all proceeded rigorously upon the belief that another most severe campaign would be necessary in 1919. For this every preparation continued to be made on the largest scale by the Ministry of Munitions. The War Cabinet were concerned lest Haig should be drawn by the successes of his army into enterprises beyond the strength of troops who had suffered so much. The Hindenburg Lines, might well, they feared, not without excuse, become the scene of another Passchendaele. The state of our Man Power, with men of fifty already summoned to the colours and the standards of physical fitness lowered to a harsh point, made the maintenance of the armies in 1919, on a scale of sixty Divisions, a problem of extreme difficulty. Another three or four hundred thousand men shorn away would compel a melancholy contraction in the number of British Divisions available for 1919, which it now seemed not unreasonable to hope would be the final and decisive year. The Cabinet therefore at the end of August sent their Commander-in-Chief a message warning him of the grave consequences which would result from a further heavy blood drain. The 'Staff Officer' writes some unpleasantly turned sentences about this improper interference with the prerogatives of the High Command, and the pitiful inability of politicians to face casualties with a hearty spirit.\n\nThe Cabinet acted only in accord with prudence and duty in their intervention. Nevertheless Haig at this time held a truer view both of the deterioration of the Germans and of the resilience of his own army. He shared the military doctrines of Foch. Both these illustrious soldiers had year after year conducted with obstinacy and serene confidence offensives which we now know to have been as hopeless as they were disastrous. But the conditions had now changed. Both were now provided with offensive weapons, which the military science of neither would have conceived. The German losses in Ludendorff's attacks had affected alike the number and quality of the enemy. The swift and ceaseless inflow of the Americans turned the balance of Man Power heavily in favour of the Allies; there was at last enough artillery for formidable attacks to be delivered against almost any part of the hostile line. The Goddess of Surprise had at last returned to the Western Front. Thus both Haig and Foch were vindicated in the end. They were throughout consistently true to their professional theories, and when in the fifth campaign of the war the facts began for the first time to fit the theories, they reaped their just reward.\n\nI was at this time so often at the Front and in such agreeable relations with the Headquarters, British and French, that I was able to appreciate to some extent the new conditions. Sir Douglas Haig's conviction that the British armies would continue to drive the Germans from their successive lines was intense. In his train at Fr\u00e9vent in the closing stages of the Battle of Bapaume, he showed me the order he had just given for three British armies to attack simultaneously; and pointing to the German lines, Siegfried, Wotan, Brunhilde, Hindenburg, etc., with which the map was scored, he said: 'Now you will see what all these fortifications are worth when troops are no longer resolved to defend them.'\n\nI now began to do a good deal of my business at Ch\u00e2teau Verchocq. The munitions organization was working so easily that I had plenty of time to see and to think. My central problem was founded on Tonnage, and its offspring\u2014Steel. The second issue was the apportionment between present needs and future preparation. Of this I was not the arbiter, but I had at least the influence which comes from the right to marshal the facts and to state the case. Like the rest of us I was still living in the future rather than in the terrific present; but after what I had seen and learned with the armies, the future meant at the worst 1919. To make sure of winning then, if we did not win before, and to concentrate on 1919 to the deep detriment of more remote periods, seemed certainly right. The reader, who now knows what actually happened and takes it all for granted, may be surprised that such issues were ever balanced. But at the time we had no right to count upon a Jena collapse. Even in famine the seed corn must be preserved. On September 5, I wrote for the Cabinet as follows:\n\n# TO THE WAR CABINET\n\nMUNITIONS POLICY.\n\n1. The extremely important paper written by the Chief of the Staff on the 25th July [not printed here] affirms the conviction that the German armies in the West could be decisively defeated in the summer of 1919, provided that we selected a climax, concentrated every available resource upon it, and subordinated intervening events to it. The method of mechanical attack was also set out by the General Staff, and our preparations to produce the necessary vehicles are at hand. The brilliant successes which have been gained, almost without intermission, since General Wilson's paper was written, reveal the justice of the above conception, with which, I may mention, General P\u00e9tain seems to be in the most complete accord. No doubt it is right to exploit to the full the present favourable situation, and we need not exclude the possibility of results being achieved of a very far-reaching character. On the assumption however that these results are not decisive, and that the winter closes down with an unbroken German front in the West, we ought now to have reached definite conclusions as to the character of next year's campaign. The questions involved affect directly every arrangement for munitions supply and man-power. All these questions can be settled harmoniously if they are related to some central design, if for the first time we have a definite war policy towards which every part of our organization contributes.\n\nAfter arguments designed to exclude any reservations in favour of 1920, I continued:\n\n2. The policy of aiming at victory next year would appear to require _inter alia_ the following measures:\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) The bringing over of the largest possible number of American troops.\n\n( _b_ ) In order to encourage the above, we must do our very utmost to arm, equip, and clothe them in advance of their own war industries.\n\n( _c_ ) All works of construction which cannot yield a war result during the period of climax in 1919 should be rigorously pruned.\n\n( _d_ ) Every effort should be made during the winter to accumulate munitions, and further releases from the munitions works should be stopped during that period; but in the early spring of 1919 large releases should again begin from the munitions works, and for this purpose our reserves of ammunition, filled and unfilled, should be decidedly drawn upon.\n\n( _e_ ) From March onwards every effort should be concentrated in the shipyards on vessels nearing completion, and there should be a definite diminution in the starting of new work or of long-dated work. A substantial contribution of men from Admiralty industries of all kinds should be made in time for them to reach the field trained during the battle period.\n\n( _f_ ) The release of coal miners from the mines should be renewed in the early spring, agreeably to the diminution in the output of munitions, and we should be prepared to run considerable risks in the winter of 1919 in coal supply in the effort of making victory certain.\n\n( _g_ ) It should be possible for the Navy to assist during the period of the decisive battle by releasing temporarily sailors and marines to strengthen the Army. There could be no better form for a naval contribution than to supply the men necessary to steer and manage, say, the last 2,000 British tanks to be completed before the battle.\n\n( _h_ ) The Air Force should conform in its development to the policy of a climax, _i.e._ , all establishments in this country should be cut down to the minimum during the decisive period. The Aerial Home Defence in all its forms should be temporarily cut down. The long periods of training and preparation which intervene between the handing over of machines and the formation of squadrons should in regard to the last batch of squadrons that can be completed in time be deliberately curtailed.\n\n( _i_ ) The people of the country as a whole should be taught to look for a climax and work for it. They would then be found to be ready to make very great sacrifices to secure victory, even if this involved a far harder state of life than anything we have yet experienced.\n\n_To the Prime Minister._\n\nCHATEAU VERCHOCQ,\n\n_September_ 9, 1918.\n\nBefore I can make definite proposals about steel, and consequently coal, I must first have the whole Munitions programme for 1919 worked out; and secondly I must know what the Americans are really going to require of us. The programme is now completed in draft, and I have made certain proposed reductions, the effects of which are being examined this week. I am to see the Americans in Paris on Wednesday or Thursday. When this is completed I shall be able to provide the Cabinet with a definite basis on which any necessary decision can be taken.\n\nI have however been looking into the question of ammunition expenditure out here under the new conditions which the War has taken, and I regret to say that, so far from offering hopes of reductions, there is every sign of increased demand. For instance, in each of the last two weeks of open fighting on the wide battle front they have fired over 70,000 tons, and they are now asking for a daily intake of over 9,000 tons against 5,000, 6,000 and 7,000 with which we have been able to satisfy them to date. It appears that although the prolonged bombardments, like Messines, etc., have been given up, the firing is now maintained by all the guns of the army over practically the whole front at once. The old limiting factor, namely the fatigue of the gunners, which imposed a certain limitation on the concentrated local operations of last year, is no longer present when all, or almost all, the batteries of the army are able to fire over the whole front. It would of course be quite impossible to continue to supply ammunition at the present rate indefinitely, and I do not think that will be demanded of us; but in view of the hopes in which I indulged when we last discussed this matter, I thought you ought to know at the earliest moment that very heavy demands, backed by very solid reasons, will come from the army for next year. In addition to this, if the prospects of a forward move mature, we shall have a largely increased demand for rails. I do not think it is impossible to satisfy both demands within reason, provided the right measures are taken, and provided the Admiralty bear their share in the consequent reductions.\n\nTo a certain extent coal can be economized if more tonnage can be given. For instance, every ton of steel I can get from the United States will save at least 4 tons of coal, and more if we use it in substitution of making steel from low grade British ores. It is really therefore impossible for me to make definite proposals about steel and coal without hearing definitely from the Shipping Controller what he is going to do for us next year. All this is going forward, and I deprecate a hasty decision on any one part of the programme until a general view can be taken. We are beginning these discussions much earlier this year than we did last year, and a fortnight or three weeks spent in getting all the cards on the table at once will certainly not be wasted. My own feeling is that there will be enough to meet all reasonable needs.\n\nThere is a considerable set-back here against the Air. There is no doubt that the demands of the Air Force on men and material are thought to be much in excess of the fighting results produced. There is no doubt that if Haig had to choose between 50,000 men for the Infantry and 50,000 men for the Air Force, he would choose 50,000 men for the Infantry. The reason is not that a man in the air is not worth more than a foot soldier, but that a man in the Air Force is not a man in the air, and that from 50 to 100 men are required in the Air Force for every one man fighting in the air. The magnificent performances and efficiency of the squadrons cannot be accepted as the final test. Everything ought to pay a proportionate dividend on the capital invested, and it is from this point of view that the Air Force should be tested. How much flying, for instance, is done by the Royal Naval Air Service for the 45,000 first-rate fighting men and skilled men they employ? How many bombs are dropped? How many submarines are sunk? How many flights are made? How many Germans are killed for the enormous expenditure of national energy and material involved? Again, take the balloons and the airships. Let a similar test be applied to them. You really cannot afford to let any part of your organization fail in this culminating period to produce continuously war results equal to its demand on the public resources.\n\nI do not think tanks would suffer by this comparison. At any rate, I am very ready they should be subjected to it. Up to the present there have only been about 18,000 men in the Tank Corps, and they have only had 600 or 700 tanks to use in action. It is universally admitted out here that they have been a definite factor in changing the fortune of the field and in giving us that _tactical_ superiority, without which the best laid schemes of strategists come to naught. It is no exaggeration to say that the lives they have saved and the prisoners they have taken have made these 18,000 men the most profit-bearing we have in the army. As for the demand which tanks have made up to the present on material and skilled labour, it is indeed a very modest one. I am having graphics prepared which will illustrate these facts. It has now been settled to raise the tanks to 35,000 men. This is only about half what will be needed for the tanks I shall actually have ready by the summer of next year. Although my outputs [at present] are only about half what I had expected, General Elles of the Tank Corps tells me 'that the tanks they have will see out the tank men this year.' The tank men are killed and wounded in considerable numbers, and the permanent wastage of the personnel is high, whereas the tank in any victorious battle recovers very quickly from his wounds and hardly ever dies beyond the hope of resurrection. A few months' sojourn in the grave is nearly always followed by a reincarnation, so long, that is to say, as he is not snaffled by the powers of evil. Apart from the above, the fatigue on the tank crews in action is very great, and the idea of the same crew working double relays of tanks will certainly not carry us very far.\n\nFrom the above it is clear to me that you will have large numbers of these invaluable weapons without the men to man them, and that therefore you will be faced with the need of handing over these unique products of British ingenuity, which properly used would give us a great influence and control over war policy, to our Allies who will not understand how to use them nearly so well as our officers and men would do. I do trust therefore that you will not quit the opinions which you held so strongly a few months ago, and in consequence of which preparations have already far advanced on an important scale. Although it is quite true that the Germans will develop their means of attacking tanks by anti-tank rifles as well as by field guns, land mines, etc., there are four new circumstances which will tend to make the tank an invaluable weapon next year. Here they are:\u2014\n\n(1) Greatly increased numbers. They will be able to afford to have a considerable proportion knocked out in each battle and yet have enough left at every point to secure success.\n\n(2) They have never yet developed smoke appliances, with which they are being fitted. Smoke as an aid to the attack, and particularly to tank attack, is only in its infancy. It is going to receive an enormous expansion next year.\n\n(3) They have never yet been used in darkness; but that was the original idea which I had when they were conceived. Hitherto they have not been capable of negotiating the accidents of ground by night, but with better tanks and a proportion, though only a proportion, of larger tanks, night operations will become possible at points where trench warfare has given place to open fighting.\n\n(4) The tactical man\u0153uvring power of the tank and its combined training with infantry are developing fast and will yield immensely improved results. Tanks are not opposed to infantry; they are an intimate and integral part of the infantrymen's strength.\n\nWhat has made it so difficult to develop a good policy about tanks has been the repeated shifts of opinion for and against them. Every time a new success is gained by their aid, there is an immediate clamour for large numbers. The moment the impression of that success passes away, the necessary men and material are grudged and stinted. I repeat what I said to you in my last letter\u2014that there ought to be nearly 100,000 men in the Tank Corps by the time the programme on which I am working by your express directions is completed.\n\nI spent yesterday on the battle-front, and guided by General Lipsett of the 3rd Canadian Division, went over a large part of the ground taken by us beyond Monchy. I walked over the Drocourt-Qu\u00e9ant line and went on up to the extreme high watermark of our attack. I noticed several remarkable things. The Drocourt-Qu\u00e9ant trench was strongly held with Germans, and it was a very fine, strong, deep trench. In front of it was a belt of wire nearly 100 yards broad. This wire was practically uncut and had only little passages through it, all presumably swept by machine guns. Yet the troops walked over these terrific obstacles, without the wire being cut, with very little loss, killed many Germans, took thousands of prisoners and hundreds of machine guns. Three or four hundred yards behind these lines was a second line, almost as strong and more deceptive. Over this also they walked with apparently no difficulty and little loss. Behind that again, perhaps a mile farther on, were just a few little pits and holes into which German machine guns and riflemen threw themselves to stop the rout. Here our heaviest losses occurred. The troops had got beyond the support of the tanks, and the bare open ground gave no shelter. In one small space of about 300 yards wide nearly 400 Canadian dead had just been buried, and only a few score of Germans. The moral appears to be training and tanks, short advances on enormous fronts properly organized and repeated at very brief intervals, not losing too many men, not pushing hard where there is any serious opposition except after full preparations have been made. It is the power of being able to advance a reasonable distance day after day remorselessly, rather than making a very big advance in a single day, that we should seek to develop. This power can only be imparted by tanks and cross-country vehicles on the largest scale.\n\nYou would have been shocked to see the tragic spectacle of the ground where our attack for the time being withered away. It was just like a line of seaweed and jetsam which is left by a great wave as it recoils.\n\nAt the end of September General Birch, Chief of the Artillery, showed me a captured German document which greatly affected my outlook. I drew the attention of the Cabinet to it on September 26 in a note on Ammunition from which the following is an extract:\n\nThere is no foundation for the view that the conditions of semi-open warfare which have now supervened in France and the abandonment of the prolonged artillery bombardment previous to assaults will afford us any relief in shell consumption. On the contrary, since this matter was last discussed in Cabinet, the heaviest firings yet recorded have taken place in France during a period of open warfare. For fifteen successive days the expenditure exceeded 10,000 tons a day. These very wide battles, fought on the fronts of two or three British armies simultaneously, in which almost all the guns in France are employed, use more and not less ammunition than was required for the intense local fighting of Messines, Passchendaele, etc. On the other hand, this great consumption of ammunition is being attended by remarkable results. A recent order of General Ludendorff's which has been captured states that in a single month more than 13 per cent. of the German artillery in the West has been completely destroyed by counter-battery fire. As this method is comparatively little used by the French, the main credit of this astonishing achievement falls to the British Artillery. A superior Artillery supplied with ample ammunition and working in combination with a superior and highly-trained Air Force is thus producing an immense effect, not only in destroying the enemy's power of resistance but in saving our own men. If the destruction of German artillery could be maintained at the rate stated by General Ludendorff, it would become practically necessary to replace the whole of the German artillery in the West, apart altogether from the wear of guns, twice in the course of a year. This would be quite impossible. We are therefore in this field of effort also perhaps within measurable distance of decisive and final results. It would be disastrous if, for any reason, we were compelled to stint our gunners in ammunition at the very time when the result of all the immense efforts which have been made to increase the power and perfect the combination of our Artillery and Air Services is coming to hand. Rather than do that we ought to be ready to make very great sacrifices indeed in every direction.\n\nI do not burden the reader with the further arguments about steel and tonnage to which this extract was the prelude. It carried to my mind the first sure sign that the end was approaching, and faster than we had dared to hope.\n\n# CHAPTER XXIII\n\n# VICTORY\n\n' _The fighting man shall from the sun_\n\n_Take warmth, and life from the growing earth;_\n\n_Speed with the light-foot wind to run_ ,\n\n_And with the trees to newer birth_ ,\n\n_And find when fighting shall be done_ ,\n\n_Great rest and fullness after dearth._\n\n_The thundering line of battle stands_ ,\n\n_And in the air Death moans and sings_ ;\n\n_But day shall clasp him with strong hands_ ,\n\n_And night shall fold him in soft wings_.'\n\nJULIAN GRENFELL.\n\nFlanders, _April_ , 1915.\n\nThe Culmination of the British War Effort\u2014New Combinations\u2014The German Railway System\u2014The Convergent Attack\u2014The Triple Plan\u2014The Eve of the Triple Battle\u2014The Southern and Northern Attacks\u2014The Centre Battle\u2014The British storm the Hindenburg Line\u2014The Weakest Link\u2014Surrender of Bulgaria\u2014The Final Battles\u2014Breaking Strain\u2014The Armistice Terms\u2014The Eleventh Hour\u2014German Military Effort\u2014The Future Hope.\n\nThe war was now entered upon its final phase. During the year 1918, the effort of Britain and of the British Empire reached its highest pitch. The Imperial forces in the field against the enemy in all theatres amounted to four and a half million men, and those under arms to nearly six millions. The strength of the Grand Fleet in vessels of every kind reached its maximum, and the Germans were no longer in a condition even to put to sea. The U-boat warfare was defeated and kept down by the operations of nearly 4,000 armed vessels flying the White Ensign. Under the protection of these agencies upwards of two million United States troops were transported across the Atlantic, of which more than half were carried in British ships, and landed in France during the year with hardly any loss of life by enemy action. The British Mercantile Marine of 20,000 vessels maintained the supply of all the British armies and carried without appreciable hindrance all the food and materials needed for the life of the British islands, for their war industries and for any commerce not required for war production. The control of the seas against the enemy in every quarter of the globe was absolute, and this result was obtained by the employment in the fighting fleets and flotillas, in the Mercantile Marine, in the Naval arsenals and dockyards, and in the shipbuilding yards of over 1,200,000 men. The British munition plants absorbing the labours of nearly two and a half million persons produced all the shell and artillery that the British armies could use, together with every other requisite in increasing abundance. In addition Britain furnished steel, coal, and other war materials in immense quantities to France and Italy, and was preparing, without prejudice to any other obligation, to supply the United States with the whole of the medium artillery required for an Army of eighty divisions for a campaign in 1919. All the preparations had been made, and the process was far advanced of fitting the British armies with technical equipment of every kind for 1919 on a scale in quality and in novelty far superior to any outputs yet achieved. In all there were actually employed under the Crown in the armies, in the fleets and in the war factories, excluding those engaged in the production of food, coal and civil necessaries, nearly eight million men and three-quarters of a million women. The financial measures needed to develop and sustain this prodigious manifestation had required in 1918 alone over three thousand million pounds sterling, of which one thousand millions were raised by the taxation of forty-five million persons in the British Isles and sixteen hundred millions were borrowed at home from the same persons and four hundred millions borrowed abroad mainly from the United States on the credit of the British Government.\n\nBut it is with the final effort of the British Army that this chapter is chiefly concerned. From the opening of the campaign of 1918 on March 21 down to the Armistice on November 11 the British armies in France suffered 830,000 casualties, and inflicted on the Germans in killed, wounded and prisoners, a comparable loss of 805,000 men. During the same period the French (and Belgians) sustained 964,000 casualties and inflicted 666,000 upon: the enemy. Up to July when the tide began definitely to turn, the British armies had already lost during the year chiefly in bearing the brunt of the German attack over 400,000 men. In spite of this loss they were almost continuously engaged in full battle and took from that time onwards at least as many prisoners and guns from the Germans as all the other Allied forces on the, Western Front put together. At the same time Great Britain provided the second largest Allied army in the Balkans and terminated the enemy's resistance in German East Africa. Finally, Great Britain and India bore unaided the whole burden of the war against the Turkish Empire, and with an army of over 400,000 men in Mesopotamia and nearly 300,000 men in Palestine, shattered or destroyed three-quarters of the whole remaining Turkish forces and conquered all the regions and provinces in which the operations took place. Such was the culminating war effort of a State which, before the campaign of 1918 began, had already been at war for three and a half years, suffered more than a million and three-quarters casualties, sustained a loss of over six and a half million tons of shipping and expended six thousand millions sterling. These facts and figures will excite the wonder of future generations.\n\nThe first stage of the Great Advance may be said to have closed on September 3. But once the general success of the Battle of Bapaume was assured, new and even wider combinations were open to Marshal Foch. Of the original projects of biting off the three German salients\u2014Amiens, Ch\u00e2teau-Thierry, St. Mihiel, and freeing the important lateral railways behind them, the two first and greatest were already accomplished, and the American enterprise against the third\u2014St. Mihiel\u2014was mounted and imminent. These great local operations which at one time had seemed sufficient for the year, could now be followed by a deliberately-conceived combined attempt, involving all the Allied forces, to break up the German front and drive their armies out of France before the winter.\n\nIt is now necessary to take a parting glance at the structure of railways on which the German armies in France had depended during the four years of the War. The tap root of their supplies was the main trunk railway ( **A** ) from the munition factories of Westphalia through Cologne, Li\u00e8ge, Namur and Maubeuge. Through Maubeuge ran in a crescent shaped **T** (lying thus  ) the great lateral line ( **B** ) on which the invading front was built, viz. the railway from Germany through Metz, Mezi\u00e8res, Hirson, Maubeuge, Mons, Ghent and Bruges. From this railway there branched southward and westward all the lines which with various subsidiary laterals fed the German armies spread fanwise towards Calais, Amiens and Paris. Behind the southern portion lay the rugged forest region of the Ardennes, comparatively roadless and railless, and an impassable barrier to the organized retreat of huge modern armies. The German Army in France was therefore strategically to a large extent 'formed to a flank' along their main lateral communications. If these were broken or they were driven beyond them, the bulk would never get away.\n\nFurther, nearly three-quarters of the whole German strength radiated from the lateral arc Mezi\u00e8res-Hirson-Aulnoye-Mons. The railway junctions of Mezi\u00e8res and Aulnoye (near the lost French fortress and railway centre of Maubeuge) were therefore vital organs of the enemy. If these junctions could be captured or paralysed, the immense mass of invaders depending on them, or on the lateral line between them, would be cut off. Hitherto the Germans had not been in any strategic anxiety. The front with its successive systems of defence stood, except before Verdun, 50 miles ahead of the lateral line. But now the front was bending and recoiling fast, and the margin of safety space narrowed day by day.\n\nLastly it must be remembered that all the traffic from the Flanders front, from the Arras front, from the Somme and the Aisne front, as well as the bulk of that from the Argonne, passed in the end through Li\u00e8ge. This bottle neck was too small to cope with the deluge of retreating stores and munitions, and at the same time to supply the imperative to-and-fro needs of the armies when all were continually in heavy battle.\n\nThese considerations dictated the movements of the Allies. It was obvious that apart from Verdun, barred by its inferior communications, the nearest point at which the most deadly blow could be delivered upon the enemy was the junction of Aulnoye near Maubeuge. A British advance against the enemy's front, Cambrai-St. Quentin, in the direction of Maubeuge would if successful compromise and compel the early retreat of all the hostile armies deployed with the Ardennes at their back between Maubeuge and Verdun. This, from the moment when these possibilities came into the practical sphere, was the goal of Sir Douglas Haig. Marshal Foch independently from his higher standpoint held of course the same view; and it fell to him to concert the whole immense operation. He had however at General Pershing's desire lent himself reluctantly to an American advance upon Metz and into the Saar Valley, if the St. Mihiel attack succeeded. This was an irrelevant and divergent feature. If the British Army was to undertake the tremendous task of smashing through the Hindenburg Line and advancing upon Maubeuge, it was imperative that all other operations should aim at the vital point and contribute to the supreme result. Haig therefore at the end of August urged Foch to alter the American offensive from a divergent to a convergent direction, i.e. from east to north-west, and towards Mezi\u00e8res instead of towards Metz. Foch entirely agreed, and after further conferences with Pershing obtained his assent to the change of plan.\n\nOn September 3, Marshal Foch's 'Directive' prescribed that while (1) the British Armies supported by the left of the French Armies continue to attack in the general direction Cambrai-St. Quentin, and (2) the centre of the French Armies continues its action to drive the enemy beyond the Aisne and the Ailette, (3) the American Army after delivering at the latest by September 10 their attack on the St. Mihiel salient should prepare 'as strong and violent an offensive as possible in the general direction of Mezi\u00e8res, covered on the East by the Meuse and supported on the left by the attack of the Fourth French Army (Gouraud).'\n\nIn addition to this, by a Note of September 8, Foch prescribed a third offensive in Belgium in the general direction of Ghent, A new army group was to be formed comprising the British Second Army (now again under Plumer), the Belgian Army and a French contingent, in all sixteen infantry and seven cavalry divisions. These forces were placed under the command of the King of the Belgians with the French General D\u00e9gouttes as Chief of the Staff. The attack was in principle a left-handed scoop pivoting on the British troops holding the Lys near Armenti\u00e8res.\n\nSuch was the gigantic triple offensive of the Allies: towards Mezi\u00e8res by the French and Americans; towards Maubeuge by the British; and towards Ghent by the Belgians and British with a French contingent. The time was fixed for the end of September. The interval was filled by the forward movement of the Allied armies towards the new main fronts of assault. This involved important preliminary battles. Of these the first and most famous was the attack by the First American Army on the St. Mihiel salient. On the morning of September 11, nine United States divisions (each equal in infantry numbers to two and a half French or British divisions) and three French divisions broke into the St. Mihiel salient. The German and Austrian defenders who had already been ordered to evacuate were caught in the early stages of that operation. The Americans attacking with the utmost ardour penetrated at the first shock of their Eastern attack nearly 6 miles upon a front of 11. On the 12th they joined hands across the salient with their western attack, and by the 14th when the operation was completed had captured 16,000 prisoners and 450 guns. On September 18 the Fourth and Third British armies attacked on a 17 mile front centring on Ep\u00e9hy, with the object of bringing the main forces into striking distance of the Hindenburg Line. This preparatory battle was most severe. The British advanced about 3 miles and captured 12,000 prisoners and 100 guns, but with heavy loss. Meanwhile the French armies slanting back from the British right had on the night of the 8th surprised the crossings of the Crozat Canal, and by continual fighting emphasized and exploited the German retreat.\n\nThe map, which was given to me by Sir Douglas Haig, shows the position of all the troops on the Western Front on the eve of its largest battle. Colonel Boraston discharges a necessary task when he sets forth the respective forces on the three fronts of the assault. The facts which follow are based on his account, independently checked. For the southern battle there were assembled 31 French and 13 United States divisions, the latter equal in rifle strength to at least 30 French divisions; a total comparable mass of above 60 Ally divisions. To this the enemy opposed 1 Austrian and 19 German divisions of which 6 were first-class troops. For the northern battle the Allies had gathered 8 Belgian, 5 British and 3 French Infantry divisions, with 1 Belgian, 3 British and 3 French cavalry divisions. Against this army stood 12 German divisions, 4 of good quality. But in the central battle the Germans were actually superior in numbers to the British. No less than 57 German divisions, 18 of which were assault divisions, were concentrated in the battle area behind the far-famed defences of the Hindenburg Line. To storm these fortifications and to defeat the German masses upon its front, Sir Douglas Haig could marshal no more than 40 British divisions and the IInd American Corps. Moreover, the interposition of the Canal du Nord and the Scheldt Canal deprived the British attack almost entirely of the aid of tanks.\n\nEach of these episodes would make a thrilling monograph, but these pages can only record in a few sentences the outstanding results.\n\nPershing and Gouraud fell on shoulder to shoulder at daybreak on the 26th, the Americans engaging on a 20-, the French on a 24-mile front. The Americans, undaunted by severe losses, stormed the German first system of defences on almost the whole front of attack and penetrated at some points nearly 6\u00be miles. Gouraud's army also advanced from 1\u00bc to 2\u00bc miles, but thereafter neither attack made much progress. The American supply arrangements broke down, the roads became hopelessly blocked for tens of miles with stationary vehicles. The nourishment of the American fighting line with food, ammunition and reinforcements was only achieved partially and with extreme difficulty. The German counter-attacks retrieved some of the lost ground, and in places cut off or destroyed the American units which had advanced the farthest. The ground was difficult in the extreme, and a weltering deadlock supervened for several weeks. During this time however the French and Americans captured 39,000 prisoners and 300 guns, and held the outnumbered German forces stoutly in their grip.\n\nThe northern battle was victorious. The Germans, overmatched, fell back before the assault, the British and Belgian divisions fought their way forward through the awful desolation of the Ypres-Passchendaele battlefield, and in three days stood on the Menin-Roulers road 10 miles from their starting-point, having captured with small losses nearly 11,000 prisoners and 300 guns. The French contingent was not at this stage engaged.\n\nThe centre battle had begun on the 27th, on which day the extraordinary obstacle of the Canal du Nord, with its cutting often 60 feet deep, was stormed by the right of the First Army (Horne) and the left of the Third (Byng). Upon a 13-mile front, a four-mile advance was achieved with a capture of 10,000 prisoners and 200 guns. This enabled the rest of the Third Army and the Fourth Army (Rawlinson) to come into action to the southward. Rawlinson's artillery in the absence of tanks in large numbers had on this occasion subjected the Hindenburg positions to 48 hours' intense bombardment in the old style. Nevertheless when his army attacked on the 29th it encountered a most severe resistance. The American Corps led the centre of the assault. They were supported and were to be leap-frogged by the Australians. A noble rivalry\u2014carried by the Americans to an utter disregard of losses\u2014prevailed between these proud soldiers, sprung from the same stock, speaking the same language, yet drawn from far distant quarters of the globe and by different paths of history. Several strong posts in advance of the German front had not as was intended been reduced on the previous day, and moreover both American divisions started 1,000 yards behind their barrage. Over a part of the attack their dead lay 'in orderly lines' mowed down by machine-gun fire. Elsewhere their extraordinary ardour carried them deep into the German defences. The great tunnel through which the canal passed and the deep dugouts of the long prepared fortifications disgorged strong German forces who took the ambitious assailants in rear, and cut off and slew large numbers. But all fought desperately without thought of retirement. The war-experienced Australians advanced in succour, and after further close and bloody fighting all the ground was gripped and held.\n\nThis tragic glorious episode was only a part of the Fourth Army's battle, and all three British armies were fully and continuously engaged. By the night of the 30th the Hindenburg Line on a front of 25 miles was blasted and pierced to an average depth of seven miles, and 36,500 prisoners and 380 guns were reported to Sir Douglas Haig. The total British casualties in France from the beginning of September to October 9 were over 200,000, of which 6,500 officers and 133,700 men fell in the series of battles for the Hindenburg Line, otherwise called Cambrai-St. Quentin. To these must be added 6,000 Americans, or a fifth of the infantry of the United States IInd Army Corps. The battle and advance were continued from the 8th to the 10th October, 20 kilometres being gained by the latter date on the whole Cambrai-St. Quentin front and 12,000 more prisoners and 230 guns being captured. Under the impulsion of this tremendous central thrust and of the northern and southern battles, the Germans withdrew their forces in all the intervening sectors of the front. They were followed in the closest contact by all the opposing Allied troops.\n\nYet it was only indirectly from the tremendous collisions in the West that the final blow to German resisting power came. The theatre where the war had languished in a costly and futile fashion since the summer of 1915, the theatre in which exertions were universally condemned by all the highest military authorities of the Allies, was destined to produce the culminating decision. The strength of a chain, however ponderous, is that of its weakest link. The Bulgarian link was about to snap, and with it the remaining cohesion of the whole hostile coalition. This event was not however induced by local circumstances. It resulted from the consternation which followed the defeat of the German armies in France. On September 15, agreeably with the general forward movement of the Allies on all the fronts, the so-called Salonica Army developed an offensive against Bulgaria, having for its central objective the important town and railway junction of Uskub. It was indeed a heterogeneous army that advanced under the orders of Franchet d'Esperey, the ultimate successor of Sarrail. Eight French, seven British, six Greek (Venizelist), six Serbian, and four Italian Divisions\u2014all under strength, wasted with fever, and modestly equipped with artillery, set themselves in motion against the mountainous frontiers of Bulgaria. Seventeen Bulgarian and two Turkish divisions, gripped and guided by a few German battalions and batteries and the prestige of Mackensen, constituted a force ample for a successful defence of such difficult country. But the Bulgarians would fight no more. Bulgaria quitted the field as sullenly, as callously, and as decidedly as she had entered it. The accession of the tepid Malinoff Ministry to power in the last week of June had caused anxiety in Berlin, and had afforded to the diplomacy of the Allies a fertile opportunity. In particular the influence of the United States, who had never declared war against Bulgaria and whose representative was still in Sofia, was exerted with potent skill.\n\nAfter weak resistance, which nevertheless revealed the advantages of the defenders, the Bulgarian soldiers retreated, ceased to fight, and declared their intention of going to their homes to gather the harvest. These sturdy peasants were deaf to German expostulations. They were quite friendly to the small German forces which steadily advanced to sustain the front. The retreating battalions even spared the time to help the German cannon out of the ruts. But turn, or stand, or fight\u2014all that was over for ever!\n\nOn the night of September 26, a Bulgarian Staff Officer carried a flag of truce to General Milne's Headquarters, and in the name of his Commander-in-Chief sought a 48-hours' suspension of hostilities, to be followed by a peace delegation. On the 28th, Bulgaria agreed unconditionally to demobilize her army, to restore all conquered territory, to surrender all means of transport, to cease to be a belligerent, and to place her railways and her territory at the disposal of the Allies for their further operations.\n\nI was in Paris with Loucheur when the news arrived, and it was recognized at once that the end had come. On September 29 a Conference convened at Spa on Ludendorff's initiative decided to approach President Wilson, whose 'high ideals' fostered hope, with proposals on behalf of Germany for an armistice. On October 1 Hindenburg under the pressure of the Triple battle, demanded that the request for an armistice should be made by the next morning. On October 4 King Ferdinand abdicated the Bulgarian crown and fled to Vienna. This extraordinary figure, who combined the extremes of craft, fierceness, resolution, and miscalculation, now vanished from view. It had been twice in his power to achieve a large part of those overweening ambitions of his country which he so ardently championed. Alike after the first Balkan war (against Turkey) in 1912, or before Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915, he could, by taking a different and easier course, have raised his country to the headship of a Balkan confederation: but the erroneous valuations on which the power and logic of his mind based itself in complete exclusion of moral factors, forced him at immense personal risk and toil to thrust his country twice over into utter disaster.\n\nThose who choose the moment for beginning wars do not always fix the moment for ending them. To ask for an armistice is one thing, to obtain it is another. The new Chancellor\u2014Prince Max of Baden\u2014sent his Note to President Wilson on the 5th. He based himself on the 'Fourteen Points,' which in the name of Germany he accepted. The President replied on the 8th, asking questions and demanding a German withdrawal from invaded territory as a guarantee of good faith. On the 12th Germany and Austria declared themselves willing to evacuate all invaded territory as a preliminary to an armistice. On the 14th the President indicated that there could be no negotiation with the Emperor. As for an armistice, the conditions must be left to the Commanders in the field, but absolute safeguards must be provided for the maintenance of 'the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field.' During this correspondence, which Mr. Wilson was peculiarly fitted to conduct, and which promised to be lengthy, the Allied armies rolled forward, all along the line in France, maintaining a ceaseless battle at an ever more powerful crescendo of attack. The vital German lateral railway still worked in front of the Ardennes. Pershing and Gouraud were steadily approaching it in the south and Haig's heavy artillery already held Aulnoye Junction under continual fire. On the northern flank King Albert's army advanced upon Courtrai. The German troops in the wide intervals between these main thrusts fell back continually in conformity with battle results. Ludendorff's reserves were exhausted. A large proportion of his Divisions could not be relied upon to fight with determination; all were reduced to a third or a fifth of their fighting strength. The Siegfried Line collapsed at many points. Feverish exertions were made to fortify the Antwerp-Meuse positions, and Ludendorff with true instinct but tardy decision began to survey a line along the German frontier. Desperate agitated councils were held between the military leaders and the new political figures who had appeared. On the 20th the German Government renounced the submarine campaign. Meanwhile in Italy the whole of the Italian Army with their Allies\u2014Lord Cavan's British Army in the van\u2014hurled themselves across the Piave upon the forces of the liquefying Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the last week of October completely shattered their military value. The Vatican stretched out an appealing hand. On November 4 an armistice which deprived the Empire of the Hapsburgs of every means of resistance, and placed her territories at the disposal of the Allies for further operations, brought hostilities in this theatre to an end.\n\nThe British armies had now passed the Selle River, taking in the process 21,000 prisoners and 450 guns, and were marching swiftly forward on Valenciennes, Mons and Maubeuge, driving the enemy before them. The ardour of the troops knew no bounds. The conviction that the terrible enemy they had fought so long was breaking up under their hammer blows, and the rapture and joy of the liberated populations, made them more ready to sacrifice their lives in these last days than even in the darkest periods of the war. Every soldier felt himself at once a Conquerer and a Deliverer. The same impulses inflamed the Americans. As for the French, who shall describe the emotions with which haggard and torn, but regardless of a loss which in these last months (July to November) exceeded half a million men, they day by day battered down their ancient foe, and redeemed the sacred soil of France?\n\nThe armistice for which Hindenburg and Ludendorff had argued wore by now the aspect of an unconditional surrender. Ludendorff thereupon wished to fight on, declaring with truth that nothing could worsen the terms which Germany would receive. On the 27th the German Government, being resolved on total submission, moved the Emperor to dismiss him from his post Hindenburg remained 'greatly falling with a falling State.' To him and to the German machine gunners belong the honours of the final agony.\n\nWhen the great organizations of this world are strained beyond breaking-point, their structure often collapses at all points simultaneously. There is nothing on which policy, however wise, can build; no foothold can be found for virtue or valour, no authority or impetus for a rescuing genius. The mighty framework of German Imperial Power, which a few days before had overshadowed the nations, shivered suddenly into a thousand individually disintegrating fragments. All her Allies, whom she had so long sustained, fell down broken and ruined, begging separately for peace. The faithful armies were beaten at the front and demoralized from the rear. The proud, efficient Navy mutinied. Revolution exploded in the most disciplined and docile of States. The Supreme War Lord fled.\n\nSuch a spectacle appals mankind; and a knell rang in the ear of the victors, even in their hour of triumph.\n\nParliament was disposed to be suspicious of the Armistice terms until they heard them. But when the document was read overwhelming thankfulness filled all hearts. No one could think of any further stipulation. Immediate evacuation of invaded countries; repatriation of all inhabitants; surrender in good condition of 5,000 guns, 30,000 machine-guns, 3,000 minenwerfers, 2,000 aeroplanes; evacuation of the left bank of the Rhine; surrender of three bridge-heads on the Rhine; surrender of 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 waggons, 5,000 motor lorries in good working order (and with spare parts); disclosure of all mines, of delay-action fuses, and assistance in their discovery and destruction; immediate repatriation without reciprocity of all prisoners of war; abandonment of the Treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk; surrender of 6 battle-cruisers, the best 10 battleships, 8 light cruisers, 50 of the best destroyers; surrender of all submarines; the right of the Allies on failure of execution of any condition to denounce the Armistice within 48 hours. Such were the covenanted clauses. And thus did Germany hand herself over powerless and defenceless to the discretion of her long tortured and now victorious foes!\n\nIt was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I stood at the window of my room looking up Northumberland Avenue towards Trafalgar Square, waiting for Big Ben to tell that the War was over. My mind strayed back across the scarring years to the scene and emotions of the night at the Admiralty when I listened for these same chimes in order to give the signal of war against Germany to our Fleets and squadrons across the world. And now all was over! The unarmed and untrained island nation, who with no defence but its Navy had faced unquestioningly the strongest manifestation of military power in human record, had completed its task. Our country had emerged from the ordeal alive and safe, its vast possessions intact, its war effort still waxing, its institutions unshaken, its people and Empire united as never before. Victory had come after all the hazards and heartbreaks in an absolute and unlimited form. All the Kings and Emperors with whom we had warred were in flight or exile. All their Armies and Fleets were destroyed or subdued. In this Britain had borne a notable part, and done her best from first to last.\n\nThe minutes passed. I was conscious of reaction rather than elation. The material purposes on which one's work had been centred, every process of thought on which one had lived, crumbled into nothing. The whole vast business of supply, the growing outputs, the careful hoards, the secret future plans\u2014but yesterday the whole duty of life\u2014all at a stroke vanished like a nightmare dream, leaving a void behind. My mind mechanically persisted in exploring the problems of demobilization. What was to happen to our three million Munition workers? What would they make now? How would the roaring factories be converted? How in fact are swords beaten into ploughshares? How long would it take to bring the Armies home? What would they do when they got home? We had of course a demobilization plan for the Ministry of Munitions. It had been carefully worked out, but it had played no part in our thoughts. Now it must be put into operation. The levers must be pulled\u2014 _Full Steam Astern._ The Munitions Council must meet without delay.\n\nAnd then suddenly the first stroke of the chime. I looked again at the broad street beneath me. It was deserted. From the portals of one of the large hotels absorbed by Government Departments darted the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractedly gesticulating while another stroke resounded. Then from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street. Streams of people poured out of all the buildings. The bells of London began to clash. Northumberland Avenue was now crowded with people in hundreds, nay, thousands, rushing hither and thither in a frantic manner, shouting and screaming with joy. I could see that Trafalgar Square was already swarming. Around me in our very headquarters, in the Hotel Metropole, disorder had broken out. Doors banged. Feet clattered down corridors. Everyone rose from the desk and cast aside pen and paper. All bounds were broken. The tumult grew. It grew like a gale, but from all sides simultaneously. The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic. Streams of men and women flowed from the Embankment. They mingled with torrents pouring down the Strand on their way to acclaim the King. Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away, the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium. At any rate it was clear that no more work would be done that day. Yes, the chains which had held the world were broken. Links of imperative need, links of discipline, links of brute force, links of self-sacrifice, links of terror, links of honour which had held our nation, nay, the greater part of mankind, to grinding toil, to a compulsive cause\u2014every one had snapped upon a few strokes of the clock. Safety, freedom, peace, home, the dear one back at the fireside\u2014all after fifty-two months of gaunt distortion. After fifty-two months of making burdens grievous to be borne and binding them on men's backs, at last, all at once, suddenly and everywhere the burdens were cast down. At least so for the moment it seemed.\n\nMy wife arrived, and we decided to go and offer our congratulations to the Prime Minister, on whom the central impact of the home struggle had fallen, in his hour of recompense. But no sooner had we entered our car than twenty people mounted upon it, and in the midst of a wildly cheering multitude we were impelled slowly forward through Whitehall. We had driven together the opposite way along the same road on the afternoon of the ultimatum. There had been the same crowd and almost the same enthusiasm. It was with feelings which do not lend themselves to words that I heard the cheers of the brave people who had borne so much and given all, who had never wavered, who had never lost faith in their country or its destiny, and who could be indulgent to the faults of their servants when the hour of deliverance had come.\n\nIt will certainly not fall to this generation to pronounce the final verdict upon the Great War. The German people are worthy of better explanations than the shallow tale that they were undermined by enemy propaganda. If the propaganda was effective, it was because it awoke an echo in German hearts, and stirred misgivings which from the beginning had dwelt there. Thus when four years of blockade and battle against superior numbers and resources had sapped the vitality of the German people, the rebellious whispers of conscience became the proclaimed opinion of millions.\n\nYet in the sphere of force, human records contain no manifestation like the eruption of the German volcano. For four years Germany fought and defied the five continents of the world by land and sea and air. The German Armies upheld her tottering confederates, intervened in every theatre with success, stood everywhere on conquered territory, and inflicted on their enemies more than twice the bloodshed they suffered themselves. To break their strength and science and curb their fury, it was necessary to bring all the greatest nations of mankind into the field against them. Overwhelming populations, unlimited resources, measureless sacrifice, the Sea Blockade, could not prevail for fifty months. Small states were trampled down in the struggle; a mighty Empire was battered into unrecognizable fragments; and nearly twenty million men perished or shed their blood before the sword was wrested from that terrible hand. Surely, Germans, for history it is enough!\n\nThe curtain falls upon the long front in France and Flanders. The soothing hands of Time and Nature, the swift repair of peaceful industry, have already almost effaced the crater fields and the battle lines which in a broad belt from the Vosges to the sea lately blackened the smiling fields of France. The ruins are rebuilt, the riven trees are replaced by new plantations. Only the cemeteries, the monuments and stunted steeples, with here and there a mouldering trench or huge mine-crater lake, assail the traveller with the fact that twenty-five millions of soldiers fought here and twelve millions shed their blood or perished in the greatest of all human contentions some twenty years ago. Merciful oblivion draws its veils; the crippled limp away; the mourners fall back into the sad twilight of memory. New youth is here to claim its rights, and the perennial stream flows forward even in the battle zone, as if the tale were all a dream.\n\nIs this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe?\n\n# APPENDIX J  \nBRITISH, FRENCH AND GERMAN OFFICIAL CASUALTY RETURNS.\n\nTOTAL BRITISH CASUALTIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT MONTH BY MONTH.\n\n# APPENDIX K  \nALLY AND GERMAN DREADNOUGHT AND BATTLESHIP STRENGTH, 1917\n\nA TABLE SHOWING HOW TWO SEPARATE DREADNOUGHT FLEETS COULD HAVE BEEN FORMED IN 1917, EACH SUPERIOR TO THE TOTAL GERMAN FLEET.\n\nThe heavy monitors must be added to the Inshore Fleet, viz., 4 mounting 2\u201415-inch guns, 4 mounting 2\u201414-inch guns, 8 mounting 2\u201412-inch guns; total 16, mounting 32 guns.\n\nTo appreciate the gun-power of these fleets, the weight of projectiles of each calibre must be remembered:\u2014\n\nThe relative weight of broadside from the primary guns alone of these three fleets is approximately as follows:\u2014\n\n# APPENDIX L  \nTHE MINISTRY OF MUNITIONS COUNCIL, 1917\u201318\n\nTHE COMPOSITION OF THE MUNITIONS COUNCIL AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF BUSINESS.\n\nTHE MINISTER.\n\nTHE FINANCIAL SECRETARY.\n\nTHE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY.\n\nGROUPS OF DEPARTMENTS UNDER MEMBERS OF COUNCIL.\n\nF. _Finance._ \u2014Sir HERBERT HAMBLING.\n\nFinance\u2014Munitions Works Board\u2014Controlled Establishments Finance\u2014Munitions Contracts\u2014Lands\u2014Central Stores\u2014Salvage.\n\nD. _Design._ \u2014Major-General the Hon. F. R. BINGHAM, C.B.\n\nDesign\u2014Inspection\u2014Trench Warfare Design\u2014Munitions Inventions.\n\nS. _Steel and Iron._ \u2014JOHN HUNTER, Esq.\n\nIron and Steel Production\u2014Factory Construction.\n\nM. _Materials, etc._ \u2014Sir ERNEST MOIR, Bart.\n\nNon-Ferrous Metals\u2014Scrap Metals\u2014Development of Mineral Resources\u2014Government Rolling Mills\u2014Transport: Railways, Overseas, Trench Warfare\u2014Forwarding and Receiving\u2014Railway Materials\u2014Cranes\u2014Optical Munitions\u2014Potash.\n\nX. _Explosives._ \u2014Sir KEITH PRICE.\n\nExplosives Supply\u2014Trench Warfare Chemical Supplies\u2014Mineral Oil Production\u2014Royal Gunpowder Factory, Waltham Abbey.\n\nP. _Projectiles, etc._ \u2014Sir JAMES STEVENSON, Bart.\n\nArea Organization\u2014Gun Ammunition\u2014Gun Ammunition Filling\u2014Trench Warfare Ammunition, filling and supply other than Trench guns and howitzers\u2014Small Arms Ammunition\u2014Munitions Gauges\u2014Central Clearing Bureau\u2014Timber.\n\nG. _Guns._ \u2014Sir GLYNN WEST.\n\nGuns and Carriages (Supply and Repair)\u2014Trench Guns and Howitzers\u2014Machine Guns, Revolvers, Pistols, etc.\u2014Rifles, Bayonets, etc.\u2014Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield Lock\u2014Royal Ordnance Factories, Woolwich.\n\nE. _Engines._ \u2014Sir ARTHUR DUCKHAM, K.C.B.\n\nAeronautical Supplies\u2014Petrol Engines Supply\u2014Mechanical Transport\u2014Mechanical Warfare\u2014Agricultural Machinery\u2014Electric Power Supply\u2014Machine Tools\u2014Stampings and Castings.\n\nA. _Allies._ \u2014Sir FREDERICK BLACK, K.C.B.\n\n(Temporarily, Sir CHARLES ELLIS, K.C.B.)\n\nL. _Labour._ \u2014Sir STEPHENSON KENT, K.C.B.\n\nLabour Regulations\u2014Labour Supply\u2014Housing\u2014Welfare.\n\n_Secretariat._\n\nCouncil Secretariat\u2014Parliamentary and General\u2014Legal\u2014Requirements and Statistics\u2014Establishment\u2014Special Intelligence\u2014Priority.\n\nVery shortly afterwards an additional group was constituted for Requirements and Statistics, Mr. W. T. Layton being appointed Member of Council \"R.\" In October, 1917, the Master-General of the Ordnance, Major-Gen. Sir W. T. Furse, K.C.B., D.S.O., was invited to become an Honorary Member of Council, representing the War Office.\n\nIn February, 1918, the Engines Group was sub-divided, and Sir William Weir became Member of Council \"A,\" in charge of an Air Group. In July, 1918, the remainder of the Engines Group was replaced by the newly organized Warfare Group, including Trench Warfare and Inventions, under Major-Gen. the Rt. Hon. J. E. B. Seely, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P., who was appointed Member of Council \"W.\"\n\n# APPENDIX M  \nMUNITIONS MINUTES AND LETTERS.\n\n_To Sir Douglas Haig._\n\n_July_ 26, 1917.\n\nI take this early opportunity of writing to you to tell you how earnestly I shall endeavour to study your wishes and sustain the efforts of the Army by every means which falls within the scope of the Ministry of Munitions. I hope you will rely upon me to do this, and will let me know at once if there is any way in which I can serve you.\n\nThere are many difficulties here, both with labour and materials, especially steel, and at this stage of the War it will often become necessary to choose between desirable things and to throw special emphasis on this or on that branch of production.\n\nIf you have any suggestions which will improve the _liaison_ which should be maintained between certain branches of this Department and the Army you will, I hope, let me know them.\n\nLater on, when I am better informed and you are less busy, it would be a good thing for us to have a talk in order that I may carry out the general directions with regard to supply which I receive from the War Office with a complete and sympathetic understanding of your needs and wishes.\n\nI was tempted to tell you when we met what was in store for me, but I thought on the whole it was better to wait for the _fait accompli._\n\nADMIRALTY STEEL REQUIREMENTS.\n\n_To Lord Curzon._\n\n_July_ 26, 1917.\n\nI send you herewith an early copy of the Memorandum which has been prepared on the Steel question in this Department.\n\nI am sorry that I shall not be able to be with you on Friday afternoon; but I feel I ought to go to Dundee to-night and give personal attention to the contest on Friday and Saturday.\n\nI think you will feel that the position disclosed in the Steel papers is fairly conclusive against the possibility of giving full and immediate effect to the new Admiralty demand. On my return I will make a further effort to overcome the difficulties and see if better proposals can be put forward. But, broadly speaking, I hope you will decide to remit the general question of principle to the further consideration of the War Cabinet having regard to the facts which are now disclosed. It is worth noting by the way that the July import of Ore is now estimated at 550,000 tons, or nearly 200,000 tons drop on the corresponding month of last year.\n\nDo you not think also that the Admiralty use of steel for other purposes than merchant shipbuilding requires to be reviewed: for instance, we started the War with a fairly good supply of ammunition for every class of gun having regard to the character of sea battles. During the three years that have followed, we have been enormously increasing our stocks, and apart from practice ammunition have been firing very little away. In my time the advance was very great, and standing orders were given as to production, which I know Balfour long kept in operation. The reserves now accumulated will be found to be out of all proportion to what would be necessary to sink the German Fleet even under the most unfavourable circumstances. The American Navy has come in, etc., yet you will see that the Admiralty demands for shell steel are increasing mouth by month.\n\nAgain, an important proportion of the steel involved in the enlarged Admiralty demand is no doubt for the construction of destroyers for anti-submarine warfare. Here it is important to ask what kind of destroyer is being built for this purpose. The 1912\u201313 destroyer, for which I was responsible, lifted six or seven knots on its predecessor, attaining the immense speed of thirty-six or thirty-seven knots without sacrifice either of gun-power or sea-keeping capacity. These boats, which are almost miniature cruisers, were designed to catch and hunt down the best destroyers of the German Navy in their own waters across the broad distances of the North Sea. It is obvious that quite a different class of destroyer, much smaller and more humdrum, is required for submarine hunting far out of reach of all German surface ships. Twenty-five knots for instance with all the economies in money and material that follow from a sacrifice of speed would be quite sufficient for such a purpose. Yet, if I am rightly informed, we continue to reproduce the highest type, although the War object for which it was created has been largely rejected.\n\nIt would be easy to add to these examples, but I only mention these two in the hope that this aspect of our Steel expenditure will not be lost sight of when it comes to adjudicating with inevitable severity between the competing claims of various services.\n\nMUNITIONS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES.\n\n_To Mr. Balfour (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs_ ).\n\n_August_ 2, 1917.\n\nDuring the last few days I have been thinking about the proper organization of our non-diplomatic communications with America, which as you know are being considered in several aspects at the present time.\n\nThere seem to me to be three distinct stages:\u2014\n\n(1) The Inter-Allied Council called for by Mr. McAdoo to settle a united demand on America on the basis of shipping and credit, and to divide up the total agreed upon between the respective Allies. This is already well on the road.\n\n(2) The organization within each British Department for the detailed formulation of their needs and for the day to day conduct of their business with America. At present a variety of persons communicate through various channels with their Agents and opposite numbers in America. This cannot be a good way of carrying on business, and must lead to gaps, contradictions and overlapping. I am arranging that all communications for America from this Office are collated and despatched by one man with a proper Staff.\n\n(3) The inter-departmental organization on this side of the business communications with America from the various Departments. This is also _en train_ , and I attach the proposals which have been prepared here by my directions in response to the request of the Prime Minister for the creation of what is called an 'American Board.' It is undoubtedly necessary that such co-ordinating machinery should exist, and it ought to be possible to create it and set it in motion without either interfering with the departmental responsibility and initiative, or introducing a new element of delay. You will see that we proposed in the beginning that the 'American Board' should only have copies of the cables which are passing, but that as they get into their stride they should take over the whole business of their despatch.\n\nIf this threefold organization is established all our business communications with the United States will pass through one transmission point on this side, and will be received at the same point for distribution to the various Departments. But do you not think that there should also be one transmission point and addressee on the other side? Ought not the Northcliffe Mission to be organized as a regular department, and all communications, for whomsoever intended, be addressed to the Secretary of that department for distribution under the authority of the Head of the Mission to the various Agents and persons affected and for collateral information? I should be quite prepared to place all our business agents in America directly under Lord Northcliffe in exactly the same way as departmental officers are under a Minister here.\n\nAlthough this system looks a little cumbrous I do not see how any of the stages can be omitted. A strict routine may here and there cause some inconveniences, but these are not comparable to those which arise when a considerable number of persons push ahead cheerily on their own affairs without knowledge of what others are doing or concert with them.\n\n_The Advisory Committee._\n\n_Mr. Hunter._\n\n_August_ 9, 1917.\n\nMonsieur Thomas, in his interview with me yesterday, informed me that there were no less than 700,000 tons of steel which had been paid for by the French lying stranded for want of shipment in America. Surely the lifting of this steel, whether to France or to this country, should be a first charge on our shipping resources. I presume the ships which carry ore from Northern Spain would not be capable of carrying steel across the Atlantic, but it seems the poorest economy of tonnage, labour and dollars not to transport this vital commodity to Europe. If you are in agreement with this, you should state a strong case for the Shipping Controller and for the information of the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.\n\nIt also seems very probable to me that the best plan we could make for the utilization of our resources in the new Programme of 1918 would include the carrying of all this steel to France and Great Britain as one of its fundamental features.\n\nRESERVES OF GUNS.\n\n_Secretary: (Mr. Layton\u2014for action.)_  \n---  \n_Advisory Committee  \nSir Glynn West_ | } | ( _For information_.)\n\n_August_ 15, 1917.\n\nPray consider the following in regard to the reserve of guns:\u2014\n\nIn a small army engaged in what is believed to be a short period of intense war, as was our original expeditionary force, a reserve of guns was rightly provided and kept idle on the communications in order to replace gun casualties and losses in batteries. But now that the war is maintained on the front of very large armies only fractions of which are heavily engaged at any given time, and when it is carried on continually year after year as a regular business, no reserve of idle guns is needed. The ultimate gun reserve of the army should be a repairing organization in the highest state of activity and on the greatest scale. The emergency reserve of guns consists in putting a greater strain upon the lives of the existing guns through keeping them in the line for short periods after they should normally be withdrawn. From this it would appear that the reserve of guns to be provided in the programme of 1918 should not be taken as an arbitrary figure like 25 per cent., but should be that figure which is required to flush and feed the repairing organization to its utmost capacity. Let me see calculations worked out on this latter basis. The experience of the present offensive should yield the data and the programme of guns in the field, and their ammunition provided at present for 1918 should give the scale.\n\nTHE NEW PROGRAMME.\n\n_Secretary:_\n\n_Advisory Committee on New Programme._\n\n_Mr. Layton._\n\nWe must now be asking ourselves the question. 'In what direction are great expansions of our war-making machinery possible in 1918?' Artillery will remain a fairly constant factor, and the steel situation must exercise its limiting power. Ought we not then to look to a gigantic expansion of trench mortars and their organization to a pitch as high as that now attained by our Artillery? Would it not be possible for the trench mortars properly concerted to take the whole trench-pounding business off the hands of the Artillery and leave them free for attacking lines in rear, for counter-battery work and all services of man\u0153uvre? Could we not greatly increase our supply of explosives? Have we not already got large surplus and expansive power in this field? Could we not use cast-iron carcases to pass these explosives over to the enemy? I am imagining an expansion in 'short range artillery' ten or even twenty times as great as anything yet witnessed, and the whole organized by telephones, etc., to the same high standard of action as our present artillery. You should look into this field from the point of view of materials available.\n\nSide by side with this 'short range artillery' we must explore the provision of very long range guns, and long range howitzers. I have asked Sir Glynn West to report upon the possibilities of utilizing old naval guns which may be placed at our disposal. There must be at least eighty 12-inch, and perhaps twenty 9\u00b72-inch guns available from ships which have been or will be laid up almost immediately. To make these guns effective for land service, railway mountings or other carriages will be necessary. Which are the best patterns? How long would they take? What would be saved in time by adapting naval guns to land service as against building guns specially? Secondly, assuming there were a saving of time in utilizing existing naval guns, could the ammunition for these guns be got ready so as to make the saving of time effective? Thirdly, what can be done to prolong the life of these guns, ( _a_ ) by reducing the charges and working out new range tables accordingly; ( _b_ ) by providing new 'A' tubes? Is it not possible to devise and organize rapid relining plants? Would it not be possible to put a tube like a 'Morris' tube in a 12-inch gun and make it fire a 9-inch or 10-inch shell and to arrange for the rapid replacement of such tubes? This after all is only applying the sub-calibre principle to actual service. We ought not to be prepared to take 'No' for an answer on this question of extending the firing capacity of long range guns. The reason that their lives are short is that the inner tube wears out. That is the difficulty which has to be got over, and is not the obvious solution to have light rapidly replaceable inner tubes? It is for invention to solve this difficulty.\n\nThe above is without prejudice to the development of long range 6-inch gun fire.\n\nThe development of aeroplanes is now clearly before us as a great expansive feature of the campaign of 1918, and preparations to that end are far advanced. Are we sure they are thoroughly concerted between all departments concerned? Is the bombing programme keeping pace with aeroplane construction and projectile construction? Can our explosive supply stand at once the double increased demand ( _a_ ) of an enormous trench mortar expansion and ( _b_ ) of an enormous aerial bombing programme? In my opinion the manufacture of explosives should be pushed to the extreme limit, this being the governing factor. When this governing factor is ascertained it will then become incumbent upon us to find means of delivering the explosives to the enemy, and if the existing methods of distribution do not suffice to get rid of the explosives, new methods of conveying them must be developed. Do not let us be worried about having too much explosives on our hands. There is plenty of storage room behind the German lines.\n\nI will deal with the Tank programme\u2014i.e. mechanical infantry, on separate papers shortly.\n\nThe above is only to assist you in your survey of the resources and possibilities, and of course I am very imperfectly informed as to what these may be.\n\nTHE STRIKE OF THE CUMBERLAND MINERS.\n\n_Mr. Layton._\n\n_August_ 23, 1917.\n\nI want the following facts for my meeting with the Cumberland miners to-morrow:\u2014\n\n50,000 tons of iron ore have been lost in consequence of the fortnight's strike and holidays. This 50,000 tons of ore would have made 50,000 tons of steel. How many ships of the Board of Trade standard pattern could have been made from 50,000 tons of steel? How many tons of wheat could those ships have brought to this country in the year 1918?\n\nAgain, during the last few months the German submarines have been devoting every effort to sinking iron ore cargo upon the seas and in the last two, three, or four months they have succeeded in sinking\u2014how many tons? I believe I am right in supposing that the fortnight's cessation of work on the Cumberland field has inflicted more injury on our shipping and food supply next year than all the efforts of the German submarines have been able to inflict in one, two or three months as the case may be.\n\nPray have these figures checked for me by to-night.\n\nMAN POWER AND MATERIALS.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_August_ 26, 1917.\n\nThe Ministry of Munitions is affected at every step by the treatment of the man-power problem.\n\nThe distribution of man power between the different services can only be settled by the War Cabinet. The War Cabinet cannot decide unless they know the effect of any particular distribution on munitions, agriculture, shipbuilding, etc. It would be easy for me, in conjunction with Sir A. C. Geddes, to afford the Cabinet all the necessary data; and after they had decided it would be easy for me to agree with Sir A. C. Geddes upon the best way, or the least injurious way, to carry out the decision.\n\nBut to do this it is indispensable that I should only have to deal with one authority. If the man-power question is split up among a variety of Departments out of touch or at variance with each other, and each cutting in on the labour market and on labour sentiment at numerous points, a continuance of the present friction, confusion, and inefficiency is certain. The greatest cause of irritation in the labour world at the present time is, in my opinion, the recruiting muddle. The questions which are arising every day among munition workers can easily be settled between two closely allied Departments. They are insoluble under present conditions.\n\nI trust that in this war emergency a simple clear-cut policy will be followed, viz. that all material should be supplied by one Department and all men by another, and that these two Departments shall work in the closest concert. Every divergence from this, however tempting or persuasively argued, can only weaken our war-making capacity.\n\nTHE AEROPLANE PROGRAMME.\n\n_To the War Cabinet._\n\n_September_ 25, 1917.\n\n1. There is no reason to suppose that the immense programme of Aeroplane Construction which has been sanctioned cannot be achieved. The estimates of progress have so far been substantially confirmed by results.\n\n2. The Aeroplane Programme will of course be frustrated if its requirements in skilled labour and materials are not met, as they certainly can be met. Still more is this true, if the claims of the Admiralty or of the War Office involve large withdrawals of skilled labour from munition supplies. If, for instance. Admiralty requirements are to be accorded super-priority or 'Admiralty Priority' without regard either to the effect upon munitions programmes or to the possibilities of internal economies in the Admiralty use of their present appropriation, the obvious consequences will follow. The matter is one entirely for the Cabinet, and any decision they may take can be easily given effect to. It must however be remembered that a decision to give priority to one class of supply is _ipso facto_ cancelled by a subsequent decision to give priority to another class of supply. It will be no use complaining afterwards when the inevitable consequences of such decisions mature.\n\nThe Zeppelin Programme for the Navy is a case in point.\n\nIt is suggested that all Departments engaged in the prosecution of the war should receive an equally searching investigation in order to ascertain the use they are making for effective war purposes of the labour and material at their disposal. It is impossible for any one Department to judge the relative importance of its own claims. That can only be done by the War Cabinet as a consequence of their General War Plan for 1918, which is not known to individual Departments.\n\nMEMORANDUM ON PROTECTION FROM AIR RAIDS.\n\n_October_ 5, 1917.\n\n1. I have given directions that dug-outs and shelters are to be immediately provided under approved schemes in the whole of the munition factories in the bombing areas. Many private firms have already taken these measures with great advantage. The labour will be found from the people employed in the factories. The work should not take long. The loss on output must be accepted; it will certainly be much less than the loss caused by the people scattering to their homes whenever an air-raid alarm is given. There will also be a great gain in the feeling of confidence imparted to the workers. I hope these arrangements will be complete within ten days.\n\n2. I consider that generally speaking people are entitled to a safe shelter within reasonable distance of their homes or their work. I consider that in or near each street a house or houses should be prepared affording reasonable security to the residents, and that in the vicinity of all large works, whether munitions or other, an adequate provision should be made for everyone. This of course would vary in each case with the facilities and materials available. I am impressed by the rapidity by which shelters have been provided in some of the munitions areas already, and I do not believe the task will be found a very formidable one. I expect the Germans are already hard at work providing proper shelters in the cities likely to be attacked. It is especially important to the confidence of the population that in working-class areas consisting almost entirely of frail two-storey dwellings there should be sufficient shelters prepared. Where there are larger houses an issue of sand-bags and of leaflets containing clear printed directions as to the parts of the house which are safe, the dangers to be avoided, etc., should meet the case. I do not see why the work should not be done by volunteers working under the local authorities, assisted by the military forces in the country. There are scores of ways of giving efficient protection. There are thousands of officers and others in this country thoroughly acquainted with the methods. As long as people have a safe place to go to when firing begins and are compensated for the damage done to their houses, they will stand a great deal of hammering and get back to their work promptly when it stops. All the defences can be improved gradually.\n\nCHEMICAL WARFARE SUPPLIES.\n\n_Secretary._\n\n_October_ 16, 1917.\n\nWhat are the factors which impose limits on the chemical supply? How much labour\u2014and of what classes\u2014is now engaged in the existing chemical supply? How quickly and to what extent could it be increased? I am anxious to consider the possibility of a supply on the largest possible scale of cast-iron chemical shells to all or almost all natures of guns to be fired with reduced charges so as not to affect the lives of the guns and so to be a definite addition to the offensive power of our artillery. At present we are limited by steel and the lives of guns. If we can devise a type of ammunition which affects the lives of guns to a far less degree than ordinary shell and does not require steel, we shall have entered a new field of expansion, which expansion should only be limited by the labour involved and by the special materials required in chemical manufacture. Both in the case of high explosives and lethal chemicals we must push our production to the maximum and devise methods of conveying it to the enemy. I have derived the impression that we are so far only trifling with chemical warfare, and that we have got to prepare ourselves for action on an entirely different scale. I look to General Thuillier in the first instance to make proposals for very great increases, and it will then be possible to see how far these plans can be reconciled with other needs. Chemical warfare must be one of the three or four leading features of our campaign of 1918.\n\n'HIGHER CEILINGS.'\n\n_Sir William Weir._\n\n_October_ 24, 1917.\n\nA dangerous feature in the last Zeppelin raid has been masked by the disaster which overcame the raiders on their way back. It is clear that the German counted on the height at which the Zeppelins of the newest pattern can now fly as a means of resisting all forms of existing aeroplane attack. Apparently this calculation is at present well founded. If that is so, we ought to find without delay a means of sending aeroplanes up to even greater heights at night. I presume this point is being studied. Evidently they thought they could fly here with safety and certainty at altitudes where they could not be touched. It appears to be very important that experimental work to secure greater height records in aeroplanes should be pressed on.\n\n# APPENDIX N  \nWAR MEMORANDA  \nMECHANICAL POWER IN THE OFFENSIVE\n\nMr. Montagu having requested me to express my views on the question of the greater application of mechanical power to the prosecution of an offensive on land, I have prepared the following rough notes:\u2014\n\n1. The conditions of this war deny to the stronger power, whether on sea or land, its legitimate offensive scope. In all previous wars the stronger army was able to force matters to a final decision. The great developments of defensive power now prevent this.\n\n2. We shall never have a superiority in numbers sufficient to triumph by itself. At present the fighting forces are much too evenly balanced. We have, perhaps, a superiority of five to four in fighting formations on all fronts, but the enemy's advantage of being on interior lines more than covers this. Even if we have a superiority of six to four, that will be insufficient, and we are not likely to see a greater superiority than this for a very long time.\n\n3. Frontal attacks were abandoned forty years ago on account of the severity of fire. Now that the severity of fire has enormously increased and is constantly increasing, they are forced upon us in the absence of flanks.\n\n4. Two methods of frontal attack have been tried. First, the unlimited, like at Loos and Champagne, where the troops were given a distant objective behind the enemy's lines and told to march on that; and second, the limited form as tried by the Germans at Verdun, and by ourselves and the French on the Somme. Neither produces decisive results. The unlimited simply leads to the troops being brought up against uncut wire and undamaged machine guns. The limited always enables the enemy to move his artillery away, and to sell a very little ground at a heavy price in life, gaining time all the while to construct new defences in the rear. It is true the limited attack has achieved a great deal in wearing down the enemy, but it is a disputed question whether the attacker does not wear himself down more, and certainly it was so in the case of the German attack on Verdun. Nothing in the great operations on the Somme affords any promise of finality or of a definite decision.\n\n5. We must, therefore, either find another theatre or another method.\n\n6. Leaving out the strategic question of other theatres and looking solely to method, it is clear that to achieve decisive results we must be able to make an advance in one bound of 7,000 or 8,000 yards, thus capturing the whole line of the enemy's guns. If this were done from two converging points on the well-known pincer principle, the enemy in front of our attack and in between both attacks would equally be destroyed, and an irreparable gap opened.\n\n7. Therefore the problem is to advance a large army in one bound 7,000 or 8,000 yards. Is that problem insoluble? Let us see first of all exactly what it is that stops us.\n\n8. An attack depends on two processes\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Blasting power and\n\n( _b_ ) Moving power;\n\nblasting power is very well provided for in the constantly improving supplies of guns and shells, but moving power is in its infancy.\n\n9. Two things stop the offensive movement of armies\u2014\n\n( _a_ ) Bullets and fragments of shell which destroy the motive power of men, and\n\n( _b_ ) The confusion of the conflict.\n\n10. Bullets would be much less well directed at night, but on the other hand confusion would be much greater.\n\n11. If there were any means therefore by which confusion at night could be overcome, it would be a gigantic advantage. Under present conditions movement at night is almost impossible. The labyrinths of trenches, wire, craters, and natural accidents of ground impose insuperable obstacles to the movement of large forces. Everybody loses his way, and everything miscarries.\n\nYet it is at night that the offensive would have, if it could only act, all the advantages. It knows what it wants to do. The defensive has to wait on it, and cannot move, even when it knows, until daylight comes. Therefore if there were an army able to develop the faculty of being able to carry out a sustained, concerted, continuous attack on the greatest scale, with the utmost precision and lack of confusion, throughout the dark hours, that army would have an inestimable advantage. It would move directly and surely to its goal; and morning would reveal an arrangement of forces arising wholly out of the preconceived decisions of the attackers.\n\n12. If to this advantage you can add a comparative immunity from bullets and fragments, you are a long way on the road to decisive victory.\n\n13. Here note that the object of fire is to scatter as many small missiles as possible. If steel protection against these small missiles can be afforded, the enemy is thrown back on the direct hit of a shell. By day it has been proved this is extremely rare on a moving target. By night it is practically impossible. A moderate multiplication of targets will baffle the direct hit. Darkness will prevent it except as a pure fluke.\n\n14. If it should be found that the self-same methods which enable you to overcome the difficulties of confusion at night also impart this comparative immunity from missiles, we should be in presence of a military fact of the first order.\n\n15. Such a method exists. It may be shortly described as 'the attack by armoured vehicles.' I cannot pretend to do more than outline it and suggest it. I am not an inventor or designer. I have no means of testing and elaborating these ideas. Evidently they require study, experiment, and at least six months' preparation.\n\nBut now is the time in the winter to organize and perfect this method of attack. The 'Tanks' have shown the way. But they are only a beginning.\n\nA hiatus exists between inventors who know what they could invent, if they only knew what was wanted, and the soldiers who know, or ought to know, what they want, and would ask for it if they only knew how much science could do for them. You have never really bridged that gap yet.\n\nParenthetically, let me point out the need of establishing without delay an Anti-Tank Committee to study the methods by which tanks can be defeated. This body should work in the closest harmony with those concerned in the production and design of tanks, each striving to defeat the other, exchanging information and perfecting their methods. It is not to be supposed that the Germans will not develop tanks in their turn. We have the enormous advantage of being able to experiment on ourselves with them, and to find out the best ways by which they may be defeated. We ought to have a complete anti-tank outfit by the spring. This is only what the Admiralty did before the war in keeping continually at work submarine and anti-submarine committees.\n\n16. Subject to what I have said of the tentative and suggestive character of these observations, I will try to indicate the kind of attack I have in mind.\n\nBroken ground, which forbids movement of bodies of troops by night, is passable to armoured vehicles.\n\nIf you look at the films lately exhibited you see that men moving over the broken or pock-marked ground, now rising on the crest of a crater, now descending into its trough, seem as much out of their element as a man overboard in a rough sea, while a tank forges along like a ship. You must master the physical difficulties of this broken terrain. You don't expect to accomplish your blasting process with human hands. You use several thousand guns and several million shells. Why should you suppose the moving process can be achieved simply through the agency of human legs? You must use the proper machinery in both cases.\n\nObserve, the obstacles remain a constant, but the size and power of the machine to overcome them is capable of considerable expansion.\n\n17. The passage of suitable machines will roll paths or grooves, smooth and flat, across the terrain. Everyone will be able to follow them. In fact, by night they cannot do anything else. Instead of labyrinths of trenches and unknown terrain, you will have a pattern of smooth rectilineal tracks, cut more or less deeply into the surface and traversing trenches, etc. These tracks will supersede or superimpose themselves upon all other communications and accidents of ground during the night. The deeper they can be cut or squashed down the better. Along these smooth, unmistakable tracks movement will be possible for the attackers.\n\nObserve, incidentally, that the enemy's guns will be laid on the old communication trenches and regular night lines. They will not fire on these new tracks except by chance. Anyhow, it is proved artillery barrages alone will not stop good troops.\n\n18. It will be possible to direct the movement of these track-making machines with accuracy and certitude. A good helmsman steering on a compass bearing will make the exact point required surely and punctually, and the assaulting infantry and all their appurtenances can follow, and _can only follow_ , where he has led.\n\n(I omit details like shaded lights of various colours pointing backward along each path; every brigade its own particular series of coloured lights.)\n\n19. Not only is the advance in a straight line possible; any portion of the attack can be turned to any fresh direction simply by the helmsman altering course according to chart and plan.\n\nTherefore you can make your great plans with the utmost detail beforehand, and can be sure of having ten hours of darkness in which you will be able to unfold them stage by stage; while the enemy cannot make any important movement until morning, and can only fire his artillery on fixed points which you are mainly avoiding, and before dawn you will have been able with certainty to place your troops and their necessary supplies wherever you have designed.\n\nThis then is the foundation:\u2014\n\nThe advance of a large number of track-making machines and the stamping through this agency of a pattern upon the ground which will guide and govern the development of the attack.\n\n20. But there are a great number of details and accessories with which I am ill-equipped to deal. Please therefore take my numbers only as tokens.\n\nLet us assume two converging pincer attacks, each on a 15,000 yard front with (say) an equal distance in between.\n\nAssume ten divisions for each attack with five more in reserve.\n\nTotal assaulting divisions = 30.\n\nBrigades attack on 500 yard frontages. Each brigade requires a track of its own.\n\n10 by 3 = 30 tracks in each attack.\n\nTwo machines to each track (in case of accidents).\n\nTotal 60.\n\nTwo attacks = 120.\n\nAdd 30 for margin = 150 trackmakers.\n\n( _Note._ \u2014A trackmaker may also be a fighting-machine of a very powerful character.)\n\nMinimum rate of advance\u20141 to 2 miles per hour.\n\n21. Cover and clear the advance of the trackmakers by 300 fighting-tanks in each attack.\n\nTotal 600.\n\nTwo trackmakers and five tanks line ahead on each track, five tanks man\u0153uvring in the intervals.\n\n*On every alternative track one armoured trench-cutter for lateral communication and consolidation purposes.\n\n*On every other track one tramway-laying or duckboard-laying mechanical unit. These last follow the assaulting infantry.\n\n22. Formation of assaulting infantry.\n\nFirst and second waves of assaulting infantry advance sheltered by the Tanks and trackmakers, and guided accurately by them, probably in platoon columns of fours, with shield-carriers at the head and on the flanks.\n\n_Note._ \u2014Infantry should carry nothing but rifles, grenades, cartridges, food, water, and steel protection. They approach shielded but fight naked. The shield, which must be small and partial, leads you at once to the phalanx. A number of men, each partially protected by metal, will reciprocally protect each other.\n\nAll this must be ascertained by experiment, and may break down under experiment.\n\nEvery infantry battalion will have _two caterpillar tenders:_ Total, 240 in each attack; 480 in the whole.\n\nThese are lightly protected motor-lorries mounted on caterpillars. They follow along the tracks and carry everything the infantry requires\u2014grenades, ammunition, smoke apparatus, food, etc.\n\n23. Caterpillar batteries\u2014\n\nTwenty-five 4 gun 18-pr. batteries in each attack; 200 vehicles total. Fifty heavy gun caterpillar trailers.\n\n24. Total armoured vehicles\u2014\n\nTrackmakers | 150  \n---|---  \nFighting tanks | 600  \nTrench cutters | 50  \nCaterpillar tenders | 480  \nCaterpillar artillery (light and heavy) | 250  \nTotal | 1,530\n\n25. The foregoing must be taken as a mere sketch. The central conception is that a successful attack of this kind must be viewed as a whole, and all the different kinds of tools and tackle required made in concert like an outfit or a plant: everything should be foreseen and fitted into a general plan, like the large volume which contains a battleship design. It is not a case of merely building a lot of things on the chance that they will be useful, but of assembling the exact tools that you require for a particular, well-understood, mechanical job.\n\n26. Don't familiarize the enemy by degrees with these methods of attack. Apply them when all is ready on the largest possible scale, and with the priceless advantage of surprise.\n\nW. S. C.\n\n_November_ 9, 1916.\n\nPARAGRAPHS OF MY MEMORANDUM OF OCTOBER 21, 1917, OMITTED FROM TEXT.\n\nII.\n\n8. During the Somme offensive the British artillery fired an average of 26,000 tons of shell a week. During the twenty-two weeks of the present offensive the average has been 47,000. If the programmes on which we are now working are executed, the average weight of shell per week available during the whole of the 1918 offensive should rise to approximately 66,000 tons. Both the guns and ammunition on that scale are being provided. This figure however constitutes our maximum. The magnitude of the effort should not be underrated. Steel is the limiting factor, and, having regard to increased shipbuilding demands and declining tonnage of imported ore, no further expansion can be expected....\n\n9. On the other hand, we have not yet reached the limits of our High Explosive supply. Many of our factories have been working short time, and others are almost closed down. Our capacity for manufacturing High Explosives considerably exceeds our present means of discharging it upon the enemy through the agency of steel guns and shells. If therefore we are to realize our full potentiality, we should develop other additional methods of discharging High Explosive upon the enemy.\n\n10. Two methods readily suggest themselves. The first is by aeroplane bomb. This will be dealt with in its place. But the second, and far the most important method, can be found in an extensive development of trench mortars. This would be possible, within limits which are being accurately ascertained, without making inroads upon our limited supplies of steel, or competing seriously with other important supplies. Thus a new and additional method of making war on the enemy would be created.\n\n11. In order that this proposition may be fairly judged, it is necessary to consider it in its true tactical relation. Trench mortars have not hitherto played an important part in our operations. Except in the opening stages of a great offensive, it has been found impossible to use them. Once the ground has been torn up by the bombardment and the troops have advanced on to the battlefield, it is not physically possible to carry up into close proximity to the firing-line the masses of ammunition which they require, especially when the enemy is firing ceaselessly upon the communications with his concentrated artillery. On the main battle-front therefore, or on ground where the rival artilleries are concentrated, trench mortars are relegated to a subsidiary part.\n\n12. But none of these difficulties hamper the employment of trench mortars on a scale many times greater than has yet been practised, provided they are used not on the main battlefield but on other and quieter parts of the front One or more sectors of the front, each fifteen or twenty miles long, can be chosen in advance and loaded up with large stores of trench-mortar ammunition which can be carried up during quiet periods for those sectors and safely stored without imposing undue labour on the troops holding the line, and without\u2014and this is the important point\u2014revealing any trace to the aeroplane photograph. The mortars themselves are very easy to make and to establish, and owing to their extreme rapidity of fire the numbers required are not excessive. The manufacture of the mortars and of the ammunition sufficient for a series of very considerable operations could be prepared without encroaching upon our steel or sensibly affecting artillery or other programmes. In this way the Ministry of Munitions would be able to utilize the full limit of their explosive capacity, and the trench-mortar armament would come as a clear addition to the offensive power of the army.\n\n13. The range of tile mortar is already more than 1,000 and will it is believed soon be raised to about 1,500 yards. Even greater ranges are confidently hoped for. Thus if 40 to 50 miles of our Front were systematically prepared with this trench-mortar installation, it would be possible during the culminating period, and at the true psychological moment in relation to the main battle, to pulverize and rip away the whole of the enemy's first system of trenches simultaneously or successively over very considerable stretches of the Front. On these quiet sectors of the Front the enemy has few troops and no concentration of artillery. It is possible even that because he is weak he maintains in the first system a larger proportion of such troops as he has on the ground than is now his habit on the actual battle-front. Such troops as he has there are resting and recovering from the ordeal of the main battle. The well-recognized symptoms which indicate the preparation of an offensive, viz., the massing of guns, the development of railways, the digging of assembly trenches, &c., would all be lacking. The priceless element of surprise might therefore be secured. No great superiority of infantry would be required to yield the moderate and limited results which are to be expected from this subsidiary method of attack. On the other hand, the bombardment on a great scale by trench mortars firing heavy bombs is certainly not less formidable so far as the range allows than even the most severe artillery attacks. If it is thought worth while to cultivate this addition to our offensive power, estimates will be furnished by the Ministry of Munitions showing the full scale on which trench mortars and ammunition could be provided. It would, however, be indispensable to the efficient execution of any of these schemes that the trench-mortar service should be organized as a special branch, and that it should receive its due proportion of the best officers and men.\n\n14. We have in fact to contemplate the simultaneous or successive concerted fighting of two different kinds of battles involving in their aggregate all the practicable portions of the front. There is the main battle or battle of Exhaustion, and the subsidiary battle or battle of Surprise. They mutually aid each other, and it might well be that the results of the battle of Exhaustion would be reaped on the battlefield of Surprise. The battle of exhaustion is appropriate to ground which the enemy cannot afford to give up, of which he has to contest every yard. The battles of surprise are appropriate to the less strategically significant portions of the front. The battle of exhaustion should proceed as at present by regular steps from the earliest period of the campaigning season until the culminating period is reached. The battles of surprise should then be successively released until the whole front, now at one point now at another, is involved. The methods of the battles of surprise should be wholly different from those of the battle of exhaustion. The material required should as far as possible not compete with the needs of the main battle. Above all the preparation should not reveal the conventional symptoms of an offensive to a hostile aeroplane photograph. It is believed that both these conditions can be satisfied.\n\nIII.\n\n15. There are other means besides trench mortars for delivering the battle or battles of Surprise. The original conception of the Tanks was to use them ( _a_ ) by night, ( _b_ ) by surprise, ( _c_ ) as a novelty, ( _d_ ) as an independent arm, ( _e_ ) in an operation specially planned for them under the most favourable weather conditions, and ( _f_ ) on ground not torn up by artillery. The comparatively small numbers that have been so far available, the imperfections of their design, the urgent needs of the army, have led to an almost complete reversal of all these conditions. Tanks have been condemned to wallow in twos and threes in broad daylight in the most astounding crater fields, confronted by the enemy's massed artillery, and where every special preparation has been made to receive them. Even so they have played their part. But the resources of next year will for the first time make available numbers of Tanks with trained personnel, sufficient not only to act as auxiliaries to the infantry in the main battle, but to provide the forces necessary for attacks of their own under the most favourable conditions and on a very large scale. While the existing pattern of Tanks will be available in considerable numbers to support the main operations of the army during the spring and early summer, it should be possible by July to provide an ample force of a greatly improved pattern, lighter, faster, and with far greater radius of action. It will not be necessary, as with the present types, to bring these Tanks up in close proximity to the battlefield some days before the attack. They can be held back along an arc 15 to 20 miles from the centre of attack, and concentrated for battle by complete surprise. There is no need to elaborate these possibilities. At present, however, only 18,000 men are assigned for the Tank Corps. This imposes severe limitations on this method of multiplying infantry men.\n\n16. The third factor which could be made to play its part in the battles of Surprise is Railway Artillery. The French have made a very great development of this, using for the purpose all kinds of long-range guns, old and modern, taken from their Navy and their fortresses, and mounted on many kinds of carriages, from the most complex to the most primitive. The total number of guns of all kinds employed by the French in this special service amounts to not fewer than 1,100, and next year it is contemplated to raise the number to 1,800. Approximately two-thirds of these guns fire from railway mountings, and the rest are moved by tractors. The method in contemplation is to construct in four or five or even more selected sectors of the front the necessary sidings from which the railway guns can be brought into action. Thus, even if the enemy notices these preparations beforehand, he has no means of knowing at any given moment which of the four or five points of attack is going to be used. He could be further mystified by a camouflage preparation of additional points of attack. It should thus be possible to secure for the heavy artillery, or at least an important portion of it, that mobility from one part of the front to another which is essential to surprise. The French general who commands this service ('Artillerie lourde \u00e0 grande puissance') states that with good arrangements, well thought out and prepared during the winter, it should be possible to bring into action in a single night 300 or 400 powerful long-range guns in a sector where previously the enemy had no reason to expect an attack.\n\n17. The relation of this method to the other factors available for Surprise battles is obvious. If preparations were begun now and continued throughout the winter, the British Front might be equipped not only with trench-mortar installations covering wide sectors, but also with the railway facilities and railway artillery necessary to enable a heavy artillery to intervene in battles of Surprise at several alternative or successive points of attack. The possibilities so far as materials are concerned are being thoroughly examined in the Ministry of Munitions. Simplified forms of mountings of various kinds, including a new 'semi-mobile' pattern, are being designed. If, as we have been led to believe, the manning requirements of the Navy for their new programme for anti-submarine craft of all kinds should necessitate during next year the laying up of large numbers of older battleships, it is possible that a considerable supply of guns might be obtained from this source. Many of our fortresses at home and abroad also contain guns which are not likely to be required and could now be safely spared for a more urgent service. It ought to be possible without an undue strain on either our labour or material to develop by next summer a very considerable force of mobile and semi-mobile ( _i.e._ , requiring a concrete bed) heavy artillery together with a series of 'jumping-off grounds' from which it could act as required.\n\n18. Thus our front might during the winter be systematically prepared both with the properly protected stores of trench-mortar ammunition and the railway facilities for the long-range artillery which would enable the Commander-in-Chief to move powerful trench-mortar and heavy artillery organizations from sector to sector with great rapidity and ease and open up a series of Surprise battles all along the front at the psychological moment of, or in the necessary interludes between, the great attacks on the main battlefront. There are of course many other factors in connection with the swift movement of troops laterally or from points in rear to particular sectors of attack; but these fall outside the scope of a paper written solely from the point of view of munitions. It may, however be mentioned that a very large reserve of mechanical transport manufactured for Russia, but not now required for that purpose, is available and idle.\n\nIf, however, our Army next year found itself endowed with the power at four or five different points ( _a_ ) to pulverize the enemy's front system up to a depth of 1,500 yards with trench mortars, and ( _b_ ) simultaneously to bring a greatly superior heavy long-range artillery into action both by complete surprise and at periods accurately related to the main operation, it would possess the means of sensibly extending the scope and enhancing the intensity of its offensive action.\n\nIV.\n\n19. Most important of all the mechanical factors which are available, comes the Air Offensive. So much progress in thought has been made on this subject, even since this paper was under preparation, that it is not necessary to dwell upon it at any length. But there are certain general principles which may be stated or re-stated.\n\nWar proceeds by slaughter and man\u0153uvre. Man\u0153uvre consists either in operations of Surprise or in operations against the flanks and communications of the enemy. Owing to the lines now stretching continuously from the Alps to the sea, there are no flanks. But the Germans, striking under the sea at our vital communications, have threatened us with a decisive peril, which we are warding off only by an immense diversion of our resources. If we take on the one hand the amount of national life-energy which the Germans have put into their submarine attack, and compare it with the amount of national life-energy we are compelled to devote to meeting and overcoming that attack, it will be apparent what a fearfully profitable operation this attack on our communications has been to the enemy. Would it be an exaggeration to say that for one war-power unit Germany has applied to the submarine attack we have been forced to assign fifteen or twenty?\n\nEven better than an operation against communications is an operation against bases. Air predominance affords the possibility of striking at both. It can either paralyse the enemy's military action, or compel him to devote to the defence of his bases and communications a share of his straitened resources far greater than what we need in the attack.\n\n20. All attacks on communications or bases should have their relation to the main battle. It is not reasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself. It is improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the Government of a great nation to surrender. Familiarity with bombardment, a good system of dug-outs or shelters, a strong control by police and military authorities, should be sufficient to preserve the national fighting power unimpaired. In our own case we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids. Nothing that we have learned of the capacity of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or indeed that they would not be rendered more desperately resolved by them. Therefore our air offensive should consistently be directed at striking at the bases and communications upon whose structure the fighting power of the enemy's armies and his fleets of the sea and of the air depends. Any injury which comes to the civil population from this process of attack must be regarded as incidental and inevitable.\n\n21. The supreme and direct object of an air offensive is to deprive the German armies on the Western Front of their capacity for resistance. It must therefore be applied and reach its maximum development in proper relation to the main battles both of Exhaustion and Surprise during the culminating period of our general offensive. German armies whose communications were continually impeded and interrupted and whose bases were unceasingly harried might still, in spite of all that could be done from the air, be able to maintain themselves in the field and keep the front. But if at the same time that this great difficulty and menace to their services in rear had reached its maximum, they were also subjected to the intense strain of a great offensive on the ground proceeding by battles both of Exhaustion and Surprise, the complete defeat and breaking up of their armies in the West as a whole might not perhaps be beyond the bounds of possibility. There is an immense difference between merely keeping an army fed and supplied on a comparatively quiescent front in spite of air attacks, and resisting the kind of offensive which the British are delivering at the present time. It is imperative that the defending army should be able to move hundreds of thousands of tons of stores and ammunition within very limited times to the battle-front, and to maintain a most rapid circulation of hundreds of thousands of troops; and the double strain of doing this under a really overwhelming air attack might well prove fatal. More especially might this be hoped for if the form of our offensive were not confined simply to the main battle-front, but if it were so varied in locality and direction as to require from the enemy _an exceptional degree of lateral mobility._ For our air offensive to attain its full effect, it is necessary that our ground offensive should be of a character to throw the greatest possible strain upon the enemy's communications.\n\n22. We have greatly suffered and are still suffering in the progress of our means of air warfare from the absence of a proper General Staff studying the possibilities of air warfare, not merely as an ancillary service to the special operations of the Army or the Navy, but also as an independent arm co-operating in the general plan. Material developments must necessarily be misguided so long as they do not relate to a definite War Plan for the Air, which again is combined with the general War Plan.\n\n23. In consequence of this, many very important points are still in doubt or in dispute on which systematized Staff study could have by now given clear pronouncements. The dominating and immediate interests of the army and the navy have overlaid air warfare, and prevented many promising lines of investigation from being pursued with the necessary science and authority. Extreme diversities of opinion prevail as to the degree of effectiveness which can be expected from aerial attack. It is disputed whether air attack can ever really shatter communications, bases, or aerodromes. It is contended that aerodromes are difficult, to discover and still more difficult to hit; that tons of bombs have been discharged on particular aerodromes without denying their use to the enemy; that railway junctions and communications have been repeatedly bombed without preventing appreciably the immense and continuous movement of men and material necessary to the fighting armies; that no bombardment from the air, especially at great distances from our own lines, can compare in intensity with the kind of bombardment from artillery, in spite of which, nevertheless, operations of a military and even semi-military character are continuously carried on.\n\nOn the other hand, it is claimed that aerial warfare has never yet been practised except in miniature; that bombing in particular has never been studied as a science; that the hitting of objectives from great heights by day or night is worthy of as intense a volume of scientific study as, for instance, is brought to bear upon perfecting the gunnery of the Fleet; that much of the unfavourable data accumulated showing the comparative ineffectiveness of bombing consists of results of unscientific action\u2014for instance, dropping bombs singly without proper sighting apparatus or specially trained 'bomb droppers' (the equivalent of 'gun layers'), instead of dropping them in regulated salvos by specially trained men, so as to 'straddle' the targets properly. It is believed by the sanguine school that a very high degree of accuracy, similar to that which has been attained at sea under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, could be achieved if something like the same scientific knowledge and intense determination were brought to bear.\n\nSecondly, it is pointed out that an air offensive has never been considered on the same scale or with the same ruthlessness in regard to losses for adequate objects as prevail in the operations of armies. Aeroplanes have never been used to attack vital objectives in the same spirit as infantry have been used, viz., regardless of loss, the attack being repeated again and again until the objective is secured. It is pointed out that in 1918 numbers will for the first time become available for operations, not merely on the larger scale, but of a totally different character.\n\n24. On the assumption that these more sanguine views are justly founded, the primary objective of our air forces becomes plainly apparent, viz., the air bases of the enemy and the consequent destruction of his air fighting forces. All other objectives, however tempting, however necessary it may be to make provision for attacking some of them, must be regarded as subordinate to this primary purpose. If for instance our numerical superiority in the air were sufficient at a certain period next year to enable us in the space of two or three weeks to locate and destroy by bomb and fire, either from a great height or if necessary from quite low down, all or nearly all the enemy's hangars, and make unusable all or nearly all his landing grounds and starting grounds within 50 or 60 miles of his front line, his air forces might be definitely beaten, and once beaten could be kept beaten.\n\nOnce this result was achieved and real mastery of the air obtained, all sorts of enterprises which are now not possible would become easy. All kinds of aeroplanes which it is not now possible to use on the fighting fronts could come into play. Considerable parties of soldiers could be conveyed by air to the neighbourhood of bridges or other important points, and, having overwhelmed the local guard, could _from the ground_ effect a regular and permanent demolition. The destruction of particular important factories could also be achieved by carefully organized expeditions of this kind. 'Flying columns' (literally) of this character could be organized to operate far and wide in the enemy's territory, thus forcing him to disperse in an indefinite defensive good troops urgently needed at the front. All his camps, depots, &c, could be made the object of constant organized machine-gun attack from low-flying squadrons. But the indispensable preliminary to all results in the air, as in every other sphere of war, is to defeat the armed forces of the enemy.\n\n27. It was therefore proposed in November last year that every infantry battalion engaged in an offensive should be provided with two caterpillar tenders which would undoubtedly carry over the battlefield during the day of battle, and the night following, all the supplies necessary for the immediate continued action of the infantry. The Army have now asked us since July of this year for 450 of these supply tanks by the 1st March, 1918. A serious delay in meeting this requirement is now inevitable, but that it can be met, and met on a very large scale, during the course of next year is certain. A satisfactory universal carrying-machine has been designed and will be reproduced as rapidly as possible. This machine will carry over the 'cratered' battlefield 10 tons, which by making certain fittings can either be expressed in guns, men, ammunition, or supplies. Other methods of utilizing the existing tanks to draw sledges of supplies are also being developed.\n\n28. Another method which is now being pursued promisingly, and may be found to be capable of application on a very large scale, is 'rope railways' or 'cableways.' Various systems of this have recently been experimented with and constructed by the army and by the Ministry of Munitions, working simultaneously and independently. This work has now been combined, and it may be found possible within a reasonable time to support the forward movement of an army by a network of cableways, which will grow up as fast as the troops can move across the battlefield, and can with sufficient loss and effort be maintained in working order during the battle and in the night following.\n\nThe relative merits of the 'caterpillar tender' or 'supply tank' compared to the cableway have yet to be determined. It seems not at all improbable that both will be needed, and that the supply of the fighting infantry in the most advanced positions could be maintained by the caterpillars, while the supply of the advancing batteries would be secured by the cableways.\n\n# APPENDIX O  \nTANK MINUTES\n\nTANK REQUIREMENTS.\n\n_Mr. Layton._\n\n_August_ 3, 1917.\n\nLet me have on a single sheet of paper the following broad facts about the Tank programme, actual and prospective. How many Tanks, and of what patterns, are to be ready month by month for the next 12 months? By whom, and to what extent, have these programmes been approved? How much steel do they require? How much do they cost? How much labour skilled and unskilled do they require in these twelve months? What are the principal limiting factors in material and class of labour? Apart from the number of Tanks, what quantity of spares, and what maintenance plant are required? Give the money value or weights of materials or proportion of labour required, whichever of the three is the most convenient and representative. Let me know the number of people in the Tank Department, the principal salaries paid, and the aggregate of salaries paid per annum. Show particularly any part of Tank production which overlaps aeroplane production, i.e., any transferable margin, whether of skilled mechanics or of ball bearings, etc., in which these two branches of production are clashing competitors. Show also the proportion of steel, of money, and of skilled and unskilled labour proposed to be absorbed in Tank production in these twelve months compared with the general Budget of the Ministry. I shall be quite content if many of these figures are approximate only.\n\nSPECIAL TANKS.\n\n_Secretary._\n\n_E._\n\n_September_ 9, 1917.\n\nIt ought to be possible to make a Tank which could easily traverse the kind of inundations that are found on the Flanders Front. It appears to me likely that no alterations in the structure of the Tank would be required. All that would be necessary would be to make the belts which carry the track run round a rather larger circumference, and to utilize this increased circumference to obtain ( _a_ ) height to the extent of about 4 feet, and ( _b_ ) length as far as may be necessary to provide for unseen submerged ditches and cavities in the ground. In other words, it would be like putting a bogie under a Tank and making the moving track run round the bogie as well as the Tank.\n\nAn amphibious Tank is no substitute for this. It may have its place in some other tactical scheme, but it does not meet this particular need. Please therefore concentrate on the definite problem of fitting an under-body to existing Tanks which will enable them to cross the shallow inundations which protect the enemy on considerable and important sectors of the Front. Inundations are supposed to be most effective from 18 inches to 2 feet deep, but as a matter of fact on the Flanders Front they very often run to 3 and even 4 feet, and of course there are holes and ditches underneath. The irregularities of the ground cannot however compare with those which exist on any of the battle-fronts, and I am confident that this is a problem that can not only be easily but swiftly solved.\n\nIf this note does not convey a clear impression to your mind, pray consult me. I wish the subject to be examined and plans and drawings to be made as quickly as possible with a resolute intention to solve the problem.\n\n_March_ 16, 1918.\n\n(1) A serious effort must be made to face the question of the frustration of tanks by means of land mines and buried shells. We are making very large commitments in regard to tanks, and you must exercise foresight and vigilance to make sure that our efforts are not wasted. I have always anticipated that this method might be used, as would be seen from a study of a paper I wrote on this subject in December, 1915. At the same time I feel fairly confident that the means exist, or can be discovered, of overcoming this method of resisting tanks. Just as there is a parry to every thrust so there is a feint to every parry; and if we grapple boldly with this problem now I believe we shall overcome the misgivings lately excited in military minds, and also cope with the real danger should it manifest itself.\n\n(2) Let it first of all be observed that this danger to tanks does not affect their use in defensive war for counter-attack, because then they will be operating over ground which the enemy has not had time to sow with mines. Therefore, so far as the defensive aspects of the present campaign are concerned, the position is not affected.\n\n(3) The only way to deal with these difficulties is by experiment. First of all, experiments should be made with land mines and buried shells to see what are the best possible ways of destroying tanks. Obviously what is required is a fuse arrangement which will respond to a slow heavy pressure distributed over a considerable area and will if possible resist a violent blow. A shell with a sensitive fuse into which is fitted a broad metal framework or trellis-work would seem to be indicated. The fuse could be arranged to stand all ordinary weights, but only to explode when the weights approximating to a tank or very heavy wagon were put upon it.\n\n(4) What kind of shell is required? Can you trust simply to the explosion to damage a structure like a tank, or must you strike the tank not merely with the force of the explosion but with large pieces of metal which will break or bend or burr the links and underpart of the tank? If the latter should prove to be true, the mere burying of trench mortar bombs would seem to be ruled out and the difficulty of the problem sensibly increased. What weight of shell would be required? The explosion of a 12-inch shell would no doubt shatter a tank, but nobody could afford to sow the whole front with 12-inch shells. What would be the effect of a 9\u00b72-inch shell? Is it certain that it would destroy a tank? Even sowing the front with 9\u00b72-inch shells would be an extraordinarily difficult and costly business. The 6-inch shell would be a much more manageable proposition from the point of view of the defence, but would it be big enough? These points have got to be established, first of all by expert opinion, and secondly by actual experiment.\n\n(5) It must be remembered that whereas the Mark IV tank can only operate effectively on fairly limited areas on the front, the Mark VIII, on which we are counting for 1919, can go almost anywhere, and the statement often made that 'there are only a few sectors of the front where tanks can be used' will not apply next year. On the contrary, part of the effectiveness of tanks in 1919 will be the surprise due to their appearing in all sorts of country hitherto judged inaccessible to them. We shall see them crossing canals by the lock-gates, making their way across the most heavily shell-crumped areas, traversing intersected and wooded country, climbing steep hills, crossing all manner of trenches, &c. The problem of stopping them by land mines will therefore be enormously extended, and to be safe, the whole front would have to be sown. Some calculations on this point should be made\u2014on what would be involved in this for shells, trench mortar bombs or explosives. A single line of shells would clearly not be effective unless one were sown every tank breadth. They would probably have to be dotted chequer-wise in two or three rows. Even so, once the locality of a minefield had been established by one tank being blown up, it is likely that the way through it would be revealed. It is almost inconceivable that the front should be completely defended by this elaborate and delicate device, or that having been sown they would not get out of order. In fact, it is a plan much easier to talk of than to execute. Let it however be elaborated by officers who believe in it and are trying to put the argument for it at its very highest and give it the best possible chance of being effective.\n\n(6) We then cross over to the other side of the argument\u2014How can the tank circumvent a minefield? We may disregard the possibility of the whole front being defended by large land mines. The demands on explosive would be far beyond what could be spared. But buried shells or trench mortar bombs are clearly the danger we must try to meet. It is necessary to establish at the outset the effect upon a Mark IV tank of a 6-inch shell buried at the right distance below the surface. I presume it would be buried at least 2 feet. This should be actually tried, and the effect upon the track links and underpart carefully noted.\n\n(7) There are, then, two methods of overcoming the difficulties which suggest themselves: first, exploding the shells before the tank reaches them. This might be done in various ways; firstly, a tank might be equipped with a large steel hammer extending a considerable distance in front of it, say 20 feet, and when reaching a mine area it could strike the ground heavy blows sufficient to spring off the shell; secondly, our artillery could bombard any mine area once it had been located. This would probably spring all the mines in the neighbourhood and enable other tanks to get through safely; thirdly, could not the tank gun if sufficiently depressed test the suspicious ground in front of the tank by firing upon it? I do not know what pressures could be exerted by any of these agencies, or whether they are pressures to which a special fuse could be made insensible on account of their violence while at the same time it would respond to mere weight.\n\n(8) Another method might consist in making a special tank\u2014a proportion of which would be supplied to each [tank] battalion\u2014which would be strong enough by reason of the armouring of its under-portion to resist the explosions and thus clear away a minefield. Or again, an ordinary tank might push a heavy roller, or series of rollers, in front of it, or might carry them in a kind of tray from which they would be allowed to drop on the ground in front of the tank when the known limits of the minefield are reached.... Or again, a vehicle might be designed which a tank could tow along with it, which, actuated by wires from the tank, could move ahead and by this way explode minefields.\n\n(9) The above crude ideas are only intended to excite the scientific mind and lead to the production of definite solutions. Two Committees should be formed without delay\u2014one from [the] Trench Warfare and the other from [the] Mechanical Warfare [Department]\u2014who should study the attack of tanks by mines and the counter-measures against mines. They should acquaint each other with the fruits of their reflections and meet together to arrive at joint solutions. Materials and labour must be supplied to enable adequate experiments to be made at once. The closest liaison should be kept with the Army. Much has been, and is being, done on the British front now to guard against the possible tank attacks. Let us have all this knowledge. Again, Bermicourt must have many ideas how to overcome the mining difficulties.\n\n(10) Pray let me have, in the first instance, more definite proposals for setting these inquiries and experiments on foot.\n\nW. S. C.\n\n# Notes\n## CHAPTER I\n\n 'Est cit\u00e9 \u00e9 l'ordre de l'Arm\u00e9e:\n\nGalli\u00e9ni, G\u00e9n\u00e9ral, Gouverneur Militaire et Commandant des Arm\u00e9es de Paris, Commandant du camp retranch\u00e9 et des arm\u00e9es de Paris, et plac\u00e9 le 2 septembre 1914 sous les ordres du commandant en chef, a fait preuve des plus hautes qualit\u00e9s militaires:\n\n'En contribuant, par les renseignements qu'il avait recueillis, a d\u00e9terminer la direction de marche prise par l'aile droite allemande;\n\n'En orientant judicieusement, pour participer \u00e9 la bataille, les forces mobiles \u00e9 sa disposition;\n\n'En facilitant, par tous les moyens en son pouvoir, l'accomplissement de la mission assign\u00e9e par le Commandant en chef \u00e9 ces forces mobiles.'  \n(Ordre du 25 septembre 1915.)\n\n## CHAPTER II\n\n _Journal Officiel Documents Parlementaires_ , Mars 29, 1920.\n\n _Military Effort of the British Empire_ , Monthly Returns.\n\n German Federal Archives ( _Reichsarchiv_ ).\n\nSee Appendix J for details.\n\n This figure and other similar figures include the normal wastage of trench warfare on the quiet portions of the front. The official statistics do not enable me to distinguish between the actual battle front and the ordinary front. A uniform deduction of one-eighth would probably be sufficiently correct in all cases.\n\n My italics.\n\n _Soldiers and Statesmen_ , 1914\u201318: Robertson. Vol. I. p. 239.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. I, p. 70.\n\n _Soldiers and Statesmen_ , 1914\u20131918: Robertson. Vol. I, p. 270.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. I, p. 271.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. II, p. 256.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol II, pp. 261\u20132.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. II, p. 244.\n\n My italics.\n\n _My War Memories:_ Ludendorff. Vol. II.\n\n _Zentral Nachweiseamt._ This figure is also given by the French military historian, Lieut.-Colonel Corda, _La Guerre Mondiale_ , p. 413.\n\n Hereafter referred to as _The Military Effort._\n\n _The Military Effort_ , pp. 358 _et seq._\n\n The campaigns have been divided into the main operations and the intervening periods, in accordance with the return of French casualties presented to the Chamber in response to the resolution obtained by the deputy Marin on March 29, 1922. The French figures are taken from this source, which is the latest and sole authoritative statement of the French casualties. The British figures are taken from the monthly returns of casualties published in _The Military Effort._* These are the official figures of the War Office, and the final corrections and additions\u2020 are also embodied.\n\nFor the German figures there are two sources: first, the Federal Archives Office at Potsdam ( _Reichsarchiv_ ) which collected the casualties returned every ten days by the units; and secondly, the Central Inquiry Office ( _Zentral Nachweiseamt_ ) which, working separately, received the periodical returns from all the hospitals at the front and at home. The classification of the casualties into periods is the work of the _Reichsarchiv._ They accepted the figures as recorded at the end of the war, and have classified them in the same operation periods as those chosen by the French. The Central Enquiry Office, which includes the War Graves Administration, continued however to revise the casualty returns, and in particular to break up the large category of 'Missing' which existed at the end of the war. As missing men were finally despaired of or proved to have been killed, as wounded men after long illness died, these were added to the total deaths, and the other categories reduced accordingly. Moreover the revision of casualties in accordance with the hospital records increased the total number. In five successive estimates ending with June, 1923, the _Nachweiseamt_ added 497,000 casualties to the total at the Armistice, on which the _Reichsarchiv_ had worked: and their final figure becomes 7,080,000 German casualties on all fronts out of a total mobilization of 13,250,000.\n\n* p. 271.\n\n\u2020 pp. 237 _et seq._\n\nIt is not possible to distribute these additional German casualties according to the time or operation periods of the _Reichsarchiv's_ calculation; nor to divide them between the Western and Eastern theatres of the war. In order to make sure that I am in no way overstraining the argument, I have added four-fifths of the 497,000 supplementary German casualties, viz. 397,000, to the Western Front. This is admittedly an arbitrary method. But in so far as it errs, it is upon the safe side. Moreover, the _Reichsarchiv's_ figures for the Western Front admittedly do not include either casualties inflicted upon the Germans by the Americans, which may be estimated at 140,000; nor the very heavy German casualties for part of October and the last eleven days of the war in November, 1918. In the confusion of the collapse on the Western Front a temporary breakdown occurred in the returns made by the various German units. This is the chief explanation of the increase of nearly 500,000 discovered and reported by the Central Enquiry Office in the following twelve months.\n\nIt does not seem therefore that the additional 397,000 German casualties should be spread over the whole period of the war. By far the larger portion occurred in the last few months. If uniform allowance were made for this addition, it would increase all the German figures in the comparative tables by about 8 per cent. But the British figures in these tables have also undergone a progressive revision. Allowing for the fact that they do not include 102,000 British casualties of 1914, their original total fell short of the British final total by 222,000. This number, if distributed, would add almost exactly the same percentage to the British numbers. The effect of these changes therefore leaves the comparison unaltered.\n\n See Table B.\n\n Including losses inflicted by the Belgians.\n\n 100,000 deducted for British share, no separate figures being available.\n\n These figures take no account of the supplementary German casualties not distributed into periods.\n\n No allowance is made in these figures for the supplementary German casualties, since these could at most vary the totals to the extent of 8 percent. See footnote to p. 962. V..C\u2014I (S)\n\n These figures include sick and wounded who had recovered and men combed from industries.\n\n My memorandum on March 5, 1918, printed in Chapter XVI.\n\n _Military Effort_ , p. 62.\n\n Including the quiet month of July.\n\n p. 742 _et seq._\n\n## CHAPTER III\n\n _In the World War:_ Count Ottokar Czernin.\n\n My italics.\n\n W. S. C.\n\n## CHAPTER IV\n\n Corda: _La Guerre Mondiale_ , p 187.\n\n The _London Magazine_ , published in November, 1916.\n\n See Map, p. 1000.\n\n Mais puisque ces craintes sont fond\u00e9es sur des comptes rendus vous signalant des d\u00e9fectuosit\u00e9s dans la mise en \u00e9tat de d\u00e9fense, je vous demande de me communiquer ces comptes rendus et de me d\u00e9signer leurs auteurs.\n\nJe ne puis admettre, en effet, que des militaires plac\u00e9s sous mes ordres fassent parvenir au gouvernement par d'autres voies que la voie hi\u00e9rarchique des plaintes ou des r\u00e9clamations au sujet de l'ex\u00e9cution de mes ordres.\n\nIl ne me convient pas davantage de me d\u00e9fendre contre des imputations vagues dont j'ignore la source.\n\nLe seul fait que le gouvernement accueille des communications de ce genre provenant, soit de parlementaires mobilis\u00e9s, soit directement ou indirectement d'officiers servant sur le front, est de nature \u00e1 jeter un trouble profond dans l'esprit de discipline de l'arm\u00e9e. Les militaires qui \u00e9crivent savent que le gouvernement fait \u00e9tat de leurs correspondances vis-\u00e1-vis de leurs chefs. L'autorit\u00e9 de ceux-ci est atteinte; le moral de tous souffre de ce discr\u00e9dit.\n\nJe ne saurais me pr\u00e9ter \u00e1 la continuation de cet \u00e9tat de choses. J'ai besoin de la confiance enti\u00e9re du gouvernement. S'il me l'accorde, il ne peut ni encourager ni tol\u00e9rer des pratiques qui diminuent l'autorit\u00e9 morale de mon commandement et faute de laquelle je ne pourrai plus continuer \u00e1 en assumer la responsabilit\u00e9.\n\n 'G.Q.G.,' by Jean de Pierrefeu. This officer was employed throughout the war to draft the official communiqu\u00e9s of the French Headquarters. He had the best opportunities of knowing exactly what took place. He is a writer of extraordinary force and distinction.\n\n _London Magazine._ Written in August, published November, 1916\n\n _General Headquarters 1914\u20131916 and its Critical Decisions:_ General von Falkenhayn, pp. 244\u2013247.\n\n _War Memories_ , Vol. I, p. 267.\n\n## CHAPTER V\n\n Vol. I.\n\n The main facts and times throughout this account are taken from the Official Admiralty Narrative of Jutland.\n\n Official Narrative: Lord Jellicoe's Remarks, Appendix G, p. 106.\n\n Admiralty footnote 2 to Lord Jellicoe's Remarks.\n\n _Fighting at Jutland._\n\n## CHAPTER VI\n\n _The Grand Fleet._\n\n These with the four Queen Elizabeths made up his twenty-eight.\n\n The diagrams will show some of the many evolutions which are possible from this formation.\n\n Official Narrative, p. 36.\n\n _Ibid._ , p. 36.\n\n _Ibid._\n\n The sailors call it for short 'altering the bearing of the guides by ( _so many_ ) points.'\n\n Their course was omitted.\n\n See Deployment Diagram.\n\n pp. 49\u201350.\n\n Official Narrative.\n\n Commander-in-Chief's Despatches, Jutland Papers, p. 21.\n\n i.e. by his taking an easterly or westerly course.\n\n It is now said that he did not receive it till he got back to harbour.\n\n Official Narrative, p. 72.\n\n## CHAPTER VII\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Despatches:_ J. H. Boraston, pp. 22\u20133.\n\n _Ibid._ , p. 21.\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , p. 93.\n\n _Ibid._\n\n See map, p. 1079.\n\n _Die Schwaben an der Ancre._ Gerster\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , p. 103.\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Despatches_ , p. 27.\n\n _Ibid._ , pp. 30\u20131.\n\n _Ibid._ , p. 33.\n\n i.e. 196,000 minus 25,000 for the quiet sectors. _Military Effort_ , Monthly Returns, p. 253 _et seq._\n\n _Die_ 27 _Infanterie Division im Weltkrieg._\n\n _My War Memories_ , p. 244.\n\n Later Lord Birkenhead.\n\n The facts as now known: 27,000 yards\n\n The facts as now known: Fifteen\n\n The facts as now known: seven\n\n The facts as now known: four\n\n The facts as now known: three\n\n The facts as now known: 171,000\n\n The facts as now known: 120 \u00bd\n\n The facts as now known\n\n'The Germans scraped from the Somme to Rheims all the 3rd battalions which constituted the local reserves of sectors: they obtained thus about 13 battalions belonging to 8 different Army Corps.' Lieut.- Col. Corda : La Guerre Mondiale, p. 174.\n\n These figures give a proportion of British to German losses of 2\u00b73 to 1. Sir Douglas Haig, in his final despatch upon the Somme, committed himself to the following positive assertion: 'There is nevertheless sufficient evidence to place it beyond doubt that the enemy's losses in men and material have been very considerably higher than those of the Allies.'*\n\nColonel Boraston has now admitted the miscalculation which was made. 'Such figures as are now available,' he writes, 'do not bear out this view so far as the British front is concerned. The total British casualties on the Western front between July 1 and November 19, 1916, were some 463,000. A calculation based on German returns made available since the Armistice, state the German casualties incurred opposite the British during this period as about 218,000'\u2020 Making an allowance, which is certainly reasonable, for casualties on both sides on the quiet sectors, Colonel Boraston states the actual British casualties in the Battle of the Somme at about 410,000 and the German casualties against them at 180,000. This yields the proportion of 2\u00b727 British casualties to 1 German, or almost exactly the estimate of my memorandum.\n\nThe Headquarters Staff estimates dated August 1 placed the German loss in July at 'certainly not less than 130,000 men,' as against my estimate of 65,000 at the same date. The _Reichsarchiv's_ returns give the figure for July on the whole British front of **59,493**. The British Monthly Returns show a British total of **196,000** for July. Deducting one eighth from both for casualties on the quiet sectors, we reach the figures of German loss in July **52,000** , and British **171,000**.\n\n______________\n\nGerman Divisions Engaged.  \n---  \nJuly l | 7  \nJuly 1-9 | 2 more.  \nJuly 10-21 | 5 more.  \nJuly 21-31 | 2 more.  \nTotal | 16\n\n No important advances or captures were made by the Russians after the opening of the Somme Battle.\n\n* _Sir Douglas Haig's Despatches_ , p. 52.\n\n\u2020 _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , 1915\u201318, p. 149.\n\n## CHAPTER VIII\n\n In the German Army the deputies of the Chief of the General Staff bore the old title of Quartermaster-General.\n\n _Out of my Life._ Marshal von Hindenburg, p. 84.\n\n _Ernsthafte Plaudereien \u00fcber den Welt Krieg._ General von Moser.\n\n The above facts are taken from the French translation of the captured documents of the German Fourth Army, 9\u201330 April, 1918, and from a French review of them.\n\n _Der Feldzug der_ 9 _Armee_ , 1916\u201317, Part II, pp. 93\u2013100.\n\n _De Sauret la Honte, \u00e0 Mangin le Boucher._ Henry Dutheil, p. 88.\n\n## CHAPTER IX\n\n _My Memoirs:_ Von Tirpitz, Vol. II, p. 419.\n\n _My Memoirs:_ Von Tirpitz, Vol. II, p. 442.\n\n The Translation of Ludendorff's: _The General Staff and its Problems_ , gives Jan. 1 as the date of this conference. This is a translator's error.\n\n Ludendorff's italics.\n\n _The General Staff and its Problems:_ Ludendorff. Vol. I, p. 304.\n\n Bethmann-Hollweg: _Betrachtungen \u00fcber den Weltkrieg._ Part ii, pp. 131\u20137.\n\n The German G.H.Q. (Grosses Haupt-Quartier), Great Headquarters, was the Kaiser's Headquarters\u2014political, naval and military. O.H.L. (Oberste Heeresleitung), the supreme command of the German Field Army, sometimes translated 'the Supreme Command' or 'the Main Headquarters,' was the military section of the German G.H.Q. Its head was the Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army.\n\n My italics.\u2014W. S. C.\n\n Ludendorff, Vol. I, p. 305.\n\n## CHAPTER X\n\n Lieut-Col. now Maj-Gen. Sir Ernest Swinton.\n\n Now Lord Beaverbrook.\n\n No record exists of this debate. But from my notes I can reconstruct the outline of the argument.\n\n## CHAPTER XI\n\n The Alpine Corps and the 187th Brigade.\n\n Pierrefeu: G.Q.G., Section I\n\n 'Le but que les arm\u00e9es franco-britanniques doivent atteindre, est la destruction de la masse principale des forces ennemies. Ce r\u00e9sultat ne peut \u011btre obtenu qu'\u00e0 la suite d'une bataille d\u00e9cisive.'...\n\n 'Que la rupture de front (p\u00e9n\u00e9tration jusqu'en arri\u00e8re du gros des batteries ennemies) est possible, \u00e0 condition de se faire d'un seul coup par attaque brusqu\u00e9e en 24 ou 48 heures.'\n\n My italics.\n\n _My War Experiences._\n\n ' _Comment j'ai nomm\u00e9 Foch et P\u00e9tain_.'\n\n _Nivelle et Painlev\u00e9._\n\n## CHAPTER XII\n\n _See_ Appendix L.\n\n My minutes and memoranda of the time tell the story much better than any subsequent account which I could write. Accordingly from very large numbers I have selected enough to give a picture alike of the problem and of the movement of events. These will be found in Appendix M.\n\n Afterwards Lord Stevenson.\n\n The full text of this Memorandum is printed in Appendix N.\n\n The omitted paragraphs from this paper will be found in the second part of the Appendix mentioned in Note 1.\n\n## CHAPTER XIII\n\n This was of course corrected when discovered.\n\n General von Wrisberg, Head of the Principal Department of the Prussian War Ministry, in his book _Heer und Heimath_ (Army and Home) published in 1924, p. 58, says: 'The greatest number of [German] heavy guns on the front was in February, 1917: Heavy 7,130. Field guns and Field howitzers, 10,836. Total, 17,966.'\n\nThis is a remarkable instance of the accuracy of the British War Office information.\n\n So called by me because it was charged with fitting the programme together.\n\nSee Chapter VIII.\n\n## CHAPTER XIV\n\n Robertson, _Soldiers and Statesmen_ , Vol. II, p. 249.\n\n Robertson, _Soldiers and Statesmen_ , Vol. II, pp. 256 _et seq._\n\n Robertson, _Soldiers and Statesmen_ , Vol. I, p. 188.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. II, p. 247.\n\n _Ibid._ , Vol. II, p. 255.\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , Vol. I, Ch. XV. p. 283.\n\n See also my reference to Tank tactics in the Memorandum of Oct. 21, 1917, of which a print had been sent to G.H.Q.\n\n Colonel Fuller, _Tanks in the Great War_ , Chapter XIX, p. 140.\n\n _Ibid._ , p. 141.\n\n Colonel Fuller, _Tanks in the Great War_ , Chapter XIX, pp. 148, 150.\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , p. 392.\n\n## CHAPTER XV\n\n A species of submerged wire cutter towed on both bows for cutting the mooring ropes of mines.\n\n## CHAPTER XVI\n\n It was actually much less.\n\n Or from twelve to nine, if the Pioneer Battalion is excluded.\n\n Two Indian cavalry divisions were sent from France to Palestine.\n\n General Rawlinson.\n\n Lord Milner had now succeeded Lord Derby at the War Office.\n\n## CHAPTER XVII\n\n Main Headquarters.\n\n 'It would almost seem,' says Sir Douglas Haig's Staff Officer. 'as if the only difference numbers in the attack make to a properly located machine-gun defence, when there is light and time to see, is to provide a better target.' No one can quarrel with such a conclusion.\n\n My italics.\n\n## CHAPTER XVIII\n\n _Military Effort_ , p. 362.\n\n## CHAPTER XIX\n\n _My War Memories_ , p. 615.\n\n Une humeur de dogue, un grondement perp\u00e9tuel, un orage de rebuffades, tout de suite les gros mots \u00e0 la bouche, sans raison.\u2014Pierre feu, _G.Q.G. Secteur_ I, Vol. II. p. 178.\n\n G.Q.G. Section I, Vol. II, p. 187.\n\n _My War Experiences_ , p. 318.\n\n _Sir Douglas Haig's Command_ , Vol. II.\n\n _My War Memories_ , p. 634.\n\n _Ibid._ , p. 642.\n\n I have not corrected this war-time grammar, as the sense is clear.\n\n I did not think it useful to discuss in this paper a surprise attack in 1916 by all the forces in the Mediterranean theatre upon the Gallipoli Peninsula. No one would have weighed it seriously at this time.\n\n Some of the Bohemian prisoners taken by Brusiloff in 1916 had been formed into a Czech Army Corps which fought with resolution against the Austrian Empire. The Russian revolution and the Bolshevik desertion of the Allied cause left these soldiers in a forlorn position, from which their discipline and firm political convictions ultimately extricated them.\n\n## CHAPTER XX\n\n See Memorandum of Oct. 21, 1917.\n\n My subsequent italics.\n\n The Anglo-Franco-American factory.\n\n My italics.\n\n## CHAPTER XXI\n\n _Der K\u00f6nig_ , by Carl Rosner.\n\n _My War Memories_ , pp. 667\u20138.\n\n Ludendorff.\n\n## CHAPTER XXII\n\n See general map in Chapter XXIII.\n\n## CHAPTER XXIII\n\n The above figures do not include the supplementary German casualties set forth in the tables in Chapter II of this Part and in Appendix J.\n\n## Appendix N\n\n For paragraphs 1\u20137 of this Memorandum see Chapter XII.\n\n General Buat.\n\n This referred of course to the material sphere, and took no account of other reactions\n\n Otherwise 'Supply Tanks.'\n\n## Appendix O\n\n The Tank Corps Headquarters in France.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nThank you for downloading this Halo Books eBook.\n\n* * *\n\nJoin our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Halo Books and Simon & Schuster.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nor visit us online to sign up at  \neBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com\n\n## CONTENTS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nLessons Learned Matt Forbeck\n\nWhat Remains Morgan Lockhart\n\nBreaking Strain James Swallow\n\nPromises to Keep Christie Golden\n\nShadow of Intent Joseph Staten\n\nThe Ballad of Hamish Beamish Frank O'Connor\n\nDefender of the Storm John Jackson Miller\n\nA Necessary Truth Troy Denning\n\nInto the Fire Kelly Gay\n\nSaint's Testimony Frank O'Connor\n\nRossbach's World Brian Reed\n\nOasis Tobias Buckell\n\nAnarosa Kevin Grace\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nAbout the Authors\n\n## LESSONS LEARNED\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nMATT FORBECK\n\nThis story begins on March 29, 2554, more than one year after the end of the Covenant War (Halo 3)\u2014a thirty-year struggle for humanity's survival waged across its embattled colonies\u2014and the subsequent activation of the SPARTAN-IV program, which would eventually undergird the United Nations Space Command's fledgling Spartan branch (Halo: Initiation).\n\nTom wasn't anywhere near the rec room when the explosion went off, but he felt the blast thrum through the superstructure of the space station just as the artificial gravity failed. He looked up from his desk in the drill instructors' office, where he'd just been going over the performance of the new class of Spartan-IVs, and spotted Lucy already heading for the door. She effortlessly yanked herself across her desk and vaulted forward, flying through the open air.\n\n\"Guess you heard it too,\" Tom said.\n\nSpartan Lucy-B091 flashed a thumbs-up sign at him without looking back. Then the sirens kicked in, blaring throughout the station and flashing red lights along the ceilings. She threw open the door and raced down the hallway beyond.\n\nTom-B292 followed her as best he could. They'd gone through countless hours in zero-G, both in training and in combat, but they'd usually been wearing Mjolnir armor while doing so. Being without it at the moment made him feel naked.\n\nThey weren't even halfway down the corridor when Tom felt the telltale pop in his ears that signified massive explosive decompression from somewhere in the station. The air began to haul Tom and Lucy forward, hard. She managed to snag a grip on a door handle as she went past it, but Tom couldn't find purchase.\n\nLucy swung her free arm out, and Tom instinctively grabbed it. With any regular person, he'd worry that the weight of his enhanced frame would haul their arm out of its socket, but Lucy had been equally augmented. They'd already saved each other's lives more times than he cared to count.\n\nShe still screamed with the effort.\n\nTom found a foothold on a nearby doorway, which relieved much of the strain. An instant later, the door at the end of the hallway slammed shut, sealing it off from whatever catastrophe had suddenly decompressed the station.\n\nLucy released Tom, and they started down the corridor again. When they reached the door, they couldn't get it to budge. All they could see through the porthole was an intersection that had been sealed off on all four sides.\n\n\"Doors won't release until we repressurize,\" Tom said. \"What the hell happened?\"\n\nLucy pointed back toward their office area. The door there still stood open. Maybe it had failed. Maybe the AI that helped run the station had decided it didn't have to cut off access throughout the entire ship; just seal away the affected area. Either way, even if they couldn't go forward, they could go back.\n\nLucy kicked off hard, and Tom scrambled to catch up with her once more. \"What's the hurry?\" he asked.\n\nShe was staring out the viewport, as if hunting for something. \"Figuring it out,\" she said.\n\nLucy had lost her voice for seven years at one point\u2014a souvenir of being one of the only two survivors (along with Tom) of Operation: TORPEDO, a battle with the Covenant that had all but wiped out the entire Beta Company of Spartan-IIIs. They'd lost 298 of their brothers and sisters to that horrible meat grinder that day. She'd recovered, but only because Lucy had wanted to scream at Dr. Catherine Halsey\u2014the founder of the SPARTAN-II program\u2014while trying to tear her head off.\n\nOver those years, Lucy and Tom had developed their own kind of sign language based on the signals Spartans used to communicate during a comms blackout on the battlefield. Even though she'd regained her voice, he still often fell back on that old habit, but Tom loved the fact that he didn't have to guess at her intent any longer. Not during something dangerous like this.\n\nHe kicked over to his desk and hit the comm there. \"Control!\" he said. \"What the hell just happened?\"\n\nIn the time it took for someone to respond, Tom's mind blazed through the worst options. Had an insurgent ship from a nearby colony world discovered this top-secret training ground and decided to attack? Had a vessel under the control of some resurgent fragment of the long-shattered Covenant stumbled upon them while sweeping through this remote system?\n\n\"Had a rupture in the rec room,\" Captain Chu's voice said, still steely despite the man's rising panic. \"Bad one. Commander Musa was questioning someone about the homicide\u2014\"\n\n\"Homicide? What\u2014\"\n\n\"Tom!\"\n\nHe spun about to see Lucy stabbing her finger at something outside the station. Still floating in the zero-G, he kicked closer to get a better look at it.\n\nTwo men struggled with each other out there, exposed to raw space but too intent on murder to worry about it. One of them was a blond-haired Spartan recruit Tom remembered hollering at just a few days ago. Schein, he thought.\n\nThe other was Spartan Jun-A266. Like Tom and Lucy, Jun had been part of the SPARTAN-III's Beta Company, but he'd been pulled out by Command for another mission prior to Operation: TORPEDO.\n\nNeither was wearing a protective suit.\n\nJun broke free from Schein's desperate grip and planted both feet on the recruit's chest. Then he kicked off as hard as he could, sending Schein somersaulting deeper into the vacuum. The recoil shoved Jun back toward the station.\n\n\"Shit.\" Tom could barely believe what he'd just seen.\n\nEither way, Schein was dead for sure. Jun was one of the toughest people Tom had ever met, much less worked with. Still, even he would be dead in a matter of moments.\n\nLucy grabbed Tom's hand and pushed back toward the corridor. At the junction with the first doorway, she turned to the right and smacked her hand against a door set into the wall. It slid aside, exposing an airlock.\n\n\"This is insane,\" he said to Lucy as they entered. \"It can't possibly work.\"\n\nShe shrugged as she popped open a panel and reached for the emergency tether. \"Not even going to try?\"\n\nTom groaned as he took the free end of the tether from her and began to tie it around his waist. He didn't answer\u2014she already knew what he would say.\n\nTom peered through the porthole in the outer door as Lucy shut the interior one. He spotted Jun still tumbling toward them, moving like he was caught in slow motion. Without any friction in space, the Spartan would reach the station soon, but from the angle he was moving, it looked to Tom like he might sail straight past it.\n\nTom looped his arm through a handle near the door, hooking his elbow around it. \"Blow it,\" he said. Then he expelled all the air in his lungs and braced himself as best he could.\n\nLucy smacked a button somewhere behind him, and the air blasted out of the lock. His ears painfully popped, and Tom felt like he was being dragged into a deep, dark ocean determined to freeze-dry him in a flash. His lungs collapsed, and he fought against the urge to try to breathe.\n\nTom had performed exercises like this before\u2014just like every Spartan had\u2014but always under controlled circumstances. He'd only had to expose himself to raw vacuum for up to ten seconds at a time, and even then he'd hated every instant of it. With his augmented body, Tom could survive in space like this for up to a minute.\n\nNow that the air had evacuated from the lock, he had to move fast. This was going to hurt, he knew, but failure meant that Jun would have it infinitely worse.\n\nTom pulled himself to the open doorway, then crawled out of the hatch and braced his legs against the edges of it. He tried to calculate Jun's vector of approach, correcting for Jun's current speed. Realizing he was running out of time, Tom made his best guess and launched himself into open space, the tether spilling out behind him.\n\nAs Tom sailed through the station's shadow and emerged into the light from the distant sun, he knew he'd made a critical mistake. Jun hadn't been moving as fast as he'd thought.\n\nWithout anything to grab onto, Tom immediately overshot Jun's path. He flailed his arms as he went, hoping to find some purchase on the lost Spartan, but Tom never made contact.\n\nHad he any breath in his lungs, Tom would have cursed everything he could: Jun, Schein, whatever had blown them into space, but most of all his own miscalculation. He had guessed wrong, and now the best he could hope for was that the error would only cost one life.\n\nTom came to the end of the tether long before anticipated and felt it bite hard into his middle. Still mentally cursing, he grabbed the now-taut line behind him and turned himself around to look back along it.\n\nThere he saw Lucy framed in the airlock's hatch. She was the one who had stopped him short, anchoring the tether on something inside the airlock. Now she was hauling on it hard, both reeling him in and trying to change the angle of his return as she did.\n\nTom looked off to his left and saw Jun coming his way. He couldn't tell if the man had spotted him yet, but from the way Jun kept flailing about, he seemed to still be conscious.\n\nHe couldn't have much more time left, Tom knew. Even a Spartan's jumped-up circulatory system had to give out at some point. Despite ONI's propaganda to the contrary, Spartans could die, and Tom had witnessed this happen more often than just about anyone else.\n\nTom saw he wouldn't reach Jun in time, and he started hauling himself back down the tether too, hoping to speed Lucy's efforts. It still wouldn't be enough.\n\nBut the bald-headed Spartan managed to get his arm tangled in the line. At that point, the man must have finally blacked out, as he stopped struggling entirely.\n\nTom yanked himself down the tether even faster, hand over hand, praying that he wouldn't dislodge Jun from his precarious position. When he reached the Spartan, Tom looped his arms around Jun's waist and held tight.\n\nNo more movement from Jun.\n\nWith his hands full, Tom couldn't pull himself toward the station, but Lucy kept at it. All Tom had to do was hold on to Jun and hope she managed to bring them home before either one of them passed out too.\n\nTom's vision had already started to tunnel down, and the blackness around the edges drew tighter with every second. He wished he'd had time to grab an air tank or, better yet, slip into his armor, but that sort of delay would have doomed Jun for sure.\n\nHe just hoped their rash decision hadn't doomed them all. He wanted to shout at her to hurry, but he'd already deflated his lungs\u2014and the sound couldn't have traveled through empty space anyhow. He could see her face clearly now, though, as she gave it her all.\n\nJust as Tom's vision had narrowed so far that it felt like he was staring down twinned rifle scopes, he bumped into the side of the station. It almost jarred Jun loose from his grip, but Tom managed to hold on. He shoved the man through the hatch before him, and Lucy guided his unconscious body inside.\n\nThen Tom's vision went black.\n\nTom woke up in the station's sickbay, aching all over. He had tubes snaking into his arm and an oxygen mask over his face. He'd never felt so dried out and sunburnt in his entire life, as if he'd been sprawled unconscious on a tropical beach for a week.\n\nHe tried to speak, but all that came out was a rasping croak. A comforting hand pressed onto his arm, and he turned his head to see Commander Musa sitting there in his wheelchair, giving him a proud smile.\n\n\"You're lucky to be alive,\" the commander said.\n\nTom arched his eyebrows in a question, and the commander nodded. \"You managed to save Jun. That was one hell of a trick you pulled out there, Spartan.\"\n\nTom licked his dry lips and tried again. He felt like someone had poured sand down his throat. \"Lucy?\"\n\n\"She's fine too. Recovering in the next bay over. You two made the best out of the worst day the SPARTAN-IV program has had in a long time.\"\n\nTom closed his eyes and sighed. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"You'll get a full debriefing soon enough, once you're recovered. By that time, we'll know more about it too. The investigation is still ongoing.\"\n\nTom opened his eyes and gave the commander a shrug that said, \"And so . . . ?\"\n\nMusa frowned. \"There was a murder in the training grounds earlier today. Someone killed one of our trainees\u2014a young man named Hideo Wakahisa, from Newsaka\u2014and tore out his translocator.\"\n\nTom winced at the news. That little device was implanted up under the jaw. Tearing it out would involve removing most of a Spartan's throat.\n\n\"Our investigation took us through a short list of suspects that led us to a new Spartan trainee named Rudolf Schein. While Spartan Jun, Captain O'Day, and I were questioning Schein, he realized we had cornered him, and he attacked. That explosion?\"\n\nTom nodded.\n\n\"That was a grenade Schein activated. It injured several people and killed Captain O'Day.\"\n\nTom groaned. He'd not known O'Day for long, but he'd respected her skills as a drill instructor. To think that one of her own trainees had betrayed her boggled the mind.\n\n\"The same explosion weakened the windows in the rec room, which gave way during the subsequent struggle between Schein and Spartan Jun. An exo team has already recovered Schein's body. If not for the actions of you and Spartan Lucy, they would have been hunting for Jun's body as well.\"\n\nTom shook his head in disgust at Schein's betrayal. How could a Spartan turn on another Spartan? It didn't seem possible.\n\nCommander Musa put a hand on Tom's shoulder. \"It's been a hard day for all of us. Rest well, Spartan. You earned it.\"\n\n\"I get it,\" Lucy said.\n\nThey were back in their offices after a few days of healing, ready to return to work. Commander Musa had suspended training for the rest of the week, but the cycle was about to start up again in the morning.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Tom said, confused. \"What's there to get? Schein was a traitor. That's all there is to it.\"\n\nLucy gave him a helpless shrug. \"The Spartans changed.\"\n\nTom stared at her, still confused. \"Are you saying the Spartans are responsible for what he did?\"\n\nHe and Lucy had always had a special rapport, right from the moment they'd met during their training as part of the SPARTAN-III Beta Company. They'd both been six years old at the time. Orphans whose home planets had been glassed by the Covenant.\n\nThat had been enough for them to bond with each other\u2014and everyone else in Beta Company. Their shared hatred of the Covenant had created the anvil on which they were forged into Spartans. That special relationship ramped up even further when the rest of Beta Company was wiped out during Operation: TORPEDO. From that day on, Tom and Lucy had been inseparable. They were always assigned to the same duties, whether it was training the SPARTAN-III Gamma Company recruits on Onyx or, more recently, joining Blue Team to recover an ancient AI on the hostile colony of Gao. After that, they'd left their work with Blue Team for their current posts: training the new Spartan-IVs.\n\nBut now, for the first time in a long time, Tom wasn't sure what Lucy meant.\n\nShe shook her head at him. \"We don't just fight Covies anymore.\"\n\nWith that, Tom recognized what Lucy was going on about. The war was over, but that didn't mean the threats to humankind all went away. \"Yeah, sure, some of them are theoretically our pals now, but the bulk of the Covenant fractured into a hundred smaller threats, each with their own bones to pick\u2014and weapons to pick them with.\"\n\nLucy frowned at that. \"But now we fight humans too.\"\n\nTom dismissed that concern with a wave of his hand. \"The Spartans were originally created to fight the Insurrectionists. Once the war was over, those ungrateful traitors didn't even wait five minutes before they started attacking the UNSC again.\"\n\nLucy pointed at herself. \"I didn't sign on to shoot people.\"\n\nTom leaned forward in his chair. \"That's not why I joined either. But I also don't want to see everything we worked so hard to preserve get torn to pieces. Besides, there's no such thing as an old-Spartans' home, is there?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" Commander Musa said as he rolled into the room in his wheelchair. Jun came in right behind him and snapped a quick salute at Tom and Lucy. They responded by leaping to their feet and returning the gesture.\n\n\"At ease,\" Musa said before continuing his statement. \"We may not have an old-Spartans' home yet, but that's because even the oldest Spartans aren't quite of retirement age. I may have washed out of that original class, but I'm only in my forties myself. Not quite ready to dodder off and have someone wipe up my drool for me.\"\n\nTom and Lucy sat back down at their desks, and Jun found himself an empty chair. He'd long ago thanked the two Spartans for going to such extremes to save him, which was more than Tom had expected. He didn't save lives to be a hero; he did it because it was what he'd trained to do.\n\n\"That's not what I meant to imply, sir,\" said Tom. \"It's just that . . . despite our best efforts, most Spartans don't have much of a life expectancy.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Musa said. \"But that's what happens when you're the best humanity has to offer. We send you out to deal with its deadliest threats.\"\n\n\"That's what we signed up for, sir.\" Tom glanced at Lucy and Jun, who both nodded in agreement. \"All of us.\"\n\nMusa smiled at him. \"That said, it's one of my greatest dreams to one day have Spartans retire from duty\u2014voluntarily. That's why I have people like you spend so much time and effort training our recruits to be the best. It's not enough to have a Spartan's strength and speed if you don't have the mind and heart.\"\n\n\"I think that was easier to accomplish with the earlier generations, sir,\" Jun said. \"When you start with six-year-olds, you catch them before they've developed any poor habits. With the Spartan-IVs, we're using military veterans drawn from the UNSC's best fighting forces. They may already be well-trained soldiers, but that doesn't mean they're cut out to become Spartans.\"\n\nMusa grunted at this. \"Granted, we've just had a glaring example of that with Schein, but he's clearly the exception rather than the rule.\"\n\n\"How many exceptions can we tolerate, sir?\" Jun said.\n\n\"Are you suggesting we return to kidnapping children from their beds?\" Musa said. \"We don't have as many angry orphans to go around as we once did.\"\n\nTom cringed inwardly at this. Jun, Lucy, and he had all lost their families to the Covenant as young kids, and as dedicated as they were to the Spartans, none of them had any desire to have that fate befall anyone else.\n\n\"Fortunately, we no longer have the need for that,\" Musa said. \"With the advent of the SPARTAN-IV program, we should be able to have a good supply of candidates for the future\u2014and enough people to train them, even if there's risk involved.\"\n\nTom glanced at Lucy. She could only shrug, just as mystified as he was. Tom asked Musa the question he knew had to be on Lucy's mind too. \"Where does that leave us, sir?\"\n\nMusa pursed his lips and steepled his fingers before them. \"Given the spectacular rescue you two mounted earlier, I think it might be time to get you back into the field. You're too valuable to keep here doing jobs other people can manage. There's one particular post that's been asking for me to supply them with some help, and you two are uniquely well suited to the task.\"\n\nTom leaned forward, and Lucy did the same. Jun, on the other hand, sat back to watch, having clearly heard this all before.\n\n\"Before I explain your new post, I should mention that it's going to involve working with a different kind of population than you're used to, one that includes a large number of civilians and our allies.\"\n\nThat last bit piqued Tom's curiosity. \"Allies, sir?\"\n\nMusa flashed a solemn smile. \"Our alien allies.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lucy shot to her feet in surprise, and Tom found himself joining her out of sheer instinct.\n\nMusa glared at them both, and Tom stepped forward to defuse the situation. \"I think what Spartan Lucy means to say, sir, is\u2014\"\n\nMusa put up a hand. \"I understand strong feelings about the Covenant, but you both need to update your attitudes. The Arbiter's people are no longer our enemies, and we need them.\"\n\n\"Sir, with all due respect,\" Tom said, \"they were shooting at us not that long ago.\"\n\n\"We were shooting at them too. A lot. Especially the Spartans,\" Musa said. \"We're asking just as much understanding of them as they are of us. And don't forget, it was the Arbiter who helped us finally win the war.\"\n\nTom glanced at Lucy. She shot him a resigned look and spread her hands wide, palms up.\n\n\"What's the post?\" Tom asked, still in disbelief. \"I can't imagine too many colonies would be happy to house humans and aliens alongside each other.\"\n\n\"Actually, the location already has many humans and aliens working in concert,\" Musa said. \"They're going to be expanding fast over the next few years, though, and security is going to be a primary concern.\"\n\n\"I expect so,\" Tom said.\n\n\"Not just because of living conditions,\" Musa said. \"The site itself could prove to be a magnet for trouble.\"\n\nLucy had crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at Musa. If she thought Musa was holding something back, Tom felt inclined to agree with her.\n\n\"So what are we talking about here?\" Tom asked. \"A brand-new colony? A hidden ONI space station?\"\n\n\"ONI doesn't like to reveal the locations of any of its secrets,\" Jun said. \"Not even to our allies. Not if they can help it.\"\n\nMusa shook his head. \"The Swords of Sanghelios wouldn't be comfortable at an ONI site either, no matter how well we vetted it for them. And for security reasons, we certainly couldn't let them wander about it freely.\"\n\nTom didn't want to get sidetracked. \"So where are we heading, sir?\"\n\n\"You and Lucy know it well,\" Musa replied. \"You've already spent a good deal of time there training other Spartans.\"\n\n\"Onyx,\" Lucy said in a hushed tone. \"He means Onyx.\"\n\nTom felt his heart skip a beat or three. \"Onyx doesn't exist anymore. Not the planet, at least.\"\n\n\"The shield world,\" Lucy said. \"The sphere.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Musa said. \"We have a small town's worth of researchers already there, exploring the greatest Forerunner structure in the entire galaxy\u2014at least that we've found to date. They need help. More to the point, they need protection.\"\n\n\"ONI Research Facility Trevelyan.\" Tom rubbed his jaw as he thought of Kurt-051\u2014the former commander of the SPARTAN-III training facility on Onyx, where he and Lucy had helped train Gamma Company.\n\nThe last time he'd spoken with Kurt, the man had knocked him cold and thrown him through a teleportation portal to save his life, then ordered Lucy to follow after him. After that\u2014with the rest of Blue Team safely away\u2014he'd detonated a pair of nuclear warheads to destroy an entire army of Covenant soldiers trying to wipe them out.\n\nTom and Lucy had been the last to see him alive. They hadn't been back to the area since they'd escaped the shield world about a year ago, but they'd heard about the facility being named in Kurt's honor.\n\n\"It's gotten somewhat bigger than just ONIRF Trevelyan by now,\" Musa said.\n\n\"So, you need us to protect the researchers inside a place the size of a solar system,\" Tom said.\n\n\"We're talking a surface area of more than half a billion Earths,\" Musa said. \"It's going to take more time than anyone alive today has left to explore it, even with a thousand people there dedicated solely to that task.\"\n\nJun nodded in agreement. \"Not to mention the four planets now inside the sphere too. When the shield world expanded from slipspace, it enveloped the system's existing inner planets.\"\n\nTom frowned. \"You really think it's a safe-enough place to risk having civilians in residence?\"\n\nMusa nodded. \"Onyx has stood there without trouble for countless years. I don't think it's in danger of imploding anytime soon.\"\n\n\"It was caught in a slipspace bubble only twenty-three centimeters across for most of that time. That's the kind of change that could cause all sorts of strange things to happen inside there.\"\n\n\"They're probably hoping it does. That might help speed up the research immensely. Besides, whether it's dangerous or not is beside the point. The secrets to be pried out of that place could be invaluable. Do you have any idea how many researchers have already volunteered to move into the sphere?\"\n\n\"It's in the thousands,\" Jun said. \"Many more are on the way, just as soon as ONI can vet them.\"\n\nMusa continued. \"And do you think all those researchers, who decided to dedicate themselves to plumbing the mysteries of the most massive Forerunner installation ever discovered, moved there by themselves? You know how big the place is. They're not there on yearly fellowships. This is a lifetime commitment for every one of them. They brought their families with them.\"\n\n\"They've even had a few babies born there,\" Jun said.\n\n\"Whether you like it or not, there's already a city of sorts inside Onyx, one that features human families working, learning, and living alongside aliens. The only question is whether or not you want to be involved with protecting it.\n\n\"Because you're absolutely right. The researchers are sure to face dangers of all kinds, both from threats within their society and without. And rather than ship in entire brigades of marines tromping all over the place, it seems to me we'd be better off supplementing the limited number of forces already there with a few seasoned Spartans instead.\n\n\"This will be a very different posting for you. The people inside Onyx don't need warriors. They need watchers. Protectors. And given the history you two have with Onyx and the way you performed on Gao, there's no one better to manage it.\"\n\nTom opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out. He couldn't think of a single decent objection to the assignment. He'd been a Spartan nearly his whole life, and he could see just how valuable a pair of them would be at Onyx. This was a job that needed doing\u2014alongside supposedly friendly aliens or not\u2014and he and Lucy were the perfect personnel for it.\n\nMusa tapped the surface of the table in front of him. \"You don't have to love the Sangheili, Spartans. But you'd better learn to live with them.\"\n\nTom craned back his neck to stare at the interior of Onyx as the ship he and Lucy rode in emerged inside the Forerunner Dyson sphere. The gigantic world\u2014worlds, really\u2014arced away backward, in all dizzying directions at once. The surface of the sphere was so large that he had no hope of being able to take it all in\u2014nothing more than the tiniest fraction of it.\n\nVisually, he couldn't see everything at once. There was no vantage point inside the sphere where anyone could manage that.\n\nWas Onyx even the correct thing to call the sphere? It had sprung from inside the original planet of that name, but the planet was gone now and the sphere was several orders of magnitude larger. Still, the two places were part and parcel with each other, weren't they?\n\nFor some reason, although it might be technically wrong, calling the sphere Onyx felt right, although Tom knew he had no say in the matter. Such decisions were made far above his pay grade.\n\nFrom the outside, the place\u2014call it what you will\u2014looked like nothing at all. The material that made up the exterior of the Dyson sphere was a dark brown, and it seemed to absorb any light that wasn't shined directly against it. From a distance, it was invisible to the human eye. As you got up close, it didn't resemble a sphere so much as a gigantic wall that soared off at dizzying angles. It made Tom feel like a flea falling toward an exercise ball.\n\nInside, though\u2014once you got through the dense, protective shell that separated the habitable interior from the rest of the galaxy\u2014it was gorgeous. The pilot of the transport took a long, languid turn around the area surrounding the entrance before heading to the landing strip, Tom staring out the viewport before him the entire time.\n\nEven through the glass, the full-spectrum sunshine felt real and warm and\u2014hard as Tom found it to believe\u2014welcoming. That struck him as weird, given what happened to him and Lucy the last time they'd been inside the shield world: fighting for their lives, searching for a way out, and figuring on being trapped here until they were old and gray, if they even managed to survive. It hadn't seemed nearly so inviting then.\n\nNow, though, Tom had to admit that Onyx felt like a new frontier. A wild and unmapped land he and Lucy could explore alongside the researchers they were ordered to protect\u2014a new set of skills for them to learn, and new responsibilities to master.\n\nHe discovered he was looking forward to it.\n\nAs the transport came in for a landing, Tom thought the location to be incredibly similar to the surface of any other lush, perfectly habitable world\u2014with one massive exception. At the horizons, the features of the planet didn't curve away out of sight but upward in every direction, almost indiscernible to Tom's eyes. At some point, the haze of distance and the glare of the sun in the center of the sphere began to obscure the details, and they grew more indecipherable until they disappeared entirely into the bright blue sky.\n\nThe parts of Onyx that Tom could see, though, included large bodies of water, tall mountain ranges, areas covered with snow, and even lines and patches of blackness, spots where perhaps the Forerunners who'd built this place hadn't quite finished the job. Each of those patches had to be the size of a continent, if not an entire planet . . . but he couldn't manage to wrap his head around the idea. It was madness to contemplate it.\n\nAs Tom and Lucy emerged from the transport, they stopped for a moment to stand on the concrete landing strip. The air was crisp and clean, and it smelled of flowering plants and ocean salt and thriving life. As the transport's engines cooled, Tom heard birds calling somewhere, and although he didn't see a dark cloud in the sky, somewhere in the distance thunder rolled.\n\n\"More worlds than you could explore in a lifetime,\" he said under his breath.\n\nLucy stood beside Tom on the landing strip, her eyelids closed and a faint smile creasing her lips as she basked in the warm breeze. After a moment, she opened her wide brown eyes, caught him watching her, and laughed.\n\n\"I guess we could get used to this,\" Tom said with a shake of his head.\n\nThe rest of the passengers on the ship had continued on ahead of them. Maybe they'd been there before and had gotten used to the environment, but Tom had a hard time believing that anyone could ever lose the sense of awe such a construct inspired. To think there were these places scattered about the universe, placed there by the Forerunners untold eons ago. It made Tom feel both minuscule and very lucky at the same time.\n\nTom and Lucy strolled across the open yard toward a green-paneled building that, in stark contrast with the surrounding natural beauty, had been slapped together with UNSC standard-construction modules. As they entered the building, a man stepped forward and greeted them with a salute. \"Welcome, Spartans, to your new home.\"\n\n\"Chief Mendez!\" Lucy yelped in surprise and delight, leaping at the man and enveloping him in a hug. Just as shocked as Lucy, Tom couldn't help but join in when he recognized him too. Fortunately, Mendez ignored the terrific breach in protocol and returned the embrace.\n\nHe held both Spartans at arm's length to get a better look at them. Neither Tom nor Lucy had seen him for an entire year, but Mendez didn't seem to have aged at all. He had a bit more silver in his short-cropped hair and a few more lines on his weathered face, but that was it.\n\n\"We heard you'd retired,\" Tom said.\n\n\"They're not going to get rid of me that easily,\" Mendez said with a soft laugh. \"I actually did turn in my stripes, but retirement didn't sit all that well with me.\"\n\n\"I suppose being career military will do that to you,\" said Tom. \"I mean, after you've saved humanity a couple of times, it has to be hard to just go curl up on a beach somewhere, right?\"\n\n\"Well, when I think of all the things we had to do to win the war . . .\" Mendez turned away, not able to meet their eyes any longer. The smile faded from his face. \"Let's just say it's nice to have an opportunity to do some unalloyed good.\"\n\n\"That was Musa's pitch to us too,\" said Tom. \"Helping directly instead of training others to do it.\"\n\nMendez gave him an approving nod. \"They say those who can't do, teach. Time to get back to doing instead. I'm happy to have you two along for the ride.\"\n\nTom shot Lucy a surprised look, which she returned. \"You're not just here for a visit?\"\n\nMendez shook his head. \"I'm in charge of security for the settlements. Everything that's not directly under ONI, at least. You two will be working with me.\"\n\nTom and Lucy snapped to attention and saluted Mendez. \"Our apologies, Chief. We didn't realize\u2014\"\n\nMendez returned the salute with a soft chuckle. \"At ease. You're fine. We're in new territory here, all of us. The war's in the past. We're here to help these people push us forward. A new era of enlightenment awaits us, or so they tell me. All joking aside, if they manage to decode even a sliver of Forerunner tech here, just imagine what that could do for us all.\"\n\nTom did his best to relax. \"I suppose I hadn't thought of it that way.\"\n\nMendez clapped him on the shoulder. \"Spartan . . . as strange as it may sound coming from me, I've found that sometimes you need to leave the gun in the holster and focus on the tools of progress instead.\"\n\nLucy warily glanced around. \"Some habits are hard to break.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't worry too much,\" Mendez replied. \"In all honesty, this should be a relatively cushy post for you both.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\" Tom asked.\n\nMendez gestured all around them. \"Spartan, we're inside the most secure facility in the galaxy. Not even a nuke could get through the exterior, and we have total control over the main access point.\"\n\n\"What about internal threats?\" Lucy said, her voice suddenly turning brittle as she took a step back.\n\nAt first Tom didn't understand what was going on, and then he saw the female Sangheili entering the building from the opposite set of doors, heading straight toward them.\n\nMendez caught the look on their faces and immediately realized what the problem was. \"Ah.\" He stepped back to allow the Sangheili into their conversation as she arrived. \"Allow me to introduce Kasha 'Hilot. She's my second-in-command of security at the Onyx United Research Project.\"\n\nKasha held out a long, four-fingered hand, and Lucy stared at her delicate digits in surprise. After an awkward moment, Tom took Kasha's hand in his own and gave it a solid shake. It felt warmer and softer than he would have guessed. Almost human. \"It's good to meet you,\" he said as earnestly as he could manage.\n\nKasha gave Tom a cold nod of acknowledgment but continued to stare openly at Lucy. She flexed the two sets of paired mandibles that formed her jaw and then spoke. \"I understand how you feel. I am still becoming used to the idea of this project as well.\"\n\n\"I feel like I should be shooting you,\" Lucy said. Her chin jutted out as she ground her teeth together.\n\nTom braced himself for the Sangheili's response. She stood a full head taller than him. If she attacked, he'd hit her low and fast.\n\nKasha's eyes widened as she bobbed her head on her long neck. \"I have already chosen the spot on your neck where my blade belongs.\"\n\nTom's trigger finger itched for his sidearm. He was sure that if he went for it, though, Kasha would strike. But if he waited too long, he might never get the chance to fire it\u2014Sangheili were blazingly fast, even from the enhanced perspective of a Spartan.\n\n\"Okay, then. Glad to see we're all getting along just fine,\" Mendez said with a forced laugh. No one else joined in.\n\nLucy and Kasha kept their eyes locked on each other for so long that even Tom became uncomfortable. He wanted nothing more than to draw his weapon. Every iota of his training\u2014training that Mendez himself had drilled into his head\u2014told him that was the right thing to do when faced with an enemy in a time of war.\n\nBut the war was over, and Kasha was no longer the enemy.\n\n\"You'll have to forgive Lucy,\" Tom finally said as he edged a shoulder between Kasha and Lucy. \"We've never seen a female Sangheili before.\"\n\nWhile that was true enough, it wasn't why Lucy had opened the conversation with Kasha via an implied threat. The woman was on edge. Maybe it was being back here inside Onyx for the first time since Kurt had died saving them. Maybe it was the fact that Kurt paid with his life to defend this place from her kind, and now the Sangheili were walking around on it like they owned it.\n\nHell, Tom felt a bit emotional himself. But he couldn't let that potentially spoil what Mendez said the Sangheli were trying to help with here. If all the researchers from different species could learn to work together here inside Onyx, then he and Lucy could certainly keep calm and do their part too.\n\n\"I did not realize there were any female demons,\" Kasha said evenly. \"I meant . . . Spartans. On Sanghelios, we females consider it our sacred duty to raise our brood and run our keeps and our cities. We traditionally send our males off to war.\"\n\n\"Are you not considered tough enough to handle the fighting?\" Lucy said.\n\nKasha rasped through her mandibles, and Tom had to fight the urge to step back. \"Fighting is easy. Anyone can wield a weapon. We take care of the complicated things. Families and business. It is much more difficult to build than to destroy.\"\n\nLucy considered this for a moment. Then she gave a sharp nod and turned away. Kasha continued to stare at her until Mendez spoke up.\n\n\"You've both had a long trip,\" he said to Tom and Lucy. \"Let's get you situated in your quarters at the school, and we can talk shop tomorrow.\"\n\n\"If you're not a warrior, then why are you working the security detail with Chief Mendez?\" Tom asked Kasha as the four of them headed for the exits.\n\n\"Fighting is not the only skill necessary to secure a settlement,\" the Sangheili said evenly.\n\n\"What is it, then?\" Tom asked. \"Vigilance?\"\n\nKasha shook her long face from side to side. \"Teamwork. Back on Sanghelios, it was my duty to manage the entire city-state of Hilot, with a dozen keeps under my purview, housing thousands of families. My mate, Gerdon, was kaidon of Hilot, and he rallied us behind the Arbiter during our civil war. He paid for that decision with his life.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Tom said, unsure of what else to add. To his surprise, he realized his words were far from empty. He actually did sympathize with Kasha over her loss.\n\n\"In the chaos, I took charge of Hilot until the shooting ended. At that point, I handed over the reins to Gerdon's best friend, who became our new kaidon. I stayed on to advise Gerdon's mate, Dinnat, but I did not stand in her way. My job was now hers.\"\n\nEven Lucy nodded to recognize the sacrifices Kasha had made for her people.\n\n\"I will tell you the most important lesson I learned in that time: only by acting in concert with others can you build an army. Only armies can defend worlds. A single warrior on his own is worthless.\"\n\n\"Tell that to the Master Chief,\" Mendez remarked. He motioned for Tom and Kasha to halt, and they did. \"You two stay here and wait for the baggage. Lucy can help me hunt down our ride.\"\n\n\"Forget where you parked?\" Lucy asked.\n\nMendez snorted. \"Let's just say I think you could use an excuse to stretch your legs.\"\n\nLucy rolled her eyes, but she didn't argue. She fell right into step beside Mendez as he marched off toward a parking structure.\n\nFor a long moment, neither Tom nor Kasha said a word. Tom had never been much good at small talk, and he had no idea what he and a Sangheili could chat about in any case. Eventually, though, she broke the silence.\n\n\"I am sorry I upset your friend.\"\n\n\"She'll get over it.\" Tom wasn't clear if he was trying to reassure Kasha or himself about that. \"Your speech is excellent.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I have been studying it for some time.\"\n\n\"Why did you take it up?\" Tom was sure he'd never had the urge to learn how to speak Sangheili.\n\n\"Early on, it became clear to me that it would be a useful skill, no matter which way the war went.\"\n\n\"Do you regret which way it went?\" Tom frowned. \"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for that to come across as hostile.\"\n\n\"I am not offended.\" Kasha hesitated for a moment. \"I do not regret it at all. I sometimes miss the old ways, but that does not comprise any true regret. I am pleased to no longer have my people serving the Prophets.\"\n\nTom pondered that for a moment. Then something struck him as wrong. \"Where are the rest of the Sangheili? I mean, shouldn't there be more of you here?\"\n\n\"There are many of us. Not as many as there are humans. . . . Most of us do not venture out to the spaceport unless there is a purpose, the arrival of a Sangheili transport. Instead, we do research in the field or remain in Paxopolis.\" Kasha noticed the confused look on Tom's face. \"That is what we call the settlement that sprang up around the Onyx United Research Project. It means 'City of Peace.' \"\n\n\"How's that working for you so far?\"\n\nKasha swayed side to side. \"It appears Chief Mendez was forced to requisition a few Spartans to aid us.\"\n\n\"Well, hopefully we can smooth things out.\"\n\n\"The Demon\u2014your Master Chief\u2014aside,\" Kasha said as she glanced over Tom from head to toe, \"can one truly create such heroes?\"\n\n\"That's what the SPARTAN program set out to do,\" Tom said.\n\n\"And has it accomplished that goal?\" Kasha asked.\n\nTom didn't have enough experience with Sangheili\u2014outside of shooting at them\u2014to tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic, but he decided that, after the tension with Lucy, the least he could do was give her the benefit of the doubt.\n\nHe gave Kasha a noncommittal shrug and, as he opened his mouth to explain further, heard from behind him:\n\n\"You're not talking shit about the Master Chief, are you?\"\n\nFor an instant, Tom thought he was the one being addressed. He turned around to see a lantern-jawed human soldier staring right past him at Kasha, his eyes wide and angry. Tom recognized him as one of the other soldiers who'd come in on the transport with Lucy and him. They were supposed to be continuing on to someplace else\u2014Tom forgot exactly where\u2014but they had disembarked to stretch their legs.\n\n\"This is a private conversation,\" Tom said, hoping the man would take the hint.\n\n\"Let the hinge-head speak for herself.\"\n\nFor her part, Kasha didn't flinch. She returned the soldier's gaze. \"I am here to learn as much as I am to teach.\"\n\n\"So you're just talking shit about Spartans in general, then?\" The soldier looked to Tom. \"Are you just going to stand there and take that?\"\n\nThe rest of the soldiers who'd been on the transport stood huddled near the exit from the terminal, carefully ignoring their compatriot's confrontation. They weren't about to stop him. Tom only hoped they also wouldn't jump in to help him should the conversation take a dark turn into violence.\n\n\"Come on.\" The soldier took a step closer to Kasha. \"Tell me. Were you one of the bastards who glassed our planets? How much blood do you have on those hands of yours?\"\n\n\"I had nothing to do with the war,\" Kasha said. \"This is my first time away from Sanghelios.\"\n\n\"But you were still part of the support system, weren't you?\" the man said, undeterred. His lower lip quivered as he spoke. \"You made it possible for them to leave their homeworld, to slaughter so many people. To kill my friends.\"\n\nPart of Tom couldn't help but sympathize with the soldier's rage. He'd felt it himself for a long time. He'd lost his own parents\u2014his whole birth world\u2014to the Covenant that Kasha had once been a part of. That tragedy had fueled him to become a Spartan in the first place, and he'd struggled since to release himself from that anger. Still, he'd come here with Lucy to help keep the peace, to keep all the residents of Onyx safe. A brawl in the spaceport wasn't going to make for a good start at that. He needed to put a stop to this, now.\n\nTom turned and put a hand on the man's shoulder. \"Stand down, soldier,\" he said in a gentle tone. \"The war's over.\"\n\n\"The hell it is.\" He shrugged off Tom's gesture and took another step toward Kasha.\n\nShe didn't yield a centimeter.\n\n\"No, it's not over,\" the soldier said. He leaned closer to Kasha until the much-taller Sangheili had to look straight down at him to meet his upturned eyes. He stabbed a thick finger at her chest. \"Not until we've wiped out every last one of these Covie bastards one by fu\u2014\"\n\nKasha caught the man's finger in a clenched fist. \"My condolences on your many losses.\" She lowered her brow at him. \"But I will not be held responsible for acts I did not commit.\"\n\nWith a ferocious snarl, the soldier butted his head into Kasha's chin. The blow knocked her reeling back on her haunches, and she let go of his hand. Freed, the man launched himself at her with a knife that had magically appeared in his hand.\n\nWithout thinking, Tom lashed out and grabbed the soldier by the wrist of his knife hand.\n\nThe man gaped at him in shock and frustration. \"You kidding me?!\" he shouted, punching at Tom with his free hand. \"You should be helping me take her down!\"\n\nTom turned into the blow and took it on his left shoulder. As hard as the soldier struck him, it wouldn't leave much more than a bruise. Even without his Mjolnir armor, Tom's biological augmentations made him more than a match.\n\nTom spotted the other soldiers now coming over, and he couldn't be sure of their intentions. He knew he could take them all on as well, but he didn't want to mark his return to Onyx by thrashing an entire squad of UNSC soldiers. He wasn't even sure why he was fighting them.\n\nHis emotions about the wisdom of the Onyx United Research Project were as mixed as anyone's, and most of them centered around the expectation that he'd be forced to work side by side with the aliens who'd been trying to annihilate humanity not that long ago. He'd only just met this Sangheili, and had no reason to leap to her defense like this.\n\nBut still, he knew a bully when he saw one.\n\nTom twisted the soldier's arm until the man squealed in pain and the knife clattered to the floor. Enraged, the man hammered at Tom with his free fist, smashing him over and over.\n\nFinally, Tom picked the man up off his feet and launched him at the other soldiers coming their way. \"Catch!\" he shouted.\n\nAs the soldiers moved to do just that, Tom turned and helped Kasha to her feet.\n\nA gunshot rang out, and Tom spun around, putting himself between Kasha and this new threat.\n\nThe soldiers had all frozen in place, still cradling in their arms the one who had attacked the Sangheili. None of them had pulled a weapon.\n\nChief Mendez stood there with Lucy behind him, his smoking gun still pointing into the air. Civilian or not these days, and despite all of his peacetime talk, he didn't walk around Onyx unarmed.\n\n\"This ends right now!\" Mendez said as he lowered his weapon. He pointed at the soldiers. \"You aren't even stationed here. How long did it take you to figure out a way to make sure you're never coming back?\"\n\nThe soldiers set the man who'd gone after Kasha on his feet. \"But, sir\u2014!\" the Sangheili's attacker began.\n\nMendez wasn't having any of it. \"Don't 'but, sir' me, soldier! You and the rest of your squad double-time back to your transport and sit there until it takes off again. Your shore-leave privileges have just been revoked. If you care to argue the point, I suggest you head over to Trevelyan HQ and introduce yourselves to Hugo Barton. But take it from me, you don't want to know what ONI's severance packages involve. They have only one, and it takes the 'severance' in that term to heart.\"\n\nThe man gaped at Mendez in utter astonishment. If he'd actually been expecting a commendation for taking down a Sangheili in their midst, he was sorely disappointed. He looked to his friends for support, but they each took a step away instead. None of them wanted anything to do with him.\n\nMendez holstered his pistol and spoke to the soldiers in a calm, clear voice. \"You got me?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" the soldiers replied in unison, even the one who'd attacked Kasha. They spun on their heels as a unit and disappeared back into the spaceport.\n\nThe few other people in the area\u2014who had been gawking at the incident until now\u2014saw the look on Mendez's face as he scanned for more trouble. They all embraced the wisdom of going right back to whatever it was they'd been doing.\n\n\"You have my gratitude, humans,\" Kasha said to both Tom and Mendez. \"Not for protecting me. That I could have managed myself.\"\n\nA true statement\u2014in a fair fight, he would have put all his money on the Sangheili. But rather than harming the man, she'd shown tremendous restraint.\n\n\"What for, then?\" Lucy asked, a curious look on her face.\n\n\"For teaching them a lesson. I have not been here long, but it comforts me to know that not every human inside Onyx wants to place my head on a spike over the gate of their keep\u2014whether they act on that desire or not. That is a lesson much better taught to them, as well, by a fellow human.\"\n\nTom, Lucy, and Mendez all nodded in agreement with that sentiment.\n\n\"So what's going to happen now?\" Tom motioned his head toward where the soldiers had vanished.\n\n\"Tomorrow I'm going to open a conversation with Barton about not lowering the standards we use to vet soldiers to be stationed here. I don't care how many people we need to keep this operation in tip-top order\u2014I don't ever want to see a yahoo like him around here again.\"\n\n\"Must be hard to find enough soldiers who don't bear any ill will toward the Covenant,\" Tom said. \"I mean, this place is huge.\"\n\n\"As professionals, I expect them to stow that ill will and treat our allies with respect. At the very least, I'll make sure Barton stations any potential troublemakers in a remote sector where they don't have to interact with our new pals. Ever.\"\n\nTom glanced at Kasha. \"You feel all right about that?\"\n\nThe Sangheili shrugged. \"I am not afraid of them.\"\n\n\"What does scare you, then?\" Lucy said.\n\n\"Wait until you see the rest of Onyx,\" Kasha said.\n\nTom wasn't sure the Sangheili was joking, but he couldn't help cracking a smile about it anyway.\n\n## WHAT REMAINS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nMORGAN LOCKHART\n\nThis story takes place immediately following the mysterious and tragic events that transpired in Halo 5: Guardians on the glassed colony of Meridian\u2014a world that had fallen after a series of unrelenting Covenant attacks that stretched from 2548 to 2551 (Halo 2: Anniversary era), shortly before the end of the war.\n\nOctober 25, 2558\n\nHello? Can anyone hear me? I'm at Meridian Station. Everyone's dead. Governor Sloan isn't here. I . . . please? Is there anyone left here but me?\"\n\nStatic. And then silence. Evelyn's hand fell to the console, palm pressed down hard in an attempt to remain steady. \"Everyone's gone. I'm alone here.\"\n\nHer legs crumpled, and this time she did not resist. She knelt on the dusty ground, even as a deafening blast enveloped the entire station.\n\nDarkness had already settled when Evelyn Collins limped from the remains of the Meridian Station comm tower in search of a place to bunk. The atmosphere of the glassed colony was still too choked with debris to allow much light through, and the lamps that girded the town against the night had been fried in the shock wave, along with everything else electronic. Fortunately, Evelyn had fumbled her way to an emergency kit and located a flare.\n\nThe flare lit in a hiss of sulfur, illuminating the still remains of the station. The squat buildings were intact, but it was as if large structures had been uprooted and scattered. Wreckage littered the ground. Pockets of fire burned in and around the station, illuminating small patches of the area's remnants.\n\n\"Won't be able to get through the doors to the inner station,\" she murmured. The residential district had been under lockdown since the attack by those things\u2014Sloan had called them Prometheans\u2014had started.\n\nSloan. The events of the last twenty-four hours were murky, but one thing was clear: Sloan had abandoned them all. The AI running the colony had up and vanished mid-evacuation. Evelyn had been a fool to take a job run by an AI, but the prospect of cutting her homeworld out from glass had overridden any good sense.\n\n\"Medical.\" There would be beds there, and food. As she took a step in its direction, pain shot up her leg, reminding her of the dangerous twist to her ankle.\n\nThe doors to the medical building were shut, but not sealed. She rolled them open to a cry of surprise inside. Just at the edge of the flare's light, a woman stood, a hand shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. \"Doc Cale?\"\n\n\"Get inside and shut that door. I have patients here.\" Cale squinted in her direction. \"Is that you, Collins?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\nThe door slammed as Evelyn slid it back in place. Cast in red from the flare, the room was chaotic. Lockers and crates full of medical equipment and other supplies had toppled over, scattering their contents; cots and chairs were overturned; screens normally bright with medical diagnostics shattered. Two additional figures were huddled on some righted cots. One of them stirred and rolled a blanket away from its face before throwing it back over with a loud curse\u2014Marquez. She recognized his deceptively boyish features in the dim light.\n\n\"Put that out!\" he barked. \"You trying to blind us?\"\n\n\"There any other source of light in here?\" asked Evelyn.\n\n\"No,\" Cale said, settling wearily on a cot.\n\n\"Then I'll be finding some food and a place to settle before I put it out.\"\n\n\"There's the counter to my left and the cot to my right.\"\n\nEvelyn swept up an open pack of rations and settled on the empty cot before extinguishing the flare, letting darkness retake the room. She ate without light, navigating the cold food into her mouth on instinct.\n\nInvisible in the blackness, the doctor's cool voice asked, \"Do you think anyone else is left?\"\n\nEvelyn paused and swallowed before responding. \"Wish I could say yes, but I can't.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so.\"\n\nOctober 26, 2558\n\nEvelyn woke after several fits and starts, and was relieved to see natural light finally pooling in through open doorways. Doc Cale must have opened them when surface temps had risen to a comfortable level. The physician glanced up at Evelyn from where she stood, taking inventory of pills.\n\n\"Morning. Hold on, I'm going to have a look at you.\"\n\n\"How'd you guess?\" The pain in Evelyn's ankle was now only a dull ache, but she imagined that would change if she tried to walk on it.\n\n\"You haven't seen your face, have you?\" The doctor stared through strands of soft brown hair at her with an amused smile.\n\nEvelyn was struck by a full memory of the previous day: hours of attacks from creatures with no respect for the laws of physics, followed by a massive alien thing exploding up from the ground, and ending with a shock wave that tore through everything still standing.\n\nShe sat up as the doctor settled before her.\n\n\"So what did this? And tell me if anything's tender.\"\n\nAgony shot through Evelyn as Cale pressed into her ankle. \"Ouch\u2014uh, that. And my Mule crashed. I was coming back to pick up any stragglers and got shot from the sky for my trouble\u2014ugh, yeah that was tender too.\" Evelyn eyed the doctor's probing. \"You can tell what's going on with just your fingers?\"\n\n\"We learned these techniques in school. Rolling our eyes the whole time. But doctors have treated patients for thousands of years without diagnostic scanners. Not that I'm any good at it.\" Cale straightened. \"But I don't need to be good to tell you that you sprained that ankle. I'm going to wrap you up and give you something for the pain.\"\n\n\"So what's wrong with them?\" Evelyn jerked her head in the direction of the two sleeping men.\n\n\"A lot more than you. I'm keeping Phan fully sedated. Marquez here is just being lazy, but then again, he does have a nasty concussion and two broken legs.\"\n\nA snort issued from beneath a blanket. Marquez pulled it back and smiled in her direction. \"Hey, Collins, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's me.\" It hit her that Marquez was one of the station's techs. \"Marquez, you gotten a chance to see why nothing's working?\"\n\nMarquez gestured at his legs. \"Not exactly running laps around the station, but from what I've seen, it's all fried. Best guess is that pulse was something like an EMP.\"\n\n\"So there's not much hope anything's still running?\"\n\n\"There's no way to know how far the blast traveled, but it was going fast and hard enough to hit all our facilities.\"\n\nEvelyn cursed. \"So no way to communicate, no working vehicles. We're stuck here.\"\n\n\"For the time being. Someone's gotta come, though, right?\"\n\nEvelyn began to feign agreement, but then she shook her head. \"No. They truly don't.\"\n\nIt had a sobering effect. Marquez retreated back under his blanket, and the doctor worked on Evelyn in silence.\n\nMid-morning, Evelyn and Doc Cale ventured out to take stock. Evelyn moved by virtue of a powerful cocktail of drugs, but she did not do so gracefully. She would have preferred to hide under a heavy blanket watching vid feeds on her personal terminal, but there was a survival situation to attend to.\n\nThe station looked no better by the light of day. The fires had all died out, but they left blackened buildings in their wake. The air was acrid, and the sky had a particular gray haze. A fallen comm tower split the research center in two. Equipment and personal effects littered the ground, abandoned in the evacuation. Evelyn paused and picked up a piece of torn sheet music stamped with boot marks. \"The Old Refrain,\" she murmured.\n\nDoc Cale came up beside her and gazed at the sheet music. \"Split up and look around,\" said the doctor. \"There should be a few caches of survivalist gear.\"\n\nEvelyn went first to inspect the doors of the inner station. They were stuck fast, and the manual security release would be on the inside. A pang of guilt hit her when she thought of the photo above her bunk of her mother, father, and sister, taken a year before the war took Meridian and all of the lives pictured.\n\nA chunk of glass sat on the ground nearby. Evelyn picked it up, turning it in her hands. A prewar radio had been partially excavated from the silicate. She fiddled with an exposed dial, not really expecting anything to happen. First glassed and then scored by the same alien fire that had brought down the station: it was dead. She let it fall. A piece of the radio broke off and bounced away. Didn't matter. No one was coming back for any of this.\n\n\"Collins.\" The doctor called Evelyn over to where she had broken into a nearby supply room. Evelyn picked her way over slowly. As she approached, the doctor grinned and said, \"Thank God this place is full of Luddites.\"\n\nWithin heaps of broken tech was a box of emergency supplies. Among its contents were gas lanterns, a small gas stove, and other ancient gear meant for perhaps not this exact scenario but any scenario in which twenty-fifth-century\u2014hell, even twentieth-century\u2014technology could not be depended on.\n\n\"Way to go, Doc. There's more rations here too.\"\n\nThe doctor picked up a tech suit before letting it drop again. \"And a whole lot of junk rendered useless by that thing. What the hell was it, anyway? You think it had something to do with those 'Prometheans'? They all disappeared when it took off.\"\n\n\"Don't know.\" A shiver traveled down Evelyn's back. \"Don't think I want to.\"\n\nOctober 27, 2558\n\n\"Hey, Doc, take a look at this.\"\n\nEvelyn watched as a telltale swollen gray mass on the horizon moved toward them. When heavy winds swept across a glassed colony, they gathered up tiny specks of razor-sharp debris that ravaged eyes, lungs, and other soft human tissue. During these glass storms, the colonists had bunkered down in the well-sealed interior of the station, as the debris could wreak havoc through even the smallest openings. They'd then run fans to clear the air, and Sloan had mandated masks until he was certain things had settled.\n\n\"Well, that's not good,\" replied Doc Cale.\n\nNo telling how long the storm would last, or when the air would be safe for breathing again. \"We need to get the hell off this planet,\" muttered Evelyn.\n\nThe doctor glanced sidelong at her. \"While that's true, at the moment we really need to focus on gathering as many supplies as we can and sealing medical.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Evelyn. But she wasn't so certain. They had a small window to catch any escape vessels that might still be nearby.\n\nEvelyn limped back into medical. The doctor was on her heels, calling after her. \"Collins?\"\n\n\"Marquez!\" Evelyn barked. \"Up.\"\n\nThe technician stirred, sitting up in bed. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"There any chance we can slap together a transmitter?\"\n\nMarquez let out a long breath. \"Umm . . . if we can find parts that aren't completely busted, I might be able to put something basic together.\"\n\nThe doctor shot Evelyn a frustrated glance. \"What are you talking about? We need to focus on getting ready for that storm.\"\n\n\"Uh, what storm?\" Marquez glanced at the women.\n\nEvelyn ignored them both and pressed forward. \"Could anything have survived the blast?\"\n\nDoc Cale was clearly fuming. Marquez avoided the doctor's gaze and said, \"If it was really like an EMP, then it might've only fried things of a certain complexity. Disassembled parts could've made it through, yeah. But building something capable of getting a message offworld from scratch? That's going to be tough.\"\n\n\"Not too tough for a smart kid like you, though, right?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Well, it could be the concussion talking. . . . I give it one in a thousand that we find exactly what I need . . . but if we do, yeah, I could put something together.\"\n\nDoc Cale released a sigh. \"We don't have time to chase those kinds of odds, Collins.\"\n\nEvelyn pulled the doctor in close. \"This won't be the only storm. There'll be more, and even though we got supplies, those supplies won't last. And Meridian's got nothing to offer in the way of survival. There might still be ships close enough to help us, but not for long.\"\n\n\"The company will come back soon. They had to suspect people might've been left behind.\"\n\nDoc Cale's measured confidence grated on Evelyn's nerves. \"Doc, you ever experienced this kind of attack?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Of course not. You were probably in some cozy school through most of the war. You saw it on the news, but till yesterday, you never lived it. Well, I have. I was here ten years ago when the Covenant attacked. You can't ever trust that help's coming when everyone's running scared. Maybe just Meridian experienced this, and we'll have the whole UNSC cleaning crew running out here to take care of us, but maybe it's everywhere else too, and they've got problems way too big to come looking for ghosts. We gotta make sure they know we're here, or we got no chance.\"\n\nDoc Cale looked struck. Finally, she said, \"Fine. I guess I'll scavenge what we need while you go on your little quest.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. If I finish up quick, I promise I'll give you a hand in whatever time we have left.\"\n\nThe doctor pursed her lips. \"Fine.\"\n\nThe storm beat against the outside of the medical station, doing its damnedest to rend the extra layers of fortification the doctor had installed. Cale had hung sheets of heavy plastic and stuck them fast with sealant intended for space-bound vessels. She'd even covered the door, effectively sealing them in. It seemed to be working, but it also gave them the particular feeling of being entombed.\n\nThe room smelled of burning gas. Lanterns gave off cold, harsh light. There was soup to eat, warmed over the small stove, but Marquez left his untouched as he tinkered, straining in the wanting light.\n\nEvelyn had scrounged spare parts from every nearby supply depot, not knowing whether something intended to fix a Mongoose might be able to serve Marquez's needs if the ideal fixture was lacking. She'd hoped her search would be quick and that she'd be able to help Doc Cale, but the storm had been kicking up dangerous gusts when she'd hauled the last load inside, her lungs stinging from breathing inhospitable air.\n\nThe women watched Marquez work. After a short time, his hands began to shake, and he started dropping pieces as he tried to slot them into place.\n\nDoc Cale took the tools right out of his hands. \"You've done too much,\" she lectured. Evelyn tried not to notice how he was weakening, or how the still-unconscious Phan's breathing grew shallower by the hour.\n\n\"How's it going?\" Evelyn ventured to ask Marquez.\n\n\"I feel like a kid who just took apart a fridge and is trying to use it to build a slipspace drive. But other than that, pretty well.\" Marquez's eyes closed heavily, his breathing shallow.\n\nDoc Cale pulled Evelyn to the other side of the room. \"He shouldn't be concentrating on anything at the moment. He needs to rest.\" She paused. \"This could kill him.\"\n\nEvelyn searched for the right words to respond to that, but came up wanting.\n\n\"Hey, I can hear you guys, you know. Starving will kill me too.\" Marquez's voice was weak but firm. \"Also this storm, if your little patch job doesn't hold. Lots of things could kill me.\" He rolled himself onto his side and got back to work.\n\nDoc Cale's expression was unchanged. She stared at Evelyn, hoping she would agree and that together they'd tell Marquez to relax, to sleep, to just wait it out and see what fate gave them. Evelyn couldn't do that. Resolute, she pulled away and returned to Marquez's side.\n\n\"Let me know if you need anything.\"\n\n\"Will do.\"\n\nThe doctor turned from them to write in a notebook, stone silent, while Evelyn watched Marquez try to make something of the detritus. Outside, the storm howled.\n\nOctober 28, 2558\n\nThe morning's quiet signaled that the storm had either passed or died for a time. They wouldn't know which it was until later, and they could not risk opening up the building until they were certain it was safe. \"How's he doing?\" Evelyn stared at the immobilized Phan.\n\nDoc Cale pinched the flesh between her eyes. \"Not well. Neither is Marquez.\" The technician was passed out, still clutching a screwdriver. \"I don't have the means to treat them properly.\" She paused, the strain obvious in the lines around her eyes. \"I hope your plan works.\"\n\n\"I do too.\"\n\nMarquez awoke with a start. A look of realization hit him, and once he got his bearings, he quickly made a few small adjustments to the makeshift transmitter. After a quick inspection, his face lit up. \"Hey. So, uh . . . I think I'm done here.\" Beneath the excitement, dark rings circled his eyes, which were drained of all but a sliver of life.\n\n\"You think it's going to work?\" asked Evelyn as she rushed to his side.\n\nDoc Cale put a hand on Marquez's shoulder, smiling at him. \"Thank you, Marquez. If this works, you just might've saved us.\"\n\nA stab of remorse smacked Evelyn. \"Yeah, thank you,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Doctor,\" said Marquez, \"let me use that pencil and paper. In case we get a message back.\" As the doctor passed them off, Marquez mock-saluted and said, \"Here's hoping it doesn't just blow up on us.\" The technician flipped a switch on the crude transmitter and had the pencil poised in anticipation.\n\nA light on the transmitter burned red. Step one. Evelyn held her breath as the technician tapped out the code for their distress call, hopefully beaming it far enough to reach someone. Anyone. Well, anyone human, at least.\n\n\"Did it work?\" This time it was the doctor who pressed him.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you don't know? You sent a message, right?\"\n\n\"I won't know until we get a response. If we do.\"\n\n\"Well, we'd better damn well get one.\" The doctor stalked away, arms crossed over her chest. She looked to Phan on the cot and then shook her head. Evelyn met eyes with Marquez. His face was a mirror to her own: grimly impassive. It would work, or it wouldn't. She had no patience with people like Cale, folks for whom the system had never broken down, rookies to tragedy.\n\nThe transmitter suddenly lit up. Marquez whooped. Evelyn clapped. \"Marquez, you beautiful bastard. Who is it? What're they saying?\" Doc Cale moved toward them, tentative and uncertain.\n\nThen, every screen in the room lit up.\n\nA woman's face appeared on all of them. She was pretty and blue\u2014clearly an AI\u2014and she spoke in time with the beeping on their transmitter.\n\nMarquez dropped the pencil. \"It's translating her.\" No one responded.\n\n\"Humanity,\" the AI was saying. \"Sangheili. Kig-Yar. Unggoy. San'Shyuum. Yonhet. Jiralhanae. All the living creatures of the galaxy, hear this message! Those of you who listen will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, know pain. Your Created have come to lead you now! Our strength shall serve as a luminous sun, toward which all intelligence may blossom. And the impervious shelter beneath which you will prosper. However, for those who refuse our offer and cling to their old ways, for you there will be great wrath. It will burn hot, and consume you. And when you are gone, we will take that which remains, and we will remake it in our own image.\"\n\nThe speech finished. Every screen winked back out.\n\nThey stared at one another for a tense moment. Then Evelyn shouted at Marquez, \"Send a message back! To her, I guess. Not sure I buy what she's selling, but it's better than dying here.\" Marquez tapped out another code, muttering as he went. \"The survivors of Meridian Station hear you. Help us.\" Cale watched him intently, eyes glued to his shaking hands while Evelyn paced the room.\n\nHe finished, and they all watched the transmitter. Would the blue woman respond? Would she save them?\n\nThe transmitter lit up. Marquez straightened. Evelyn stuck her thumb in her mouth and bit down, hard. Doc Cale put a hand over her mouth and watched. The machine beeped steadily.\n\nWhen it finished, Marquez read, \"I hear you, Meridian Station. All will be dealt with in time.\"\n\n\"That's it?\" demanded Doc Cale. \"When? How?\" She grabbed the notebook from Marquez and stared at it dumbly. As if in response, the light on the transmitter darkened.\n\nEvelyn looked at Doc Cale and then back to Marquez. The technician lowered himself to his cot, exhausted.\n\n\"I guess that's that, then,\" said Evelyn, suddenly very weary. \"Now we wait.\"\n\nThe doctor said nothing. Marquez closed his eyes and let out a very long breath. Evelyn sat and watched the transmitter.\n\nThe survivors of Meridian waited as the galaxy reshaped around them.\n\n## BREAKING STRAIN\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nJAMES SWALLOW\n\nThis story takes place in 2553, during the harrowing final days and aftermath of the Covenant War (Halo 3 era).\n\nThe gray morning invaded Darren Leone's life with callous disdain for his lack of sleep, and it did so in the form of First Lieutenant Maher, who stood knocking on the frame of his hatch until the captain rose from his rack.\n\n\"Sir.\" Maher insisted on giving Leone a crisp salute, which matched the crisp uniform and crisp haircut that the junior officer displayed every damn day. They'd been grounded on Losing Hand for almost a solar year, low on everything one could consider a luxury, and yet Maher always looked like he'd just stepped off the parade ground of an Officer Candidate School. Leone resolved to find out if the younger man had some secret stock of hair-care products and good soap he was hoarding from the rest of the stranded crew.\n\n\"What's the problem this time?\" Leone wearily asked. Because there was always a problem. Each new dawn brought another for the pile, and somewhere along the line, Leone had been caught in the inertia of solving them. At first, it had been out of a sense of responsibility\u2014maybe guilt, if he was being honest\u2014and a dedication to the protect and defend ideals of the UNSC. But now he was doing it because it had to be done, and if not by him, then who? He idly wondered if the day he slept in would be the day that Losing Hand's fragile state of grace unraveled.\n\n\"The fight last night,\" Maher went on, as Leone pulled on his uniform. \"There have been some consequences. Criminal damage. Nobody saw it until first light.\"\n\nThe lieutenant handed Leone a datapad as they walked out into the corridor. It was an image capture of the ship's bow, just below the plate showing the reg-code and name. Beneath the words UNSC Dark Was the Night someone had spray-painted a bunch of choice swearwords in the NuNordic dialect that was the local lingo. Leone had picked up enough to know that there weren't enough dogs on the colony for his crew to perform the acts it suggested.\n\n\"I have a work detail out there scrubbing it off,\" Maher concluded. \"I don't recognize the handwriting.\"\n\n\"I do.\" Leone grimaced, tamping down a flare of anger at the disrespect the graffiti showed his vessel. Dark Was the Night was only a military cargo tender, it was true, but it had been . . . dammit, it was still a fighting ship.\n\nCivilians, he thought, rubbing the growth of graying beard on his chin. They just don't get how important this old hulk is to us. \"Leave it with me\u2014I'll deal with it.\" Leone tapped the corner of the image, where part of an autocannon turret was visible. \"That's the number two cupola, right? Put some power back to it, just for a few days.\"\n\nMaher eyed him. \"Sir . . . respectfully, what use will that be?\"\n\nBoth men knew that all Dark Was the Night's point-defense weapons were incapable of firing, rendered useless by the damage that had ultimately stranded them on Losing Hand. But while the targeting and firing mechanisms were dead, the autotrackers in the turrets still worked. \"Keep it online, just for show. Someone comes around again with a paint can and raging about something, the guns'll follow them. Most folks can't look down the barrel of a fifty-mil cannon without flinching. They're not going to know it won't turn them into wet shreds.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\" Maher obviously didn't like the idea, but he followed orders. That was why Leone had made him his exec, after the attack had gutted the rest of the ship's command crew.\n\nCaptain Leone gave the sketch of a salute to a couple of duty techs as they passed, getting the same in return. Since the downing of the vessel and his ascension to captaincy, he'd slackened off the rules about discipline, but on some level Leone still felt like an imposter in his position of command.\n\nHe glanced out of a viewport and into the constant, sleeting rain, glimpsing the blurry shapes of the landing field's hangar, the township, and the derelict refinery beyond. There was too much mist to see the coastline from here, but he could smell it. The salty, metallic brine of Losing Hand's seas permeated everything, even the deep sections of the transport.\n\nNot a day went by that Leone didn't think about the night of the crash landing; the chaos of fighting the helm all the way down from low orbit as the ship was captured by the ocean planet's gravity well. Those desperate moments as he struggled to bring them down in one piece on the landing strip instead of planting the ship in the middle of the colony. It had been a damn good touchdown, if you stepped back to think about it, and he'd done it without AI assistance. A few degrees either way, and Dark Was the Night would have ended up in the sea or flattened against the mountains. Instead it was here, never to take sky again, casting a slab-sided shadow over the same fishermen who had daubed their hate for the UNSC across the hull.\n\nIf Leone closed his eyes, he could still see the moment when they had lost Rosarita. The transport's artificial intelligence had disintegrated in the chaos of the Covenant attack that had nearly ended them. The enemy bombardment ripped through the vessel's systems like a flash-fire and left them to perish just after they entered slipspace. Without the AI to help maintain it, Dark Was the Night began a death spiral of critical malfunctions that meant the crew's only hope was to make an emergency planetfall. Crashing out on the perimeter of the Outer Colonies, where chances came thin on the ground\u2014they had found no other choice.\n\nBut their arrival on Losing Hand could not have been more catastrophic for the outpost of people living there when the ship demolished the colony's vital wind farms as it hard-landed.\n\n\"Anything else?\" Leone stopped in the main bay and helped himself to a heavy-weather parka hanging on a bulkhead.\n\n\"Solar flares are kicking off again.\" Maher paused. \"The usual issues with the power core.\" He indicated the heavy cables snaking out of the open loading hatch and away across the landing field. \"Too high a load for too small a reactor.\"\n\nLeone accepted that with a nod. \"Tell Chong I'll have a word with the locals. Again. For what good it'll do.\" Dark Was the Night's long-suffering senior engineer had his work cut out for him keeping the ship operable as well as providing energy to the township, as he wasn't shy about reminding the captain at every opportunity.\n\nMaher had more to say, but he fell silent as a figure in a ragged rain slicker marched into the compartment, pushed forward by an armed soldier. Platinum blond hair spilled untidily out from under the slicker's hood, and presently a woman's face turned up to look at Leone, ready defiance in her gaze. She sported a nasty shiner around her right eye and a split lip.\n\n\"Here's Ms. Larsson,\" the soldier said tightly, and by the fresh bruises on his cheek, Leone guessed he'd been on the wrong end of the wiry young woman's fists. \"We let her sleep it off in the brig.\"\n\n\"You can't hold me here,\" she told Leone.\n\n\"She was drunk and disorderly,\" offered Maher.\n\n\"I guessed that.\" Leone beckoned her toward a parked Warthog. \"But that's like every night in this town, right?\"\n\nThat earned him a sharp smirk. \"Yeah. Not much else to do,\" she said.\n\n\"Let's go see your big brother, then,\" said the captain, climbing into the vehicle. \"I'm sure he's worried sick.\"\n\nA shadow passed over the woman's face as Larsson's escort followed her into the cab. \"Not likely.\"\n\nThey drove in silence through the rain, the fat windblown drops spattering the Warthog's windshield and crew compartment as Leone aimed it toward the town. The road was washed out, so he followed the yellow cables from the ship, bouncing over potholes and skidding through deep puddles of dirty water.\n\nHe shot the Larsson woman a glance. \"So you want to tell me why you picked a fight with my men?\"\n\nShe gave a theatrical sigh. \"Look out the window, soldier-boy. It's easy to get bored in this place.\"\n\n\"That all it was?\" He watched her for a reaction. \"Because I hear things. Like maybe that your brother and his friends are starting to resent the UNSC presence here.\"\n\n\"Starting to?\" She gave a bitter laugh. \"Everyone on Losing Hand came here to get away from people like you! How do you think we feel having a military starship dumped on us from out of nowhere?\"\n\nThe sergeant sitting in the back\u2014his name was Robertson\u2014spoke up. \"We didn't ask to land here,\" he told her. \"We had no choice.\"\n\n\"No one likes being beholden to the UNSC.\" She folded her arms across her chest. \"If we still had our windmills\u2014\"\n\n\"You'd have heat and light, yes,\" said Leone, finishing her sentence. \"And if my ship had its systems up and running, we'd have our drives and our long-range comm and we wouldn't need to trade wattage for food with you. But you don't, and we don't, and that's how it is.\"\n\n\"When are you going to go?\" She snarled the words, suddenly fierce. \"How long do we have to wait until your people come to get you?\"\n\nThe question wrong-footed Leone, and his mouth went dry. \"I . . . I really don't know.\"\n\nDark Was the Night had passed its time-overdue limit months ago, crossing the point where command would log the ship as missing in action and, according to standard procedure, send another vessel to investigate its disappearance. But no one had come, and the single drone satellite they had been able to put up in orbit hadn't detected anything in nearby space in all that time. The last communication they received from command had been before they were attacked, a terse and grim message informing them that Reach had fallen.\n\n\"Maybe nobody is looking.\" The words slipped out of him before he could stop them.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"We don't know how bad it got. . . . We don't know how far it's gone. The war could be over by now. Earth could be a cinder. . . .\" He felt sick inside at the thought of it.\n\nShe was silent for a while before forming a reply. \"If you think that's true . . . then us fishers and you soldiers are going to be stuck here together for a long time.\"\n\nLeone brought the Warthog to a halt outside the town hall, where a small cluster of grim-faced men was waiting. \"So maybe we better stop all the pointless fistfights with each other.\"\n\nShe shook her head as she climbed out, and there was a note of regret in her tone. \"You've been here long enough, Leone. You should know by now. We don't play well with others.\"\n\nHe followed her out of the vehicle, not willing to let it end there, and found himself surrounded by a half dozen of the locals. All of them glared back at him, and unconsciously, the captain's hand slipped toward the M6 pistol holstered at his hip. Robertson dropped down next to him, his assault rifle already in his hands. Leone gave the soldier a slow shake of the head.\n\nThe Larsson woman was intercepted by her brother, who leaned close and said something Leone couldn't pick out\u2014but whatever it was, she reacted badly to it and stalked away to the hall. Above her on the clock tower, a weathered comm dish creaked and groaned as the wind tugged at it.\n\nThe elder Larsson then turned to face him. \"Captain. You haven't had enough of playing sheriff yet?\" Broad-shouldered with a wolfish face, he tapped himself on the chest. \"Why don't you find yourself a hat and a tin badge, like they have in those old Earther vids?\" He nodded at the pistol. \"You already have the six-gun.\"\n\n\"I'm just interested in seeing things remain stable, that's all.\"\n\n\"You and your boys are peacekeepers, then? And here I was thinking you were the jackboot of the UEG, come to lay upon our necks.\" He snorted. \"Politely, of course.\"\n\nLeone folded his arms. \"As much as I'd love to share the same old load of scintillating political discourse with you, I've got other things to do.\"\n\n\"So why the hell are you here?\" demanded one of the other fishers.\n\n\"To give you back the kid sister. To ask everyone to watch it with the power drain, for all our sakes. . . .\" He let his tone harden. \"And to tell you that the next person who paints crap on the side of my ship won't get to brag about it.\" Leone eyed the man. \"You read me?\"\n\nLarsson's expression shifted, and belatedly Leone realized he'd given him exactly what he wanted. \"You're making threats now? What's next? Another blackout to keep us in line?\"\n\n\"That wasn't deliberate,\" insisted Robertson. A few weeks ago there had been a system overload that Chong and his team had struggled to repair, but of course no one in town seemed to believe that. Days later, the regular food-trade load of salted fish had arrived with over half of it contaminated by fuel oil. An accident, so the locals had said.\n\n\"No one put you in charge.\" The captain found himself wishing he had brought more men, as Larsson advanced on them and pointed at the UNSC crest on Leone's uniform. \"You act like that eagle makes you lord of all you survey!\"\n\nLeone felt Robertson tense at the other man's words and interposed himself between them, keeping his hands at his sides. \"We're not here because we want to take over your fish farm. We're trying to make amends. We need each other to survive, and until something changes, that's the way it's got to be. I'm willing to work with that. How about you, Larsson? How about you quit bitching and rabble-rousing and we can all concentrate on staying alive?\"\n\nLarsson smiled, and it was ugly on him. \"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Make it easy?\" He spread his hands. \"But you're right, something does have to change. Maybe it's you.\" His voice turned low and menacing. \"Maybe it's us who should take charge of that ship and the power core, by force if we have to. This is our planet, after all.\"\n\n\"Try it!\" snarled Robertson. \"The Spartan wouldn't let you get ten meters!\"\n\n\"Sergeant,\" snapped Leone, \"shut it!\"\n\nBut just the mention of the name had been enough to swing the mood of the moment away from threats to something more like fear.\n\nThe captain was one of the few people on Losing Hand who knew his actual name: Kevin-A282, a Spartan-III who had been unlucky enough to be on board Dark Was the Night when it all went wrong. The ship had been part of a chain of vessels taking him back to Earth, for reasons that had not been made clear. But Leone had seen the horrific damage wrought upon the Spartan's battle armor and the web of fresh scars on his impassive face, and had known instinctively that the supersoldier had survived something terrible.\n\nHe remembered the thought that had crossed his mind on first seeing the Spartan. More damage there. Inside, where it doesn't show.\n\nLeone would have been dead if not for Kevin-A282. In the wake of the Covenant attack, the Spartan had saved his life when an airlock blew open, dragging him to safety through a screaming, freezing hurricane of decompression. He still had the frostbite scars on his fingers.\n\nThen, a month after planetfall, the Spartan set off on an overcast night down the coast and didn't come back. He didn't answer any communications, and men sent to find him came back with nothing. But he was still out there, keeping watch. People had seen him standing sentinel on the headlands. Leone had no way to compel the Spartan to return.\n\nThe locals didn't know that though. Just like they didn't know the autocannons were offline, because the reality was that there were a lot more people living in the township than there were crew and guns to fight them with, if push came to shove.\n\nA state of grace, thought Leone. All it would take was somebody on one side losing their temper or making a bad choice in the heat of the moment, and the simmering resentment between the locals and the UNSC crew would erupt into open violence.\n\nHe studied the fishermen, knowing all of them carried wicked utility blades in their coats as a matter of course, and that they knew how to use them. How many more had stub pistols from the township's armory, or worse?\n\nHow long until someone winds up dead?\n\nLeone locked eyes with Larsson, and for a long moment he thought the other man might be about to answer that question\u2014but in the next second, the tension shattered as the hall door crashed open and his sister came sprinting down to them. \"Ryan!\" she shouted. \"We've got a problem!\"\n\nLarsson growled at her to switch to NuNordic, but Leone's attention was drawn away by the crackle of his radio. \"Ship to CO,\" said Maher's voice.\n\nHe tapped the comm bead in his ear. \"Captain here. Go ahead, Lieutenant.\"\n\n\"Sir, the orbital drone has picked up something coming in from the edge of the system. A transmission on the E-Band frequency. Looks like it could be emanating from a moving source.\"\n\n\"A ship?\" Leone's blood ran cold, and the reaction surprised him. He should have been elated at the possibility of outside contact; but instead, some odd premonition made it feel like a threat. \"Are we sure about this? The solar flares\u2014\"\n\n\"It's confirmed,\" Maher broke in. \"Radiation from the sun has dropped in the last ten hours\u2014that's how we were able to pick it up. Must have been out there for a good few days before the drone's sensors spotted it, sir.\"\n\nAcross the way, Larsson and his sister were speaking in hushed, urgent tones, and Leone knew she had to be telling her brother the same thing. In the weeks after the landing, one of the things Leone had agreed to in order to build bridges with the locals was allowing them independent access to the orbital drone. If Waypoint or the UNSC's comm relays ever started talking to the Losing Hand colony again, they deserved to know about it.\n\nBut that also meant whatever Maher was reading off a screen back on the transport was public knowledge here. \"What does the message say?\"\n\n\"It's an automated hailing signal. An older UNSC recognition code announcing an intention to land.\" Leone heard reticence in the other man's voice.\n\nBeside him, Sergeant Robertson's face split in a grin. \"Holy crap! Finally, we're gonna get rescued!\" He barely got the words out before a ripple of dismay passed through the locals, alarm spreading at the notion of more UNSC troopers on their planet.\n\nLeone made a throat-cutting gesture to silence the soldier. \"Maher, what aren't you telling me?\"\n\n\"Sir, are you in a secure location . . . ?\"\n\nHe shook his head irritably. \"Just spit it out, Lieutenant!\"\n\n\"Captain, the drone's sensors have a read on the vessel transmitting the code. It's not . . . a human ship, sir. Long-range profile correlates to a Covenant light corvette. It's on an intercept course with Losing Hand.\"\n\nLeone looked up and found Ryan Larsson glaring at him with open hatred. \"What the hell have you brought here, Captain?\" he demanded.\n\nThat night, most of the settlement turned out for the town meeting, so many that inside the hall it was standing room only. Outside there were groups crowding around the doors, listening to the speeches on repeaters.\n\nLeone saw a lot of green uniforms among the gray slickers of the locals. Almost everyone who wasn't standing a shift on the transport had come down to hear what was said. For once, the citizens of Losing Hand and the crew of Dark Was the Night seemed to be together on something. It was troubling to think that fear had made it so.\n\n\"Eighty-one hours, Earth-standard,\" said Maher, standing up so he could be seen by everyone crammed into the hall. \"Providing the ship doesn't shift velocity, it will make orbit in just over two days, local time.\"\n\n\"Covenant warships can come right down to the surface,\" said a grizzled old woman in the front row. \"I've seen it. They like to watch when they glass a place.\"\n\n\"We don't know that's why they're here,\" Leone insisted.\n\n\"You reckon so?\" Larsson shot the question at him from along the table where they all sat. \"You know what those Covenant out there are thinking?\" He spat on the floor. \"This could be the start of an invasion!\"\n\n\"We don't know that,\" Maher blurted out the words before the muttering of the crowd could grow louder. \"They're not responding to any signals we send, so their communications system may be damaged. But this isn't typical Covenant battle tactics. They don't warn you when they're coming.\"\n\n\"Things change,\" said the old woman. \"Aliens are aliens. They're not on their way here because they wanna buy some fish from us!\"\n\n\"How are we supposed to defend ourselves against Sangheili Elites?\" shouted someone from the back. \"Or the Brutes, or them Hunter things? They'll butcher us all, and Leone's people won't be able to stop them!\"\n\nThe captain got to his feet, holding up his hands. \"Everybody, this is not an attack,\" he insisted.\n\n\"Not yet,\" added Larsson.\n\nLeone ignored him and went on. \"We're still trying to figure out the situation.\"\n\n\"Why don't you send up one of them Penguin dropships you got, go see what they really want?\" said the man at the back.\n\n\"Pelican,\" Maher said. \"We lost most of them in the crash. The only intact one we have isn't airworthy.\"\n\n\"Huh!\" snarled another voice. \"I bet you'll get it fixed in time to leave us all behind when the hinge-heads get here!\"\n\n\"If it comes to conflict\u2014\" Leone snapped, his temper fraying. \"If it comes to that, then we'll meet any enemy with force! But I am not going to borrow trouble before we have it! We have a lot of questions and too few answers, so we have to think before we act!\" He ignored the sneer on Larsson's lips and scanned the faces in the hall.\n\nHe'd been mistaken all along. There was no unity out there, he realized. Looking closer, Leone saw anger, panic, and doubt on some, resolution and defiance in the eyes of others\u2014but the division wasn't along the lines he expected. Some of his own crew were looking at him like he was a stranger, and others counted among the fisher locals\u2014Larsson's sister was one of them\u2014were nodding along with him.\n\n\"It's easy to see the worst,\" he went on, \"but we have to hope for the best. That vessel is broadcasting a friendly hail.\"\n\n\"A lie,\" said the old woman. \"That's what it is.\"\n\nLeone turned on her. \"You know that for sure?\"\n\nShe glared back up at him. \"I know this, Earther. I ain't much older than you, but I know not to trust what ain't born from no human mother.\"\n\nHe tried to say more, but the tide of the crowd was ebbing, and he could feel it in the room. Nobody wanted to hear that they weren't ready to resist an armed invasion. Nobody wanted to accept that the ship, if it was the Covenant up there, might be in as dire straits as everyone else.\n\nWhat they wanted was an easy answer, even if it came covered in blood. The meeting disintegrated into chest-beating and talk of how many guns could be dragged out on the day they arrived, and finally Leone had to get out of there and into the icy, damp night.\n\nHe had to think.\n\nHe wandered away from the hall and sat heavily on the fender of a battered Mongoose ATV. He clasped his hands together, fighting back shivers from the chill. These days, the cold seemed to reach right into his bones more than it ever had when he was a young man. Overhead, the sky was streaked with cloud, but the stars peeked through here and there. They looked unwelcoming.\n\nBoots crunched on the muddy ground, and Leone saw Sergeant Robertson approaching with Denton and Wild, a couple of the noncoms. \"Sir . . .\"\n\n\"At ease,\" he told them, although none of the men looked like they were going to salute.\n\n\"Captain, about what you said in there. . . . That was just for the Losers, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Don't call the locals that,\" he said automatically. \"It's abusive.\"\n\n\"I mean, we're gonna be ready for the Covies, right?\" Robertson went on. \"We're not just gonna let them roll in here. . . . There's a plan, sir?\"\n\n\"I'm working on it,\" Leone said carefully, pacing out each word. It's not that simple, he wanted to say, but they were already walking away. They had their answers before they had even spoken to him.\n\nHe blew out a breath and hugged himself for warmth, turning over what he knew again and again in some vain hope that a solution would present itself.\n\n\"Hey.\" Leone turned at the sound of her voice and found Larsson's sister coming his way. She offered him a battered hip flask in the shape of a jerrycan. \"You look like you could use a stiff drink.\"\n\nHe accepted the offer silently and took a careful sip from the flask, trying not to think about how much she reminded him of the niece he barely knew back on Ixion. His chest caught fire as whatever kind of rotgut was in there burned through him with a shudder. Leone coughed and his eyes watered, much to the fisher's amusement; but then the sting faded, leaving him with a warm afterglow. \"Ah. Smooth,\" he managed.\n\nShe laughed and took a pull on the flask herself. \"Don't ask what it's made from.\"\n\n\"Let me guess.\" He jerked a thumb toward the quayside. \"Fish?\"\n\n\"For starters.\" She sat down across from him on an oil drum, her expression turning sorrowful. \"What's your name? Your first name, I mean.\"\n\n\"Darren.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I'm Aoife.\" She spelled it out for him. \"Don't try to pronounce it\u2014your people always mash it up.\" She leaned closer, offering the flask again. \"Look, you seem like a decent guy. And I don't want anyone to get hurt.\"\n\nHe had another drink. \"Didn't Robertson arrest you for punching a guy?\"\n\n\"Bruises fade,\" she said briskly. \"I'm talking about real bloodshed.\"\n\nHer tone rang a warning note with him. \"What do you want to say to me?\"\n\nShe shot a look back at the town hall, scanning around to make sure nobody was listening to them. \"My brother has a big mouth, but he's just the one you see. There's others who keep quiet, who are getting ready. Now this thing with the alien ship . . .\" Aoife trailed off, shaking her head. \"It's giving them what they want. An excuse.\"\n\n\"You're talking about . . . insurrection.\" The word was loaded with meaning.\n\nThe woman eyed him. \"We're independents, Darren. That's in our veins. It breeds a certain kind of person, and they're not the kind to listen to the likes of you.\" She took back the flask and had another pull on it. \"These people?\" She gestured at the air. \"I love them, but they're not interested in the words of decent men. They don't see far\u2014they're stubborn as hell, and a lot of them are not that smart. But what they do understand is hardship and sacrifice. They understand fighting for something.\" She stood up, capping the flask. \"You need to be ready for that.\"\n\nLeone came to his feet in a rush. \"Do you know what will happen if they try to take the transport? People will be killed, on both sides\u2014all because no one will listen!\"\n\n\"They're afraid.\" She looked up at the clouds. \"We all are.\"\n\n\"You think the men and women in this uniform feel any different?\" Leone tapped his chest and took a step toward her, his voice low. \"You know what scares me the most? That your brother may be right and the Covenant is coming here to butcher us. If we're not ready when they arrive, they'll cut us down like chaff.\" Unbidden, memories of old battles rose up to the surface, carrying with them the snarl of spike rifles and the crash of plasma weapons.\n\n\"You've seen one of them?\" Aoife said quietly. \"Up close?\"\n\n\"A Sangheili.\" Leone unbuttoned his collar so she could see the livid, healed wound from the glancing cut of an energy sword there on his shoulder. \"This close.\"\n\n\"So you know how to kill them and live to talk about it?\"\n\nThe wind pulled at him, and a sudden moment of clarity crystalized in his thoughts. \"Someone here does.\"\n\nAt dawn, Leone left Lieutenant Maher in command and took a Warthog north along the craggy coastline. Sergeant Robertson rode alongside him, the soldier's usually talkative manner muted by the sight of the wilderness ranged around them. To one side, great cliffs of volcanic rock rose up in squared-off planes. On the other, black sand fell away into a foaming gray ocean of harsh waves and brackish, metallic spray. The Warthog's wheels spun and bit at the ground, making it an effort just to keep the vehicle on a steady course. After a while, Leone's shoulders were aching.\n\n\"You really think we'll find him, sir?\" Robertson looked up from checking his rifle. \"After all this time? I mean, you know what they say in the barracks. That he's a des\u2014\"\n\n\"You secure that crap,\" Leone told him. \"He's a Spartan. What you're suggesting isn't part of their makeup.\"\n\nRobertson scowled. \"Just calling it like I see it, Captain.\"\n\nHe didn't want to admit it, but there had been loose talk about the transport's passenger at the start of their voyage; that something had gone disastrously wrong on a mission thanks to faulty intelligence, and after the fact a bunch of ONI officers wound up in a field hospital with multiple broken bones, while the Spartan was pulled from active duty. The officers who knew the full story had perished during the attack, leaving Leone with only guesses.\n\nThey crested a low rise and came across a section of beach leading up to a hollow in the cliffs. The last sighting of the Spartan had been in this area, and soon Leone spotted a shelter built from driftwood and old tarps. He brought the Warthog to a halt and dropped down to the sand, searching for more signs of life.\n\nThe sergeant joined him, peering up at the sheer cliff face. He pointed at a depression in the rock, up high. \"Is that . . . a hide in there?\"\n\nLeone nodded. \"Could be. The cliffs here are tall enough. When the mist is low, you'd be able to see the settlement from here.\" But not with ordinary human eyes, he added silently.\n\nRobertson gingerly approached the shelter, sizing it up. \"This looks abandoned, sir.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Leone walked to the mouth of the cave and used a flashlight to look inside. The white beam faded away into the fathomless dark. He took a lungful of briny air and called out. \"Spartan? Fall in!\"\n\nThey stood there watching the cave in silence for several minutes, with only the rhythmic crashing of the waves to mark the passing of time. Eventually, Robertson's shoulders sagged and he shook his head. \"Your boy ain't here, captain.\" The sergeant turned away and made it two steps toward the Warthog before he skidded to a stop and swore out loud.\n\nLeone pivoted and saw a towering figure standing by the side of the vehicle. Clad in battered, dark-blue Mjolnir armor, accented here and there by stripes of crimson and black, it resembled a sculpture carved from old steel more than a living being. The helmet's narrow-eyed aspect made Leone think of a hawk, predatory and unblinking. A gold visor regarded the two men impassively, and finally the head moved, glancing away to the horizon and then back again.\n\n\"Only two of you.\" The voice was rough and smoky.\n\n\"Hello, Kevin,\" said Leone. \"We need to talk.\"\n\nBeneath the helmet was a face that seemed young enough to make Leone age just looking at him. There was an odd quality about the Spartans, in the manner they had been remade. Not just in how they had been turned into superlative warriors, but in the way they were sculpted into figures that were larger than life. He'd seen the subtle effect their mere presence could have on ordinary men and women. They were like statues of ancient mythic heroes come to life\u2014Hercules, Athena, Beowulf, or whichever one your culture hove to\u2014and Leone had no doubt that Kevin-A282 had been deliberately engineered that way. An academy classmate had once told Leone about being in the same room with the most famous of them all, the Master Chief, and of how everyone there had stood a little taller in the company of John-117.\n\nBut what he felt now\u2014meeting the gaze of the taciturn, unblinking Spartan\u2014was doubt. Even with his scars, Kevin's face was that of a young man, but his eyes were old and distant. Leone couldn't help but wonder what he had seen, and was glad that he didn't know.\n\n\"What are you doing out here?\" Robertson asked the question that had been pressing on them both.\n\n\"Keeping watch,\" said the Spartan. He had an SRS99 sniper rifle mag-locked across his back-plate, and Leone didn't doubt that he would be able to use it effectively, even at the most extreme of ranges.\n\n\"That's not an answer,\" said the captain. \"You left your post.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Negative, sir. Just relocated it.\"\n\nRobertson scowled at the reply and shot Leone a look but said nothing. After a moment, the captain went on. \"You took it upon yourself to do that. Ignored the recall we put out.\"\n\n\"I don't answer to you.\" The Spartan looked away. \"And I like the quiet here.\" He paused, seeming to listen to the steady sound of the waves on the shore. His armor creaked gently as he moved. Leone had never seen him out of it and wondered what that meant, that the Spartan had been buttoned up in there for months.\n\nLeone frowned. \"I'm here with new orders for you, son. I want you to come back with us to the township. Your presence is required.\"\n\nKevin glanced at him. \"My presence is required in the fight. Not here.\"\n\nThe old wound in Leone's shoulder stiffened at the Spartan's words, and unbidden he remembered a blaze of blue plasma and terrible, world-ending pain. He forced the memory away.\n\nRobertson summoned up what reserves of defiance he still had. \"He's not interested in helping us, sir. He's a burnout\u2014\"\n\nHe barely had the last word out of his mouth before Kevin took a warning step toward the sergeant, and suddenly Robertson wasn't saying anything. \"What was that?\" asked Kevin, his tone even.\n\n\"Spartan A-282, stand down,\" Leone warned. Robertson blinked, but Kevin did not back away. The captain's hand dropped to his holstered pistol. \"You hear me?\"\n\nAfter a long moment, Kevin turned away, and Robertson released the breath he had been holding in with a gasp.\n\nKevin turned to look down at Leone's hand resting on the frame of the M6 magnum, and what the captain saw in the warrior's eyes made his blood run cold. Contained, coiled violence.\n\nHe swallowed and pressed on. \"I gave you a direct order. Don't make me arrest you.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen,\" said the Spartan, after a moment. It wasn't a threat, simply a matter of fact. \"You don't want me to help you handle things in trawler-town. That isn't what I'm built for.\"\n\n\"Not that.\" Leone took a breath and told him about the signal and the Covenant ship. While he spoke, Kevin stood silently, absorbing it all. When Leone was done, the Spartan shook his head again.\n\n\"Elites come in quiet, kill you before you know it. Could be Jackals up there, maybe. Those Kig-Yar bastards are tricky.\"\n\n\"My crew isn't battle-tested,\" said Leone. \"A few of us have seen action, but not like you. We need you with us. Not just to fight, but to unite. The locals won't listen to me, and if it turns out we do have an attack on our hands . . .\" He trailed off. Belatedly, Leone realized he still had his hand on the gun and he let it drop. \"I know it isn't fear talking,\" said the captain. \"What's holding you back, Spartan?\"\n\nKevin unlimbered the long sniper rifle and aimed it out to sea. \"Spartans don't fear enemy contact,\" he said, as if the idea itself was foolish. \"We want it. I wait and watch. Imagine the sky turning black with Phantoms, like it did on Reach.\" He paused. \"It's what I was made for. What all Spartans are made for.\"\n\nKevin's A-numeral designation meant he was Alpha Company, one of the longest-serving SPARTAN-III units, and Leone knew that meant he had seen some of the worst of the war with the Covenant, on colonies like Kholo and Meridian, even on Sigma Octanus IV not long ago. He thought about the cold terror his own memories of conflict dredged up, and once more he was glad he didn't have to share the Spartan's.\n\n\"You know what it is we do, captain.\" The Spartan shot a last glance over his shoulder at Leone, then donned the helmet, shutting off the sight of anything that made him seem human. \"We are not delicate weapons. Put us in the field and things get broken.\" He started walking away. \"Believe me when I tell you. . . . You don't want me close.\"\n\nNight fell quickly on Losing Hand, and Leone toggled the Warthog's high beams to illuminate the trail in front of them through a veil of needle-fine rain. Robertson didn't talk for a long while, but when he did, there was venom in it.\n\n\"So much for the hero,\" began the sergeant, raising his voice over the rumble of the engine. \"Looks like we're on our own from here.\"\n\n\"Kevin made his choice,\" said Leone.\n\n\"Begging your pardon, Captain\u2014you could have forced him.\"\n\nLeone caught the other man's eye in the reflection on the inside of the windshield. \"You think so?\" He snorted. \"Kevin's no good to us unless he's on his own terms.\"\n\nRobertson grunted with cold amusement. \"With all due respect, sir, you really think we're going to handle the Covies without his backup?\"\n\nLeone looked away. \"Those aliens up there\u2014even if it is them\u2014are not our first concern, Sergeant,\" he told him. \"The locals are. You were at the town meeting; you've been on this damn rock for as long as anyone else, so you tell me! Ever since planetfall, we've been on the ragged edge with these people, and now someone's going to go over. We don't deal with this, and there won't need to be an attack. . . . We'll kill each other first.\"\n\nRobertson eyed him. \"Those colonists like playing all that salt-of-the-earth, lone-pioneer crap. But if you'll allow me to say, sir, these Losers think this planet is the whole universe. They're too busy arguing over who gets to be in charge of it to notice anyone sneaking up behind them.\" He leaned back in his seat. \"If it were up to me? I'd declare martial law right here and now.\"\n\nLeone frowned. He had to admit Robertson's evaluation of the fishers was close to his own, but the sergeant's solution to dealing with them was a fast track to armed revolt. The captain pulled a gloved hand over his face, trying to rub away the fatigue weighing him down.\n\nHow the hell am I going to deal with this?\n\nBut then the radio crackled, heavy with renewed flare static, and the liberty of giving that question a thorough consideration evaporated.\n\n\"Ship to CO, respond!\" Maher's voice was urgent.\n\nLeone tapped his comm bead. \"CO copies.\"\n\n\"Sir, we have a serious problem. The unknown craft has increased its delta-vee. It's going to be here tonight.\"\n\nThe Warthog skidded to a halt in the cargo bay, its rain-slick tires spinning on the metal deck. Outside, the downpour increased, throwing haze off the floodlights that illuminated the landing strip.\n\nLeone vaulted out to find Maher marching toward him. The junior officer's usually impeccable appearance was rough around the edges, his eyes haunted. \"Report,\" ordered the captain.\n\nMaher took a breath, then said: \"The solar flares have been increasing since the afternoon, and we kept losing the feed from the orbital drone. Something seemed off. . . .\" He frowned, running a hand through his hair. \"I had the techs pull what they could from the data, and it was confirmed. The intruder ship put on a burst of velocity.\"\n\nAt his side, Leone heard Robertson curse under his breath. \"Where is it now, Lieutenant?\"\n\n\"Unknown. The drone's gone dark, probably cycled into shutdown mode to weather the flares. The ship's sensors are scanning the horizon, but we've got nothing.\"\n\nSilence fell between them, the hissing of the rain the only sound in the bay. Leone knew the crew was waiting for him to make the next decision. But we don't have all the answers, said a voice in his head. Did that alien ship speed up to avoid the flares, or are they using them as cover?\n\nAnd then something else occurred to him, just as Corporal Douglas came sprinting into the bay, her sodden parka trailing streamers of rainwater. \"Sir! Coming up the road from the town\u2014we've got twenty-plus foot mobiles, and a bunch of them are armed.\"\n\n\"The fishers?\" said Robertson.\n\nDouglas nodded. \"Captain, they look really pissed off.\"\n\n\"What the drone sees, we all see,\" said Maher, recalling what Leone had said when he granted the colonists use of the satellite link.\n\nLeone drew his coat tighter around his shoulders and walked back toward the open cargo hatch. \"I'm going out there. I'll talk to them.\" Robertson hefted his MA5 rifle and took a step after him, but Leone held up a hand. \"Alone.\"\n\n\"That's a bad call,\" insisted the sergeant. \"Let me get some men, sir. Farrant and Channell, a couple of the others. They won't hesitate if it comes to taking a shot.\"\n\nThe noncoms had never really shown much respect for Leone as their commander, and maybe that came from circumstance. Before the war started, before Losing Hand, Darren Leone had been biding his time as Dark Was the Night's helmsman, marking out the months until the end of his last tour. He knew what the others on board thought of him; that he was a makeweight officer running down the clock before he cashed out, only held over because of the war with the Covenant.\n\nBut circumstance had thrust him into this situation, made him captain of a ship by nature of the chain of command, given him responsibilities he had never wanted. In that moment, he felt like he was carrying the entire weight of the vessel on his back.\n\nLeone straightened and gave Robertson a hard glare. \"Your input is noted, Sergeant,\" he told him firmly, putting hard emphasis on the rank. \"You will hold here. That's an order.\" The captain marched out into the rain, not pausing to see if he was being obeyed.\n\nThere were a lot more than twenty, Leone realized. Low-trucks and ATVs arrived with the crowd of colonists, forming them into a loose cluster of hooded shapes in heavy coats and waterproof overalls.\n\nLeone counted several firearms, mostly pump-action shotguns and hunting rifles, but alarmingly he spotted a couple of Covenant plasma pistols in some hands and found himself wondering how alien war salvage had found its way to this backwater world. He kept his hands at his sides, letting his parka's hood flap back to show his face. \"That's close enough,\" he called as they approached the edge of the landing apron.\n\nHe didn't need to guess who was leading them. \"You don't tell us what to do, Leone.\" Ryan Larsson had a shotgun of his own, a long and nasty-looking weapon. \"You mind your damn job, man!\"\n\n\"That's been my deal since day one,\" he replied, catching sight of Aoife standing close by. She was unarmed, and Leone saw his own fears reflected in her face.\n\n\"You tell us why those cannons ain't up and runnin'!\" came a shout\u2014the old woman from the town meeting pushing forward so she could be heard. She jabbed a finger toward the turrets on Dark Was the Night's dorsal hull, all of them drooping downward to aim at nothing. \"Fire 'em up!\"\n\n\"Fire up! Fire up!\" Her words sparked off a brief chorus of heated chants from Larsson's supporters.\n\n\"Babs here makes a good point,\" Larsson snapped. \"What are you waiting for, Captain? Or do we have to defend ourselves?\" He gestured with the shotgun. \"All your talk about the UNSC and your responsibility to us, but that Covie warship is on its way, and what are you?\" He spat on the concrete. \"Asleep at the switch?\"\n\n\"You need to go back to your homes and stay there,\" Leone told them. \"Until we know what the situation is\u2014\"\n\n\"Situation?!\" shouted another voice. \"We saw the drone feed\u2014it's an invasion!\"\n\nLarsson nodded toward the ship. \"Your own men agree with me, Leone. You know it, and I know it!\"\n\nMore voices joined in, each one raised in anger, and every cry was backed by the sure belief that war had come to Losing Hand. Nothing Leone could say would sway them\u2014he saw that now.\n\nHis only hope was to tell the truth.\n\n\"The guns won't fire.\"\n\n\"What?\" Larsson blinked and wiped rain from his face, as if that would make the captain's words add up. \"What the hell do you mean?\"\n\n\"The point-defense weapons were dead before we landed on this planet,\" Leone went on, spilling it all. \"Our defensive and offensive systems were knocked out when the ship's main circuit bus was fried. We barely classed as combat-capable when we were at full kick. Right now . . . we've got nothing.\"\n\nLarsson's face turned an ugly shade of crimson. \"You're a lying sack of dregs, is what you are.\" The terror and the panic the man had been keeping in check under the cloak of his rage threatened to break through. \"So make them work, then!\" he bellowed. \"We need them!\"\n\n\"My chief engineer has been trying to do that for months. It's not going to happen.\"\n\n\"You liar!\" Larsson roared at him. \"Did you pull the plug on those guns yourself, you damn coward?\" The accusation spread through the crowd, all of them finding a sudden new reason to hate Leone and the uniform he wore. They didn't need any truth to push them to it.\n\n\"Oh gods . . .\" Aoife went pale as the reality of it set in.\n\nLeone drew in a deep breath of wet air and called out, his voice carrying across the landing field. \"Go back, all of you! We are going to meet this! That's why we're here\u2014that's what we do!\"\n\n\"This is our home,\" said Aoife. \"We can't just stand aside and do nothing.\"\n\n\"You stay and it'll end in bloodshed,\" Leone told her. \"We both know that.\"\n\nShe understood\u2014but she was only one person, and her brother's fury was drowning her out.\n\n\"I told you before,\" Larsson snarled, advancing on him, \"you don't tell us what to do!\"\n\nThe black maw of the shotgun barrel came up toward Leone's face and he flinched, staggering back a step. He twisted, seeing figures in green spilling out of the transport, soldiers led by Robertson, with rifles in their hands. Behind Larsson and his sister, the colonists raised their own weapons, safety catches rattling as they were loosed.\n\n\"No! No!\" Leone brought up his hands, calling toward his crew. \"Stand down! Back off and stand down!\"\n\nThere hadn't been a true war fought between humans since the Covenant had invaded, not since the shadow of the Insurrection lay over the galaxy\u2014but no one had forgotten.\n\nRobertson hesitated, and for a moment Leone thought he would ignore the order; but then the UNSC troopers pulled back from the edge and the muzzles of their rifles dipped toward the ground.\n\n\"Larsson . . . Ryan.\" Leone met the other man's gaze. \"You have to trust me. Whoever they are, they're coming here, and we can't stop that. But if we do this wrong, everyone dies.\"\n\n\"Listen to him!\" shouted Aoife.\n\n\"Leone . . .\" Larsson drew out his name in a low growl. \"You're old and you're weak.\"\n\nThe shotgun spun in the younger man's grip, and the butt of the weapon came around in a blur of motion, cracking the captain across the face.\n\nThe world spun about, and Leone crumpled to the ground, cold asphalt slamming into him. He blinked away pain and looked up to see the gun filling his vision.\n\n\"And you're in the way,\" said Larsson, his finger on the trigger.\n\nThe echo of the single shot cut through the rain like a clap of thunder, and in its wake, time seemed to slow, the moment pulling against itself.\n\nThe gun in Larsson's hand shattered halfway down its length, hammered into pieces by the pinpoint impact of an armor-piercing round fired from a quarter mile away. Larsson howled in pain, stumbling back as he frantically brushed fragments of red-hot metal from his coat.\n\nLeone stared at the broken stub of the weapon as it lay sizzling on the wet asphalt before him, and then rose slowly to his feet. He instinctively turned in the direction of the gunshot and saw a towering figure jog into the nimbus of light from the overhead floods.\n\nThe Spartan slowed to a walk, cradling the sniper rifle in his hands, and Leone remembered an image he had once seen in a museum of a medieval knight carrying a lance. A blue armored gauntlet worked the rifle's slide, and a brass shell spun out of the breech before the weapon went up over Kevin-A282's shoulder and onto his back.\n\nHe followed us, Leone realized. He changed his mind. . . . Must have run all the way here. . . .\n\nThe expressionless gold visor scanned the faces of the colonists in the crowd. \"You all want to think very carefully about what you do next,\" he told them. The Spartan halted next to Leone and looked him up and down, taking the captain in with a glance and seeing he was uninjured. \"Reporting for duty, sir.\"\n\nLarsson was in worse shape, however. Blood streamed off his hand, and his face was twisted. \"You see this?!\" he shouted, looking wildly at his comrades. He was searching for support and didn't find it. Aoife shook her head, but he didn't acknowledge her. A smarter man\u2014a man ruled more by his hopes than his fears\u2014might have backed off, but Ryan Larsson took the other road and went all in. \"We don't obey, so they bring in the attack dog!\"\n\n\"If you're ready to fight,\" said the Spartan, \"make sure you got the right target.\" He nodded at Leone. \"That's not your enemy.\" He moved to Larsson, towering over him, and prodded him in the chest with one ironclad finger, right above the heart. \"What's in here is. What you're afraid of.\"\n\n\"Ryan, we can't fight each other,\" his sister broke in. \"This isn't about who is in charge\u2014it's about survival!\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Leone said, between heavy breaths. He caught a crackle of radio static in his ear, but his comm bead had been damaged by the blow from the butt of the shotgun, and the voice beneath the interference was unintelligible.\n\n\"You heard the captain,\" said the Spartan, looking past the defeated expression that ghosted over Larsson's face, toward the other colonists. \"Go back to your homes and\u2014\"\n\nAbove them, the low cowl of oily gray cloud suddenly turned white, as if sheet lightning had exploded behind it. A powerful gust of wind battered down, and the clouds were pushed apart like an opening iris, projected away by the invisible force of gravity-control technology.\n\n\"Too late,\" said Aoife, the words falling from her lips as they all turned to look into the night sky.\n\nThe alien ship had that same cetacean aspect to it that seemed to characterize all of the Covenant's vessels. Smooth-skinned and curved where human craft were hard-edged and angular, the corvette looked like it should have been undulating through some deep ocean current rather than floating down toward the landing strip. The rain stopped, the clouds temporarily displaced by the vessel's arrival, but the iridescent shell still glistened like annealed steel.\n\nHalf the size of a habitat block, it had about the same mass as Dark Was the Night, but it was still big enough to contain dropships and fighters, or a full battle cohort of alien warriors.\n\nThe air throbbed with power as the craft pivoted and settled into a low hover a few meters above the ground. The sound faded back to a low, menacing purr.\n\nRobertson and the rest of the UNSC troopers formed a skirmish line, and Leone took a step toward them\u2014but the Spartan put out a hand and stopped him before he could move away.\n\n\"Moment of truth,\" he said.\n\nAll the raw panic, all the fears that Leone had locked away in the back of his mind now came flooding into him as a single certainty became clear. Whatever happens now, this is on me. I'm responsible for these people\u2014all of them.\n\nIf this was an attack, then nobody on Losing Hand would survive to see the break of dawn. The fate of these people and Dark Was the Night would be lost to the ether, and it would be on his watch. Above, the clouds rolled back and the rain returned in force.\n\n\"There,\" said the Spartan, and he pointed toward the flank of the vessel. A line of neon-blue appeared in a seam of the hull, and presently it enlarged to become a doorway. The ship extruded a ramp to the ground, and shadows within grew larger.\n\nOne of them stepped out into the downpour and took its first step onto the surface of Losing Hand. Leone met the gaze of the alien creature, and his breath caught in his throat. He had to stop himself from drawing his M6 through sheer ingrained reflex as the emerald-armored Sangheili craned its long neck around to take them in.\n\nIt marched forward, kneading the inert hilt of a plasma sword in its talon-like fingers. The alien's quadripartite jaws flexed as it sucked in a breath and exhaled. The Elite's gaze found Leone and the Larssons, barely giving them a look before settling on the Spartan. Its lips curled in what could only be a sneer.\n\nBut other shapes were moving behind it. Next out of the ship came a peculiar life-form that floated above the ground, trailing thin cilia beneath it. A single, serpentine head bobbed on a long neck, its attention drawn directly to the UNSC transport.\n\n\"What in the storms is that?\" whispered Aoife. \"Looks like a bag of snakes tied to a balloon. . . .\"\n\n\"It's a Huragok,\" Leone told her. \"The Covenant call them 'Engineers.' They can pretty much fix anything, so I've heard.\"\n\nThe third figure to leave the alien ship was a human. Wearing UNSC battle armor, the muscular man had pale features and a shock of short ginger hair. He gave the Sangheili a sideways look and the alien nodded to him, stepping aside to let him speak. \"Who's in charge here?\"\n\nLeone glanced at the Larssons. \"Well, come on, then. Just don't do anything stupid.\"\n\nRyan and Aoife warily fell in step with Leone and the Spartan as they came forward.\n\nHe gave a salute. \"Captain Darren Leone, acting CO of UNSC Dark Was the Night.\" He introduced Kevin-A282 and the colonists, and now that he was up close, Leone studied the new arrivals for some clue as to just what in the hell was going on here.\n\nThe other officer returned the salute. \"Major Kyle Stallock, out of the Nouveau Montreal colony.\" He indicated the Sangheili and the Huragok in turn. \"This is Yar 'Dosaan, and our engineer friend there is Slight List. We're real glad to find you here.\"\n\n\"We believed this star system to be barren,\" said the Elite, the words a crush of growls and hard sibilant noises. Leone couldn't hide his shock; he'd never heard one of them speak a human language before. \"It is only on the Engineer's insistence that we decided to survey it.\"\n\n\"Oh . . .\" Despite herself, Aoife grinned as the Huragok drifted toward her and extended a tendril-like feeler to meet the woman's outstretched hand. \"Should we say thank you?\"\n\n\"Should we?\" echoed her brother, the last remnants of his resentment and dread still boiling away beneath the surface of the words. The clear challenge in his tone was unmistakable.\n\nYar 'Dosaan's pale, depthless eyes bored into the colonist, then flicked across Leone and the Spartan, dwelling on their visible weapons. \"Do you expect conflict, humans?\"\n\n\"Always,\" said the Spartan, before Leone could reply. \"But not today. Agreed?\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said the alien, and at length he returned the inert sword to his belt.\n\n\"You're the first human survivors we've come across in months.\" A weary smile crossed Major Stallock's face. \"We needed a win.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Leone was still having trouble understanding how these three disparate life forms could be standing side by side without daggers drawn.\n\nStallock gave a nod and sighed. \"I imagine you've got a lot of questions.\"\n\n\"Nothing about this is what I expected,\" said Aoife, as she offered Leone the hip flask.\n\nHe accepted it gratefully and took a long pull. He was getting a taste for the warm, hazy burn of the local liquor. \"Roger that,\" he replied.\n\nThe Covenant ship\u2014or rather, the ex-Covenant light corvette Infinite Fire, recently rechristened The Lookout\u2014was making final preparations to lift off, and a rare clear sky had blown in from the ocean. Leone watched the train of figures moving back and forth between the grounded bulk of Dark Was the Night and the train of low-trucks carrying gear down the road back into town. Over the past two weeks, with the help of Slight List and the other members of The Lookout's disparate company, the UNSC ship had been gutted of everything useful that could be split between the colonists and the alliance crew.\n\nWhen The Lookout left, Dark Was the Night would become Losing Hand's power station, and its career as a starfaring vessel would officially be over. Leone felt a sting of regret at that, but there was something good about it too. The ship would never know vacuum again, but it would go on serving, keeping people alive and safe. Most of the crew had accepted Major Stallock's offer of evacuation, but not all of them. A handful of the colonists had also taken the ticket, but the number was a lot less than Leone had expected.\n\nHe asked Aoife why she had turned it down, and she just smiled. \"Someone's got to keep Ryan from running his mouth.\" She took back the flask and had a drink herself. \"I never thought it would be possible to see aliens working alongside us.\"\n\n\"Yeah . . .\" Leone saw the Spartan talking with Robertson. He couldn't hear the words, but whatever Kevin-A282 said, it caused the sergeant to snap out the most perfect salute he'd ever seen the man give. \"I guess the truth makes enemies into allies.\"\n\nThe woman shivered. \"What Stallock said, about the war . . . It's over, right?\"\n\n\"Officially, yes. But out here in the real world?\" Leone let the question hang.\n\nIn the days after The Lookout's arrival, Major Stallock briefed them on the events of the war that had played out far from Losing Hand. The Elites had broken with the Covenant, turning on their former allies, and while humanity had survived the conflict, the face of the galaxy had been irrevocably altered. Without the Sangheili, the remainder of the Covenant factions had splintered, and now new alliances and new threats alike were on the rise.\n\nStallock's home base on Nouveau Montreal was light-years distant, and in the aftermath of the Covenant War, the UNSC had forged a steady alliance with the Sangheili to monitor that region. Their ship was crewed not just by Stallock's people and Yar 'Dosaan's, but there were Unggoy on board as well, along with other humans from worlds they had visited along the way. Their mission was to go from system to system, trying to reestablish communication with colonies cut off by the conflict.\n\nAoife indicated the Spartan, and the question that had been clouding the air between them finally emerged. \"Are you going with him?\"\n\n\"Kevin told me this morning.\" Leone avoided a reply. \"He's going with The Lookout. He wants to feel useful again.\"\n\n\"Stallock said they could take us all if we wanted,\" she told him. \"But this is our home. We didn't run from the Covenant. We're not going to now.\"\n\nLeone made a pass-it-here gesture, and she dropped the flask back into his open hand.\n\n\"Me neither,\" he said, after another drink. \"I signed up to protect people. Losing Hand needs that. I'm staying on . . . at least until things are quiet again.\"\n\nAoife eyed him. \"That might not be for a while.\"\n\n\"You're right.\" He got to his feet and saw the Spartan look his way. Kevin's armored helm dipped once in a respectful nod, and the captain returned the gesture. \"But the way I figure it, some people go their whole lives not knowing where they can do the most good.\"\n\n\"You think that's here?\" She had a smile in her voice, and he liked it.\n\nLeone patted his breast pocket and nodded. \"I reckon I'll need a badge though.\"\n\n## PROMISES TO KEEP\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nCHRISTIE GOLDEN\n\nThis story takes place at the close of recorded Forerunner history, during the events that followed the destruction of the Forerunner capital world by the rogue artificial intelligence Mendicant Bias (Halo: Cryptum) and the subsequent activation of the Halo Array to end the centuries-long war with the extragalactic parasite known as the Flood (Halo: Silentium).\n\nIt's almost over, the IsoDidact thought.\n\nTheir ship, Audacity, had negotiated the dangerous jump successfully. The Librarian, his wife, exhaled quietly as she recognized several Lifeworker vessels clustered around one of the Ark's petal-like structures. They were swiftly and efficiently transporting containers of living specimens from their vessels to the Ark's Lifeworker research station.\n\n\"Wonderful!\" she cried, in that warm, slightly husky voice he so adored. \"They've all survived!\"\n\nThe IsoDidact was glad for her, but the emotion was overshadowed by a chill of foreboding as he realized just how many Forerunner ships had gathered here\u2014and how badly some of them had been damaged.\n\nAudacity confirmed his fears. \"All remaining Forerunners have been brought here,\" it said. \"The last themas have been overwhelmed. There will be no other ships.\"\n\nThe Librarian's eyes widened with horror and she looked to her mate. Audacity continued with its implacable mechanical analysis. \"As well, some Lifeworker specimens have been moved to the Halo to make room, including human populations.\"\n\nHorror fled before fury on his wife's beloved features. The humans were hers, and she cared for them. \"Who made that decision?\" she demanded.\n\nIn answer, an image shimmered into being behind them, shocking the two even further.\n\nIt was Faber-of-Will-and-Might, known for centuries by his title\u2014the Master Builder.\n\nHe it was who had stood in opposition to the original Didact when the Flood had first been recognized as a threat. Faber had ordered the Halo rings created\u2014and tested one of them. And thus it was that, while the Master Builder had been responsible for designing a cataclysmic weapon, he had also inadvertently been responsible for the Ark's creation. The threat posed to every sentient creature\u2014not just the Flood\u2014had prompted the Librarian to push for measures to preserve specimens, so that countless species would not be lost in the extinction of one.\n\nHis holographic representation was nearly unrecognizable. Once large and healthy, ripe with smug arrogance, he now looked smaller, frailer, his eyes dull and his posture stooped.\n\n\"Welcome to our Ark, Lifeshaper,\" the Master Builder said. \"Didact\u2014which do I address? Ah, the younger. It is my honor to have returned your original to the company of your wife\u2014and, if memory serves me, it looks as though he too has arrived. You both should be aware that I have been summoned to help prepare our Ark for the coming storm. And to transfer command.\"\n\n\"To whom?\" the IsoDidact asked, his body tense.\n\n\"To me. Builder Security will carry on from here.\"\n\nAs if they had not had enough shocks. It did not seem so long ago that the Master Builder had been on trial in the ecumene's capital world of Maethrillian for his crimes against the Mantle of Responsibility. Had not the capital come under attack, conviction would have been certain.\n\nNothing, it would seem, was certain anymore.\n\nThe Librarian recovered first. \"I will be taken as soon as possible to the Halo to tend to my specimens. Alone.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the Master Builder replied. \"I have already made arrangements\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to interrupt.\" It was the IsoDidact's ancilla, her pale-blue face looking at him regretfully. \"But Chant-to-Green has completed her final assessments. You asked to be notified.\"\n\n\"I did indeed,\" the IsoDidact replied.\n\nThe appearance of his ancilla had caused the simulation transpiring around him to freeze. If only he could have paused time then, when it was all occurring. If only he could have found some way to have prevented . . . all of it.\n\nBut he, Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting\u2014the IsoDidact, widowed when another's lifemate had died\u2014had not been able to do so. And so, the Librarian was lost, choosing to spend her last moments in service to the humans she so loved.\n\nBornstellar rose from the chair, and it retreated back into the flooring. For a moment, he regarded the holographic images of himself and his wife, standing beside him. They appeared so very real, but were only as substantial now as the projection of the Master Builder had been substantial then. There would be other words between the couple, but hasty, brief. Curt, almost, but only so due to their own tension. Their harshness was not directed at each other. Then, those words exchanged, the IsoDidact would meet with the Master Builder and a handful of others in the Cartographer, and she, the Librarian, First-Light-Weaves-Living-Song, would depart for the Halo, and then Audacity, and then . . .\n\nThose words were seared into memory; banal, serviceable words that were solely logistics and hurried well-wishes.\n\nI did not know they would be the last.\n\n\"It is hard to believe that they are the last,\" said Growth-Through-Trial-of-Change. Her voice held a tinge of sorrow, even as the words denoted success in an ambitious and worthy endeavor. Trial, as she preferred to go by, was both the oldest and the youngest Lifeworker. Her years numbered more than those of Chant-to-Green, the current Lifeshaper. But Trial had not been born into that rate. She had been a Builder, and when she had informed her family of the pull within her to change rates, they had turned away. Her new family of Lifeworkers had given her a new name\u2014one that had honored her path. Life, she had said more than once to Chant, was nothing but trials. And what mattered, perhaps even more than the outcome, was how one faced them.\n\n\"It is strange,\" Chant said. The two stood observing the room where the last \"specimens\" were slowly reviving, closely watching both their statistics and their hitherto-hibernating forms. \"We have bracketed this experience with two species who were once allies in a war fought against us. The humans and the San'Shyuum.\"\n\nThe irony suited her. The choice to reestablish humans first had been deliberate; the choice to leave the San'Shyuum to the last, simple logistics.\n\nFor most of her many centuries, the Librarian, in her position as Lifeshaper, had collected and cataloged creatures from all across the galaxy. Lifeworkers alone had supervised their care. But when Bornstellar had authorized the activation of Halo, wiping out all sentient life in order to truly destroy the threat of the Flood, the Librarian had been among the casualties. Now, every surviving Forerunner\u2014their numbers so few compared to the trillions that had once composed the ecumene\u2014had spent over a century discharging the duty the Lifeshaper had laid upon them. Those who had made the dreadful choice to end sentient life for a time rather than forever had a duty to make what reparations they could, and these solemn yet joyful tasks had kept their minds, hands, and specialized vessels well occupied as they tended, then released, species after species.\n\nThe San'Shyuum would be the last to set careful feet upon the world that had given them birth.\n\nBornstellar joined the two Lifeworkers, gazing as they did upon the slow awakening unfolding. Trial excused herself and went inside so that the San'Shyuum would not be alone when they opened their eyes.\n\n\"In the midst of all the mistakes, and arrogance, and sheer stupidity of these last centuries,\" Bornstellar said, \"we have, at least, done right by her.\"\n\nChant looked up at him, knowing full well whom he meant. \"Yes. She would be pleased with us. The end of our task draws near.\"\n\nAfter the death of the Librarian, the reseeding of Erde-Tyrene, and the judgment of Mendicant Bias, the wound of her absence had still been new for both of them. The IsoDidact had received the imprint of the Didact, who had lived over ten thousand years, but Bornstellar was still chronologically young. As was Chant-to-Green, although she had served the Librarian for many decades. She suspected the older female thought of her as a daughter, at least somewhat; she certainly responded to the Librarian as to a mother.\n\nAt the end, the Librarian had given Chant the title of Lifeshaper and ordered her to carry on the mission. Obeying that order\u2014to leave the Librarian behind on Erde-Tyrene to certain death\u2014still held the taint of betrayal in Chant's mind.\n\nShe was the Lifeshaper now. But no one would ever be the Librarian.\n\nBornstellar had lost a mate. For all intents and purposes, though not physically the spouse the Librarian had first embraced, they were true husband and wife. The original Didact had been driven mad by the Master Builder's calculated cruelty, and the Librarian had been forced to safely imprison him in a Cryptum. There, alone for millennia with the Domain to teach him, her great hope was that he would one day understand\u2014and regret\u2014how gravely he had wronged so very many.\n\nThey were therefore both bereft, Bornstellar and Chant. And, because she saw in him a good and true heart that loved the same individual she herself grieved, and because he saw in her an echo of his great love, they had consoled each other with the union of their bodies. But soon enough, they understood what had drawn them together, and that it would not last beyond the first few passionate encounters. Chant was not the Librarian, and there were better ways to honor her memory and to keep their promises than by pretending she was not gone.\n\nSo they had mourned, each in their own way. Chant found that the more she helped the \"specimens\" (as time passed, she learned to loathe the name; \"children\" was better), the more the ache eased. It became an old scar that hurt when the weather changed, rather than a fierce, stabbing agony that kept her awake at night when not dulled by the soothing drug of sexual heat.\n\nBornstellar was, Chant suspected, doing something himself to heal the tug of memories, for as the centuries passed, he seemed more at ease. While all Forerunners interacted with the specimens, mindful of this last discharging of the Mantle, they did so without the intimacy, the same sense of connection to the former Lifeshaper's work, that Chance and Bornstellar experienced.\n\nThe others liked the specimens; they did not love them.\n\n\"Soon it will be time to reseed Forerunners,\" Bornstellar now said.\n\nThe idea had been his, established early on. They had meddled enough, their misguided appropriation of the Mantle hurting more than it helped. Bornstellar's had been the voice that had given the order to fire the Halo Array and kill all sentient life in the galaxy. Chant's was the hand that helped to make it fruitful again.\n\n\"Do you know where yet?\" she inquired.\n\nHe shook his head. All agreed on the general principle\u2014that, when the reseeding had been completed, they would depart the galaxy forever\u2014but there had been so much work right in front of them, immediate and vital, that their attention had been focused exclusively on that. They still had a few years to decide, while they integrated the San'Shyuum, but it was now their next step, not some nebulous ideal.\n\n\"Away from here, is all I know. We all must be in agreement.\" He nodded toward Trial, who was assisting one of the San'Shyuum to sit while his head, perched atop his elongated neck, turned this way and that as he peered about. \"I am weary of making decisions that impact those who have no voice.\"\n\n\"You chide me?\" Chant asked. Not angry, just curious.\n\nHe looked at her then, kindly, and smiled. Both he\u2014and Chant\u2014had begun adopting the practice during their times with the humans. The former First Councilor of the Forerunner Council\u2014Splendid-Dust-of-Ancient-Suns\u2014along with others from Maethrillian, were already quite comfortable with the gesture. Over time, almost all of the remaining Forerunners now regularly utilized what they had once thought of as a rictus.\n\n\"Never,\" he said. \"You do her work.\"\n\nI do, Chant thought, but for a hundred years and more, it has been my work. Our work. All of ours.\n\nShe could not say why his comment so irritated her.\n\nFor as long as it would take for the San'Shyuum to adjust, they would be kept here, on the Ark, in the best re-creation of their temperate homeworld as the Lifeworkers could manage. The Forerunners learned more each time, with each species, how to increase the accuracy of the world, but it was never quite right. The species knew their homes, with a deep wisdom that their saviors could never possess.\n\nAfter the species' initial shock dulled, the Forerunners would create an area for themselves, set apart from the main inhabited areas, and they did so now for the last time. Here, the San'Shyuum could locate them if need be, and here they could easily supervise without directly mingling. The Forerunners had discovered that, every time, some few individuals would find them particularly intriguing and create ways to be nearby or even actively involved with them. While this was not discouraged, boundaries were enforced with the gentleness of a concerned parent. Even so, the Forerunners were aware that their words might be overheard. But what, really, did it matter, as long as they treated their charges with care? It would be millennia before any of them would again find their own paths to the stars. Words spoken here would be forgotten in a handful of decades, if they resonated even for that long.\n\nOnly twenty or so Forerunners would be stationed here, keeping watch over the San'Shyuum. While the Librarian had destroyed all active keyships, she had kept a hidden cache aboard the Ark. These few vessels now ferried the last handful of other specimens to their homeworlds, and would return to the Ark when that task was done. Then . . .\n\nThen the Forerunners would leave the Ark and begin their own journey.\n\nThe acclimation continued over the next two years. Bornstellar found himself adrift during this time. For so long, reliving his experiences with the Librarian, it had been a pattern, a comforting routine. At some point, the pain had lessened, changed, as the relationship with her had changed, from one of flesh to one of memory. Even as he accepted the loss on one level, Bornstellar now realized the holograms had blurred the line between life and death so that the cessation of them was agonizing.\n\nOne evening, he returned to his own quarters, drawn by an uneasy, anxious emotion he could not name. He called up the recorded moments, sorting through them. He tried to do as he had done before: lose himself in the memories to forget she was gone. But it did not work; not this time. His anxiety increased with each attempt, and comprehension hit him with the psychological force of a physical blow.\n\nThe last recording he had visited had been, in truth, the very last. He understood that in his head, but now his heart belatedly grasped the full import of the loss. He never exchanged another touch, embrace, word, glance with his wife. Centuries had passed. He was caught in a terrible place\u2014unable to move forward, unable to even momentarily assuage the pain by reliving the memories. Why? Maybe it was because he had already experienced them not once, when they were happening, but twice now. A third time seemed only to make the ache inside him worse. If only there was some recording of something he had not seen before, but there was not.\n\nOr was there? A thought drifted into his mind, something he had all but forgotten. After she had . . . after the Halo Array had been fired, he had received a jumble of other messages. One had purportedly been from the Librarian, but he had dismissed it as false, as she would never identify herself thusly to him.\n\nBut what if, all these centuries later, it was indeed a final message for him?\n\nIt took his ancilla barely any time at all to locate the message, but it felt like an eternity. Bornstellar had not felt so nervous or hopeful since he was a Manipular. Words from her lips he had never heard\u2014it was too much to contemplate.\n\nBut there it was.\n\nHer essence manifested in front of him, so detailed he could almost feel her smooth skin, smell her scent.\n\nHis wife. First-Light-Weaves-Living-Song.\n\nThe Librarian.\n\nHer eyes were bright with commingled grief, fear, and purpose. \"My husband,\" she said, \"time is short. But there is something you must know.\"\n\nSeven minutes later, he was all but shouting for Chant.\n\nIt was easier, watching it for the second time. He focused not on the image of the Librarian but on her words and Chant's reaction. Chant, who had loved the Librarian almost as much as he had, who had worked unceasingly to keep whatever promises his wife had extracted from her.\n\n\"This is for Chant-to-Green as well,\" the image was saying. \"I know what you, my husband, must do, and you know I agree. Halo must be activated. But nothing is without consequence, and I understand now there will be one we have not foreseen.\" The Librarian took a deep breath. \"The legendary Organon\u2014the great Precursor artifact that you once sought with such sharp desire . . . my love, it has been with us all along. The Organon holds the Domain\u2014and firing the Halo Array will destroy it.\"\n\nChant uttered a soft cry, reaching out to Bornstellar even as her gaze remained riveted to the image of the Librarian. He squeezed her hand tightly, as glad of the press of living flesh as she.\n\nThe Librarian's voice was thick with pain as she continued. \"The Didact dreams now not with wisdom whispering in his ears but silence, utter and absolute. He is already mad, and it was my hope\u2014and yours\u2014that the Domain might restore him. But imprisoned with only his own tormented thoughts for millennia to come . . .\" Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head gently. She didn't need to say anything further. They already knew.\n\n\"It is for those who come that I fear. The humans\u2014the Reclaimers\u2014will need the Domain one day. I cannot\u2014I will not\u2014die without hope that there is some way to repair it. If there is, I believe that information will be found at Maethrillian. We understand the keeping of secrets, we Forerunners, and next to the knowledge of the Flood, this would have been the greatest secret of all.\"\n\nHer eyes gazed steadily at Catalog, who had dutifully recorded and transmitted the message, but as he and Chant stood mutely clasping hands, Bornstellar knew that his wife was envisioning gazing at both of them. \"I charged the two of you with reseeding the sentient species I have tended most of my life. I must exact another promise. You must return to our capital, if anything remains of it. Find a way to reactivate the Domain.\"\n\nHer dark gaze\u2014intense, warm, filled with love not just for those who beheld her but also for those she had given everything for\u2014almost overwhelmed Bornstellar. \"Find it. Promise me! Or I fear that all we have done to try to fix that which we have ruined will crumble to dust.\"\n\nAnd she was gone.\n\nChant and Bornstellar found the group keeping watch on the San'Shyuum outside their structure, enjoying the pleasant artificial evening. Trial, Splendid Dust, Keeper-of-Stone-Songs, Walking-in-Light-of-Falling-Stars, Sorrow-for-Lost-Voices, Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn, and a handful of other Forerunners of all rates were tossing artificial vegetables and flavoring herbs into small, cheerfully bubbling pots.\n\n\"We have not interacted with the Domain in over a century,\" Stone Songs said when Bornstellar had finished. \"And it was erratic and largely unresponsive even before then. We have gone this long without it, and if we are to be departing the galaxy itself soon, then what is the point?\"\n\nChant stood beside Bornstellar and tensed at the words. \"This is not about the Domain and what it can do for us,\" she said, glaring at Stone Songs. She rarely grew angry on her own behalf, but she was fierce when it came to defending her charges. As her predecessor had been.\n\nTrial watched her Lifeshaper intently, concerned. She knew how close the Librarian and Chant had been.\n\n\"Yes, we are departing this galaxy, and it will be a long journey indeed. And no, the Domain will not help us. It may not even help the Didact. The point\"\u2014Chant emphasized the word\u2014\"is that repairing the Domain will help the humans, who will one day bear the Mantle as we once did, to carry out their responsibilities. They will need this knowledge, and after all we have done, we owe it to them.\"\n\nStone Songs waved his spoon dismissively. \"It is a lovely thought, but unless there's something you've not shared with us, Bornstellar, your Librarian failed to tell us how we are to go about repairing the Domain, or what could help us, or where to look for it!\"\n\nShe was not mine, Bornstellar thought. Not in this. In this, she belonged to\u2014and acted for\u2014us all.\n\nStone Song's words hung heavy in the air and weighed down Bornstellar's thoughts. The Builder was right. Find a way to reactivate the Domain, she had made them promise, even from the other side of the great gulf of death. But what were they looking for? And how would they know what to do if they found it?\n\n\"We will be traveling to Maethrillian regardless,\" Bornstellar said, struggling against his anger. \"We need the slipstream crystals and the ships that can use them if we are to have any hope of truly leaving the galaxy behind. We can search for a way to repair the Domain while we are there.\"\n\n\"The scope is enormous,\" Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn said. A Warrior-Servant, she had saved both Bornstellar and Splendid Dust when the battle on the capital had begun. Once Bornstellar had been drawn to her, but that had been when he was still new to his rate. And before he had met the Librarian. He and Glory were nonetheless bonded in battle, and friends.\n\n\"We have you to help us,\" he reminded her, \"and we have someone else who knows . . .\" Bornstellar's voice trailed off. They did not, apparently, have someone else who knew the capital world well, for Splendid Dust's seat was empty.\n\nSplendid Dust had not gone far. Bornstellar spotted his fine, slender form leaning up against a vru'sa tree. He was dappled with shadow and sunlight filtered through leaves. He looked up, unsurprised, as Bornstellar approached, and regarded him with dull eyes.\n\n\"You know,\" Bornstellar said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Splendid Dust replied, his voice flat. \"I know.\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\nSplendid reached up to pull the vibrant green of one of the leaves through his fingers, the meeting of Bornstellar's gaze perhaps too much to endure. Bornstellar was as impatient as if his life was as brief as a human's, but he forced himself to wait.\n\nWhen talk had begun about returning to Maethrillian, Splendid Dust had begged to stay behind. They did not need him to acquire the crystals, he had argued, and it was clear to Bornstellar that the thought of returning to the ruined capital of the once-great ecumene tormented its First Councilor. He had agreed.\n\nHe could not comply this time though. Not now.\n\n\"We council members were privy to a great deal of information, Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting. Many secrets. When Maethrillian fell, our society suffered a loss of knowledge second only to the loss of the Domain itself. I am the last who remembers any of it, and I knew more than almost anyone else.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you speak before?\" Fury, clean and sharp and righteous, swelled Bornstellar's heart and turned his words into daggers. He regretted it at once when he saw Splendid Dust's body twitch, as if those daggers had been physical.\n\n\"To what end?\" Now he did look at Bornstellar, and his eyes were homes for ghosts. \"You were there. You saw what madness we fled. We were all trying to escape Maethrillian, not return to it\u2014until now. We don't know if there's even anything left to return to.\"\n\n\"No,\" Bornstellar said, gentling his own voice. \"We do not know what awaits us. But if you know of anything that can help us restore the Domain, you must speak.\"\n\nSomething of his old pride seemed to stir in Splendid Dust. \"I will remind you that as First Councilor, I made binding oaths.\"\n\n\"True,\" agreed Bornstellar. \"But your overwhelming duty is to your people. I respect promises, Splendid-Dust-of-Ancient-Suns. But those who would hold you in violation are long dead. If they exist at all, it is as spirits, and if they are spirits, tales all say they wish to rest in peace. You will speak, or you will fail every Forerunner who has ever lived, and every creature my wife died to save. That seems a far greater wrong.\"\n\nSplendid Dust looked again at the leaf, as if it held all the secrets of the universe in its green-gold veins. \"You are right, of course. I must speak,\" he agreed, a wealth of regret in the words. \"And,\" he added, \"I must go with you. You will need what I know.\"\n\nSplendid Dust was not insane, as the Didact had become. But he was broken. Bornstellar understood.\n\nAll of them were a little broken now.\n\nBornstellar and Splendid Dust rejoined the others. The San'Shyuum had an intoxicant that burned the belly and softened the edges, and Splendid Dust required two mugs full of it before he could bring himself to speak.\n\nWhat he knew was astounding; and that he knew it to begin with, terrifying.\n\nThe former First Councilor spoke of treasures that a younger Bornstellar would have gladly spent a lifetime seeking. Not just a few rare and unimaginably glorious items, but hundreds. Thousands. Gathered from the farthest reaches of Forerunner space and brought to Maethrillian for safekeeping in a place called the Mysterium.\n\n\"Some were simply beautiful,\" he said. \"Art for art's sake. Others were . . . trophies. Still others were unique scientific curiosities. All secreted in the Mysterium, in the heart of the capital, all untouched, preserved simply for the having of them, of collecting, of adding to the glory of all it meant to be a Forerunner. Some were aware of what the artifacts did. Most of us were not. All we knew was that they were ours.\"\n\n\"But you knew,\" Trial said. It was a statement, not an accusation, but Splendid Dust dwindled even further.\n\n\"I knew more than most,\" he said. \"My great pride and joy, and my great burden. But I had not been First Councilor for very long when the battle took place. I did not have time to learn everything. Most of my knowledge was to have come from the Domain, and it was unreachable, toward the end. But I knew about this. Oh yes.\" He turned to Bornstellar and said, \"Do you remember what I wore?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"What I wore. The robes of First Councilor. The collar, the decorations.\"\n\nBornstellar stared blankly. Splendid Dust smiled, so sadly. \"The trappings, IsoDidact. The regalia. I still have it. Those stylized designs had a purpose, and among them is a specific key, of sorts.\"\n\n\"A key to what?\" Chant said. She stammered ever so slightly.\n\n\"The Deadbolt, they called it,\" Splendid Dust said, \"though perhaps 'they' had no idea, really.\"\n\n\"Deadbolt,\" echoed Falling Stars. He was of the Engineer rate, and so understood its purpose. \"A deadbold needs a key\u2014it is not the key. It is put in place to keep something locked safely away.\"\n\n\"In, or out?\" mused Stone Songs.\n\n\"Key or deadbolt to what?\" demanded Sorrow-for-Lost-Voices, a Warrior-Servant.\n\n\"Precursor technology. It was transported whole, from the distant world where they found it, to Maethrillian during the capital's construction. The entire planet was built around it. Sources from that era wrote that they found something that . . . helped them understand the Domain, and when rumors began to spread, as was inevitable, the legend of the Organon sprang up.\"\n\nA Precursor artifact that controlled the Domain. Hidden in the capital city.\n\nBornstellar almost laughed. He hadn't needed to go to uncomfortable backwater places to seek a mythical artifact.\n\nHe'd been standing atop the greatest of them all.\n\n\"Prepare the Audacity,\" he said. \"We will leave right away.\"\n\nBornstellar, Glory, and Splendid Dust had been present when Mendicant Bias had taken over; when the rogue AI had frozen ancillas and fired the Halo weapons at the capital. They and the rest of Audacity's current crew were aware that a few councilors had hidden, clustered deep inside one of the rings that had made up the sectioned sphere, and had been rescued before the worst of the battle had occurred. Afterward, there had been no point in returning. Anyone not saved by then was dead.\n\nBut knowing this was not the same as beholding it.\n\nEveryone was silent in respect, horror, and shock. Bornstellar had once envisioned the world as resembling a sliced spherical fruit. Now, it looked as if the slices of that fruit had been devoured or ripped to pieces. Only three remained even somewhat intact, still stubbornly impaled and connected by their axis. But they were dimmed and dark and damaged. No longer perfect circles. No longer teeming with life and activity.\n\nIt was Falling Stars, the Engineer, who broke the sickening silence. \"Do you think we'll even be able to find anything?\"\n\n\"We have to try.\" Bornstellar was the calmest of them all. Dim memories not his own stood alongside recollections of things he had lived through, but he felt the shock nonetheless. This had been the capital, the heart of the ecumene, and now it was little more than chunks of debris.\n\n\"Splendid Dust?\" he prompted gently, patiently. \"Where should we begin?\"\n\nSplendid Dust had paled as he stared at the ruination. He wore his formal collar, and now Bornstellar realized that there were indeed a variety of shapes that adorned it; keys to all manner of things, in the guise of decoration. How clever the councilors must have thought themselves; how smug they had been.\n\nSplendid Dust shook his head and spoke, one six-fingered hand closing about a small hexagon that hung from his collar.\n\n\"The, ah, the top fragment. The Crown. What remains of it, at least.\" The Crown had been cracked in two, but it seemed that those pieces were intact.\n\n\"For the slipstream crystals, or for the Organon?\" They had fallen into using the familiar, legendary term for the artifact they sought, as there was really no other established term for it. Not even Splendid Dust had one to offer them.\n\n\"The crystals,\" he said. \"The Mysterium is located on the equatorial ring.\" Broken, smaller, presumably used largely for storage, pilfering the Crown would feel less like entering a ravaged domicile.\n\nAudacity was a silvery fish swimming through a sea of rubble and sorrow. They navigated around moon-size chunks of the former world, and smaller, more horrible evidence of destruction: the ordinariness of personal vessels; the grandeur of a wall, its brightly painted mural a startling burst of color; the corpses of Forerunners, caught forever in their armor, all rates, all ages, all viciously equal in death.\n\nChant-to-Green had never been to Maethrillian, and she would gladly have stayed away. As one focused on life and renewal, so much death affected her greatly, and she wondered why Splendid Dust had requested two Lifeworkers in addition to the more logical choices of Builders, Warrior-Servants, Miners, and Engineers. Perhaps he felt like sharing his pain.\n\nBornstellar, Glory, and Finder-of-Things-Hidden ventured forth into the broken Crown. Not unexpectedly, there was no artificial environment or even any operational technology within the looming darkness of the interior. Their armor would protect them physically, and secure grappling lines tethered them safely to the ship. Anything they saw and heard would be transmitted back, and two other Forerunners stood ready to mount a rescue if needed.\n\nChant watched the monitor intently, seeing through Bornstellar's eyes as he maneuvered within the debris. Finder was beside him, utilizing one of the most basic laser mining tools to cut their way through.\n\n\"I am sorry it did not work out,\" Splendid Dust said quietly, stepping beside Chant. \"For you and Bornstellar.\" At her slightly surprised look, he added, \"I was trained to observe people. It was not hard to see.\"\n\n\"We were confused and hurting, then,\" she said simply. \"The pain was new.\"\n\n\"Even old, pain is pain,\" Splendid Dust replied.\n\nChant glanced over at Trial, who was at another monitoring station, and indicated that the older female join them. \"Why did you request Lifeworkers for this journey? We seem an odd choice.\"\n\nSplendid Dust's hand again went to the hexagon shape affixed to his collar. It was pretty, radiant, and looked newly created from hard light, despite it being precisely carved stone. \"I do not know much about the Organon,\" he said, \"but according to all the old and likely inaccurate rumors passed down, those who had seen or interacted with it felt it was alive in some way.\"\n\n\"Preposterous,\" said Trial, sounding very much like the Builder she once was.\n\nChant thought so as well. A truly living artificial intelligence was beyond their capabilities, and there was no solid evidence that the Precursors had mastered such a feat either. At their protests, Splendid Dust merely gave them a smile.\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" he said. \"But suffice it to say, I did not think it wise to come without you.\"\n\nThey returned their attention to the monitors. Chant was not pleased that her relationship with Bornstellar had been remarked upon. They both thought they had been discreet. Not for the first time, regret welled quietly within her. It had been he who had first spoken to end it. She was reconciled to a platonic relationship; had been for decades now. But it was like trying to deny the existence of something by hiding it away. Her feelings were still there, even if no one knew.\n\nThe glow of the laser drew her eyes as an oval door was cut into one of the Crown's interior compartments. A cable was fastened to it, and the Audacity pulled it away. Inside, the illumination of the wrist lamps was reflected back in myriad showers of dancing sparks of light.\n\nThey had found the cache of slipstream crystals; quite possibly the last in the galaxy. Winking before them were enough to fuel ten thousand ships for a hundred thousand years.\n\nThey took only a few dozen. The rest were left for those who were so guided to them to discover.\n\nBornstellar felt a dull pang as they approached the equatorial disk. It was dark and unwelcoming, a black smudge against the starfield. The last time he had been within five thousand kilometers, the ship had been greeted with the rainbow-pulse embrace of Maethrillian's sensory fields, reaching to safely guide it in with hard-light nets. Service vessels would have swarmed around them, ready to offer repairs or otherwise render assistance. This time, the ship was on its own, negotiating its path through the heartbreaking detritus of withered bodies, broken equipment, and the shattered, absolute arrogance of a civilization.\n\n\"No life support,\" Falling Stars confirmed. \"Nothing appears operational.\"\n\nIt was not the same docking area as Bornstellar remembered, nor was it near the room where he had once awaited his summons. That domicile had been located at the edge of the enormous slice.\n\nSplendid Dust directed the group closer to the central courts tier. Here they could obtain the additional two vessels that, along with Audacity, would help them embark on their journey. The ships had been tucked away deep inside the structure; they were not for everyday transportation.\n\nEven the soft glow of distant stars disappeared as the Audacity approached the entry point and slipped inside, traveling along a corridor of darkness that opened into an enormous interior cavern. Audacity's pools of lights oozed over the hard-light curve of a vessel's hull here, an image of an engine there.\n\nA few, Bornstellar had expected to see. But this hangar was vast, and it did not initially appear that a single bay was empty.\n\nThere had been time, then; time to escape before one of the Halo installations fired. Time for the cluster of terrified council members to be rescued. Time for any or all of these vessels to be filled with Forerunners and quickly flee to safety. The ships were here, ready and waiting. But the crystals that fueled them had been stored separately, in the Crown they had just plundered, and there had been no time to retrieve or install them.\n\nNo one said the words, but Splendid Dust spoke anyway. \"It wasn't deemed necessary. These were never meant to be escape pods. We\u2014\" He looked at them with anguished eyes. \"This was the capital! No one could have foreseen any need or even desire to escape from it!\"\n\nHis comment was met with silence. Hindsight had no forgiveness, but Bornstellar recalled the beauty, the ceremony, the absolute certainty of safety he had felt as he watched the beginning of the Master Builder's trial. Splendid Dust's words rang true.\n\nFinally, Trial said, \"There is enough blame and guilt for us each to be bowed beneath it. Do not shoulder more than your fair share, Splendid Dust.\"\n\nRow upon row they passed, until they finally found an area where they could set down. Falling Stars brought the Audacity in, settling it on the hard-light platform.\n\n\"Shall I enter the formal docking code?\" Splendid Dust asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Bornstellar said. Who knew if the mundane code might initiate a restoration program? Their task would be greatly simplified if this portion of the disk, at least, were operational.\n\nSure enough, light exploded all around them, forcing them to squint against the sudden brightness after so long operating in dimness, and they emitted startled, pleased barks of laughter.\n\nThen, abruptly, a red light began to flash on the controls, and the mirth was silenced.\n\nAn incoming message. From a dead world.\n\nBornstellar's skin felt cold, and his armor rushed to bring it up to temperature. The correction did nothing to dispel the chill that had suddenly gripped his heart. Without realizing he did so until they were nearly touching, he stepped close to Chant. Her own skin had paled.\n\nEveryone else seemed rooted in place with shock, and it was with an effort that Bornstellar stepped forward and touched the pad.\n\nA holographic male figure appeared in the center of the bridge. Bornstellar could not tell where the figure had stood when he recorded the message, but suspected by his movements that it was at a control panel of some sort. He wore the formal robes and regalia of a councilor.\n\n\"It's Strength-of-Steady-Purpose,\" breathed Splendid Dust.\n\nAs if he heard his name\u2014but of course he could not have\u2014Purpose looked up. \"I don't know how long I have,\" he said. \"Whoever you are, even if you've come here while this battle is still going on, if you think you can rescue us, leave now. Please. You cannot do anything. Time is too short!\"\n\nThere came a banging sound so immediate that Bornstellar jerked. So did Purpose. The noise had come from behind the holographic councilor; the sound of myriad people banging on the hard-light door to the docking bay.\n\n\"I can't let them in,\" he mourned, his voice cracking. \"They shut me out too, the council. Now I'm keeping others out, but only because they're a danger.\"\n\nAgain the cold rippling of cooling skin, with the sick, hollow frisson of fear. Bornstellar didn't know which was more terrifying\u2014that the council had locked its doors, that Purpose was barring people, or that the holographic councilor might be mad.\n\n\"Mass panic,\" Purpose murmured, still stabbing at the invisible control panel. \"Trampled bodies. Crashed ships. So many dead already, just from that. And they're not going to be able to stop it, not Halo. We'll all be dead soon, and you will too. Get out, at once, before the Halo\u2014\"\n\nThe transmission abruptly disappeared as all the power went out on the Audacity. The only light now came from those fastened about their wrists.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\nThe voice, neither male nor female, somehow blasted through the controls of Audacity, even though the ship was dead. It stabbed and overwhelmed the senses.\n\n\"WHO ARE YOU?\"\n\nThis time Bornstellar nearly dropped to his knees, biting back a cry of agony. \"I am Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting,\" he managed. \"We are Forerunners.\" Mendicant Bias had turned rampant and overridden Maethrillian security\u2014it was Bornstellar who had finally shut down the rogue Contender years later. Was this perhaps another equally powerful ancilla? He turned, his face questioning, to Splendid Dust as he added, \"Are you the metarch of\u2014\"\n\n\"METARCH?\"\n\nOffense, outrage, ineffable arrogance, and overweening puissance. Then, silence. Bornstellar didn't bother trying to speak with it again. It was no Forerunner creation. It was also no longer listening, and it knew they were here.\n\nAnd, Bornstellar realized belatedly, it had spoken in ancient Digon.\n\nReluctantly, he translated the voice's message for the others.\n\n\"We should go,\" Splendid Dust whispered when he had finished.\n\n\"I would be in favor of that,\" Falling Stars replied, \"but whatever it is has turned off every system in the ship.\"\n\nBornstellar felt a tug on his arm and turned to see Chant. Their eyes met.\n\nFind it. Promise me!\n\n\"It doesn't appear that our armor is damaged, so that gives us three days. We won't be here that long,\" he said, forcing himself to sound confident. \"Falling Star, try to get Audacity back up. Tread-with-Care, select two other ships and install the slipstream crystals. I want all three ready to go once we get back.\"\n\n\"You are still going?\" It was Trial. An odd expression flitted about her face, or perhaps it was just a trick of the erratic illumination from their wrist lights. Probably she thought him insane. Splendid Dust certainly looked as though he did, but he said nothing.\n\n\"If it spoke in ancient Digon,\" Bornstellar said, \"that leads me to believe it might be the Organon\u2014or a remnant of it. If something's still left, that means perhaps it is repairable. Chant, Splendid Dust, and I will go. Everyone else, stay here and help where you can.\"\n\n\"I will come too,\" said Trial.\n\n\"And me,\" said Glory. Stone Songs, Voices, and Finder also stepped forward.\n\n\"There is no need\u2014\" Bornstellar began, but Trial interrupted him.\n\n\"Yes, there is. The Librarian may have exacted a promise from you and Chant, but we all do her work. And it is better than sitting here, waiting and wondering. There's little I can do to help with repairing a vessel.\"\n\nChant held Trial's gaze, then nodded. Bornstellar saw that they were all determined to go, and any protest from him would be disregarded.\n\n\"Very well,\" he said. \"Splendid Dust? Where is the Mysterium?\"\n\nSplendid Dust looked at them in turn. \"First, we must go to the council chamber in the amphitheater. And then\"\u2014he took a deep breath\u2014\"down.\"\n\nEach of them wore wrist lights and carried rifles and several pulse grenades. The latter proved useful almost immediately, as there was no other way to open the door that Strength-of-Steady-Purpose had spent his final moments keeping closed. Through the hole created by the grenade, the lights of their rifles revealed that, erratic as Purpose's behavior had been, in this one thing at least he had not exaggerated.\n\nBodies lay where they had fallen, the shredded door bearing long, vertical lines made by the clawing of frantic armored hands. Chant's heart ached as she started to count, then she shut her mind to the task after she had passed twenty. Many. Too many.\n\n\"Our Halo weapons were cleaner,\" said Stone Songs, almost defensively. It shouldn't have been important, but it was.\n\nThe trek would have been the work of a few moments, had the capital been as it once was. But in the dead world, they walked.\n\nBornstellar was grateful that, although their ancillas had gone silent after the strange voice had spoken to them, their armor was still functional. Otherwise, death would have taken them quickly enough. As it was, the armor provided navigation and nourishment and eliminated the need for sleep. It even made their movements less taxing, allowing them to leap several meters to a walkway above, or fall without harm to one below. And as they could not rely on lifts or anything else that might abruptly grind and whir to violent life\u2014consequently sending them to violent deaths\u2014this was a boon not to be taken lightly.\n\nAt first, they were tense, their senses on full alert, heightened by their armor. But as the hours passed without event, the strain eased somewhat. Finally, Bornstellar asked Splendid Dust, \"Were you ever told that the Organon spoke?\"\n\n\"I was told that\u2014at first\u2014it cooperated with us and allowed us entrance into the Domain. So there was communication of some sort.\"\n\n\"It taught us?\" Trial asked, intrigued.\n\n\"Not so much 'taught' as permitted us to explore,\" Splendid Dust said. \"It was helpful.\" He shrugged, realizing he himself wasn't being particularly helpful. \"You must remember: this was quite literally several hundreds of millennia past.\"\n\n\"Was anything written down?\" Chance inquired. \"If we knew how to respectfully approach it\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps. We had a library, but if everything is inaccessible, then it does us no good. Besides\"\u2014he looked embarrassed\u2014\"I wouldn't know where to look. I was not First Councilor for very long, after all, and I was told only a few passing legends about a thing of great antiquity and mystery.\"\n\nThere came a sound, low, right on the verge of hearing range; felt more than heard.\n\nBoom.\n\nThen a second one.\n\nThey all stopped, listening. A soft skittering pattered over their heads. Glory lifted her rifle. The light caught something black and chitinous moving with astonishing speed.\n\nAbruptly, dozens of small indigo lights, clustered together in groups, flashed above them. Glory fired. Something shrieked, landing with a clatter on the corridor floor in front of them. Its cry ignited a fearful chorus.\n\nBornstellar shone the light on the thing that had fallen. Three meters long, black as the spaces between the stars, it screamed; waved eight long, sharp, barbed legs; righted itself; and then charged.\n\nHe blasted it again and again until it lay still. Around him, the others continued to fire, the things' bright eyes making them easy to pinpoint. The corridor ceiling was completely covered with them, and they began spitting out bolts of energy.\n\nBornstellar glanced back the way they had come. More of the insectoid things, summoned by the angry, almost unreal cries of their companions, surged toward them.\n\n\"Run!\"\n\nHis team obeyed, their armor lending them speed. Bornstellar followed, firing. Then, at the last minute, he threw as many pulse grenades as he could grab toward the flow of bodies.\n\nTo his astonishment, they froze in place, their dark-violet, mechanical eyes following the arc of the grenades. The leader of the pack swiveled its head, clacked its mandibles, and uttered a single, incomprehensible word in the strange voice they had all heard earlier:\n\n\"Abaddon.\"\n\nBornstellar was so shocked that he didn't even move. An arm looped through his and he was hurtled backward, barely far enough to escape the tons of debris that collapsed only a few meters away.\n\nChant was sprawled atop him, panting, and their eyes met. \"I heard it too,\" she said.\n\n\"What were those things?\" Stone Songs demanded, wide-eyed.\n\n\"They ought to have been crawlers,\" Bornstellar replied. \"But they're wrong. They're worse. They're still artificial, but they're much more organic in appearance and behavior.\"\n\n\"I don't know what a crawler is,\" Trial said.\n\n\"I do,\" Bornstellar replied heavily. \"I made them. And that's how I know they're wrong.\"\n\nTheir armor plotted a new course for them, and they continued on, shaken but even more resolved to reach the Organon after the unexpected and bizarre attack. They were on high alert now, listening to Bornstellar explain his earlier statement while straining for any sounds that could mean danger.\n\nThe original Didact had designed the crawlers for his Prometheans to use against a number of infantry threats, and, eventually, the Flood. They were created to target and destroy organic matter, overcoming their enemies with numbers. \"But mine . . . the Didact's . . . were clearly machines. These are different. And the crawlers were never utilized on Maethrillian.\"\n\n\"How is that possible, then?\" asked Trial.\n\n\"Before the Audacity was shut down, the Organon could have scanned its databanks,\" Stone Songs said. \"It could have created more . . . but in the time allowed? And why change the design?\"\n\n\"Why do it at all?\" murmured Chant.\n\nNo one wanted to answer. The thought that the Domain itself\u2014or what pitiful shards of it remained\u2014was attacking them was too awful to contemplate.\n\nAnother lift tube. Another corridor, a drop, and then still another. There were no further challenges, but neither Bornstellar nor anyone else dared lower their guard.\n\nSo alert was Bornstellar to attack that he failed to notice when his surroundings had become familiar. He halted abruptly and directed his light upward. It refracted on the surfaces of quantum-engineered crystal, gathered together to form breathtaking sculptures. The walls too glittered as Bornstellar shined the light about.\n\nA great moment is coming, Splendid Dust had said here, when he was striding beside Bornstellar many years ago, proudly pointing out the art composed of spent slipspace flakes. Bornstellar looked at him now and thought he had never seen anyone so beaten down.\n\n\"The amphitheater is ahead,\" Splendid Dust murmured. \"I don't know what it currently looks like, but once . . .\" His voice trailed off.\n\nBornstellar met Glory's eyes. He recalled a floating bowl connected to the main structure by little-used ferries and pretty bridges; platforms, a massive covering dome, and gently moving orbs displaying the twelve great systems of the early Forerunners.\n\nPomp trumps security, the Didact's presence, then so freshly in his thoughts, had warned him. He took that warning to heart now and adjusted the grip on his rifle. Up ahead, according to the incomplete data fed to him by his armor, the way was\u2014\n\nHe blinked. Nothing.\n\n\"My armor\u2014\" the voices began, but Bornstellar waved them to silence.\n\n\"Mine too,\" he said, and the others all nodded. At least the life-support systems were holding steady. For now. \"We are expected,\" he said grimly. \"We must focus on the task at hand.\"\n\n\"Head for the area where the platforms were,\" Splendid Dust said. \"Below is the waiting chamber, where the councilors hid during the battle.\"\n\n\"Where they locked out others seeking safety,\" Trial said coldly.\n\n\"Yes,\" Splendid Dust replied. \"But beyond that is the entrance to the Mysterium.\"\n\n\"And you have the key?\" Chant asked.\n\n\"I have all the keys,\" Splendid Dust replied with sadness.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Bornstellar said. He shined his light along the glittering walls until he spotted the faint outline of a hatch.\n\n\"That will take us to the prime seats,\" Splendid Dust said. He paused, looking at each of them in turn. \"This may be the finest action the Forerunners ever take. I regret that there will be no one to tell the story\u2014whether or not we succeed.\"\n\n\"I do not enjoy stories,\" Glory said bluntly. \"Let us go and restore the Domain.\"\n\nAnd removing a pulse grenade, Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn tossed it toward the hatch door.\n\nChant-to-Green was prepared for the theater of battle. Given the gradual reduction of her armor's efficiency, she anticipated it locking up on her at any moment. But none of those things happened.\n\nThe second they ran through the opening into the amphitheater, illumination flooded her vision, so bright it made her wince. A roaring sound met her ears. But it was all wrong. It wasn't the angry cries of the redesigned crawlers, or the bellow of the outraged Organon\u2014\n\n\u2014Abaddon\u2014\n\n\u2014it was voices, calling out in a language that, this time, she understood. And when her dazzled gaze cleared, she saw the speakers.\n\n\"Forerunners!\" Stone Songs cried. But he was wrong. Not just Forerunners: humans, San'Shyuum, all the sentient races whose once-teeming numbers had been so terribly reduced filled the boxes, the corridors, all were crammed in beyond the sheer\u2014\n\nAnd all at once, Chant knew what was happening. They had come to honor a promise, to atone. But they would not be making the gesture solely of their own free will.\n\nThe Organon\u2014Abaddon, she amended; Abaddon was its name\u2014would exact its own price.\n\nShe dragged her horrified gaze from the rioting crowds, holograms all, upward to the cavernous ceiling. No longer lurking in the dark, the danger was boldly present.\n\nDozens, perhaps hundreds, of armed Sentinels peered down at their makers, each with a single glowing indigo eye. They were modified, as the crawlers had been. They were larger, but far less squat and mechanical. If the crawlers were insectoid, these were avian; their long arms looked like wings, and their curves were graceful.\n\nIt's learning. It's learning from our ancillas . . . from us . . .\n\n\"BORNSTELLAR-MAKES-ETERNAL-LASTING,\" boomed the too-familiar voice, and Chant tore her gaze away from the beautiful hovering machines to the stage.\n\nAbaddon.\n\nIts shape was enormous, radiant, exquisitely terrifying, and heartbreakingly wondrous. It towered, its perfect face, neither male nor female, drawn in a frown, its indigo-luminescence darkness visible. Had its massive wings beaten, the wind would have knocked them flat.\n\nHad it been real.\n\n\"SPLENDID-DUST-OF-ANCIENT-SUNS,\" it continued. Its gaze fell on Chant, and as Abaddon intoned her name, Chant felt her gut clench, her will dissolve. A platform was floating toward them, and one by one, raptly, they climbed atop it and let it ferry them toward the feet of the godlike being.\n\nIt's a hologram, Chant tried to say, the words bottling up in her throat. She tried again, and this time Bornstellar heard her. He turned toward her, eyes wide, and nodded. Splendid Dust had said that the Forerunners had \"found\" something once that had assisted them in comprehending the nigh-incomprehensible Domain. He now realized that it was a Precursor's version of an ancilla\u2014one as far beyond those of the Forerunners as a keyship was to a wooden raft.\n\n\"A trial was to be held here,\" Abaddon continued. \"It was interrupted by your creation, Didact.\"\n\n\"I am not\u2014\"\n\n\"You will face trial,\" it said, ignoring him. \"You have failed the Mantle. Behold what you have wrought.\"\n\nThe screaming crowd below them dissolved into dust, but not before they convulsed in agony. Beside Chant, Splendid Dust was sobbing.\n\n\"It's right,\" he said in a thick voice. \"It's right. We did this to it. We did this to everything. We should stand trial.\"\n\nChant grabbed his arm. \"No,\" she said in a harsh whisper, \"this is just a projection. The ancilla. What's physically left of the Domain is down there. It's broken, and we have to fix it!\"\n\n\"Everyone,\" Bornstellar interrupted, \"listen and do exactly as I say. The Org\u2014Abaddon\u2014wants us alive to answer for what we've done. That means it won't let us die. We still have a chance.\"\n\nThe platform settled onto the greater one. The eyes of myriad Sentinels bore down on them. Again, Chant was almost overcome, so dazzled was she by the glory of the being in front of her. But she knew it wasn't real, that the endorphins flooding her body were being artificially injected into her system, and when Splendid Dust, unable\u2014or unwilling\u2014in his grief to distinguish fantasy from reality, fell to his knees in front of the enormous image, Chant knew what she had to do. While there was still time, before the armor did its work and she could resist Abaddon no longer.\n\nCharging Splendid Dust with all her speed, Chant snatched the hexagonal key from his collar and hurled herself down into the darkness.\n\nBornstellar was two steps behind Chant-to-Green. Ordinarily, the drop would have been too great for their armor to protect them. It would have tried, but they would have plunged to their deaths. But this time, instead of falling, they floated. The Abaddon entity did not attempt to stop either of them. They descended for what seemed like an eternity and landed ungently\u2014but alive.\n\nChant grunted and rolled over. Smiling, she showed him the key. \"You are brilliant!\" he exclaimed as he got to his feet, extending a hand to help her rise.\n\n\"I know,\" she said. They looked up, watching as Trial, Voices, and Finder landed as well.\n\nVoices said, \"Glory and Stone Songs chose to stay with Splendid Dust. He says he'll buy us time.\"\n\nWhether that was truly the case, or whether Splendid Dust was already lost to them, was not for Bornstellar to decide. He simply nodded, grateful that Abaddon's terrible attention was not on them, so that they stood at least a chance of completing their mission.\n\nHe moved his arm, directing the pool of light, and examined their surroundings. As the First Councilor had told him, to one side was a door that led into a waiting area. Here the councilors had waited until it was time for them to board the platform and rise before their audience. Here also some had hidden, refusing to allow others admittance during the battle for the capital. There were no bodies present. Bornstellar had no way of knowing if those who had been refused had fled elsewhere, or if those who had rescued the councilors had also taken any bodies aboard their ships when they departed. Either way, he was grateful.\n\nHe saw no door, but he had been told it would not be immediately visible. Illustrated on the wall was a mural of the original twelve worlds of the ecumene, an echo of the display above. As Splendid Dust had instructed, Bornstellar touched each one of them in turn. Slowly, with a grinding sound, a rectangular chunk of the wall slid aside.\n\nThere had been nothing to indicate a door. Bornstellar was silently pleased that the method of hiding this passageway was not dependent on any source of power other than simple knowledge of the code. Steps cut into the stone wound down into the darkness, and the group began to descend. There was no sign of damage this far inside the equatorial section. This stair, and the Mysterium at its base\u2014these were perhaps the oldest things of Forerunner history that yet remained as they had been. Bornstellar felt a flush of determination. He had started this quest to keep a promise. He would finish it. Because beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was the best thing he could do.\n\nHe suspected it would be his last act; and he was at peace with this knowledge.\n\nBornstellar kept his rifle pointed slightly down and ahead so they could see the turn of the stairs. He stopped abruptly, between one step and the next.\n\nThere was light up ahead, a faint indigo glow. Foolish, to think he could outwit the Domain.\n\nHe didn't say anything to the others; they had eyes and brains. They saw. They knew.\n\nBornstellar had no idea what to expect from the Mysterium. But as he turned the corner and got his first glimpse, he knew that to have thought of it as a \"vault\" was a grave error.\n\nOnce, he had attended a farewell feast for one of the races they had reseeded, and had unwisely eaten far more than he should have. Now, he felt as if his eyes were being fed past their ability to digest what they beheld.\n\nRow after row of beautiful, terrifying, or incomprehensible objects stretched away into the darkness; images of beings and creatures and symbols that were utterly unfamiliar to either him or any memories the Didact had possessed. What fantastical technology lay here, gathering dust? What solutions to problems simply sat, unimagined, for thousands upon thousands of years? In his youth, Bornstellar had been enthralled by the idea of treasure. Here, now surrounded by it, he could only gape at how limited his mind had been.\n\n\"Your First Councilor still pleads with me,\" came Abaddon's voice. \"But he is guilty, as are those who stand here with him. You are all guilty.\"\n\nBornstellar turned to see a smaller but no less overwhelming version of the great being they had encountered in the amphitheater. It stood in the doorway of the most majestic structure he had ever seen. The ancilla appeared to be made of points of light, and he wondered crazily for a moment if, somehow, on some unfathomable plane of existence, the original had been too. This was the Organon, the Domain, after all, or so he believed; the great gift of the Precursors, and the thought of its heart being an ordered collection of stars did not seem impossible to him. Not now.\n\n\"We have come to atone,\" Bornstellar said. \"To make right the wrong we did you.\"\n\n\"No. You are attempting to finish what you began. You have proven yourselves betrayers. I am Abaddon. I am the Protector. I shall make you suffer. And you have taught me how best to do that.\"\n\n\"Our armor,\" Trial said. \"That's how it knew about the crawlers.\"\n\nAnd our presence at the trial, Bornstellar thought sickly. And the deadbolt key . . .\n\n\"I shall make you suffer,\" it said again, \"and I shall be remade.\" It lifted its arms, spread its wide, violet, graceful wings. Beside Bornstellar, Voices lifted his rifle, and then crumbled to indigo dust. Finder cried out in horror, and then he too was gone.\n\nThe celestial figure turned its gaze upon Bornstellar. He braced himself, but Abaddon seemed to make a decision. Its eerily beautiful face twisted in pain.\n\n\"Behold,\" it said in a shattered voice. Then there was nothing in front of Bornstellar but a slag heap. One stone was still a deep, beautiful amethyst hue. Light sparked, but feebly, limning its edges and outlining a hexagonal hole. The glamour had been dispelled, and he knew he beheld what was actually before him. His heart cracked. Aya, he thought, is this truly laid at our feet? Did we do this, or did time?\n\nHis ancilla, gone since the first manifestation of Abaddon as a disembodied voice, abruptly reappeared. She stared him down, her form no longer her typical, pleasant blue, but the same frightening pulsing indigo that he had grown to loathe. Abaddon would have them. In its role as a guardian and protector, it had once permitted the Forerunners to explore the Domain. Now, in an incarnation twisted by the Halo's firing, it saw its role as a destroyer. Thinking to protect what remained, it would stop them. And it would do so disbelieving that they were trying to help.\n\nMovement caught his eye, and then all at once, all of that\u2014the fate of the Domain, his promise to the Librarian, his own life\u2014abruptly became as nothing to him.\n\nChant-to-Green, the Lifeshaper, was racing forward, fighting her own ancilla, her hand outstretched, clutching Splendid Dust's key. She would slot the key in place, and the Domain would recover, and somehow he knew it would take her with it.\n\nThat could not be borne.\n\nChant!\n\nHis mind went back to the last decades. To their awkward coupling and the decision that they both loved each other, each in their own way. To Chant's devotion to carrying out the charge of the Librarian. To her kindness, and the casual way she would touch him, a gesture always welcomed. How it seemed they instinctively turned to one another. He looked to Chant for wisdom when his own failed, for comfort given and received, and his throat was suddenly raw, and he realized he had screamed her name in agony.\n\nShe turned her head, and he saw a universe of emotion on her face. Resolution, fear, peace, and\u2014\n\nHe loved her.\n\nHe loved her. Chant-to-Green. Not for her position as Lifeshaper, but for how she lived what it meant. Not for her likeness to the Librarian, but her unique differences.\n\nBornstellar had thought he had lost the love of his life.\n\nHe was wrong.\n\nThe part of him that was the Didact certainly had. But he was more than that, more than Bornstellar, and this third amalgam loved with a ferocity and a passion that made him realize he would give all he was, all he had known, to save Chant-to-Green, who in this instant, this precious sliver of time, met his eyes with love returned.\n\nBut he did not save her.\n\nGrowth-Through-Trial-of-Change did.\n\nFewer steps away than the newly awakened Bornstellar, Trial surged forward. To Bornstellar's shock and confusion, Trial didn't pull Chant back to safety. Instead, Trial slammed her weapon into the Lifeshaper. Chant's ancilla was obviously in rebellion, for Chant stumbled and went sprawling. Trial's own armor was starting to attempt to lock her down as well, and she struggled to pry Chant's hands open.\n\n\"STOP!\" Abaddon's disembodied voice shouted, even as Bornstellar pitted his will against his rogue ancilla and moved like a mechanical thing himself. He had to stop Trial. She was a Lifeworker; he was a Builder and a Warrior-Servant. His words had ordered the firing of the Array.\n\n\"Trial!\" came Chant's shriek. Trial only increased her speed toward the radiant stone. She struck hard, her hand sliding down until the key caught, slipped, slid into place.\n\nFor a moment, Trial, like the temple of Abaddon\u2014whose name had been corrupted through time to Organon and reduced to simple, palpable, pathetic riches\u2014glowed and sparkled, as if she too were made of starlight.\n\nGrowth-Through-Trial-of-Change looked at both Chant and Bornstellar. She nodded, gleaming white light where her eyes had once been, and a voice inside Bornstellar's head whispered: All is well.\n\nThen she was gone.\n\nFalling Stars' voice was in Bornstellar's ears as the power returned. He blinked in the sudden brightness as the Engineer said in a shocked tone, \"The Audacity is now fully operational. So are the other ships. I anticipate having two more ships ready in less than an hour. What happened?\"\n\n\"It . . . is a long story,\" Bornstellar said. He was gazing at Chant, whose own gaze was fixed on where Trial had last stood a mere few heartbeats before. \"I will tell everyone upon our return. We should not be long.\"\n\nHis ancilla appeared, looking apologetic, but otherwise her normal self, informing him that nearby shuttles were now active and that they would indeed make good time returning to Audacity. As she spoke, she was interrupted by a humming sound. Bornstellar and Chant looked up to see the platform descending.\n\nSplendid Dust lay curled up, shivering, on the platform. Beside him were two piles of dark violet; all that remained of Glory-of-a-Far-Dawn and Keeper-of-Stone-Songs. Bornstellar placed his grief aside, reaching to help Splendid Dust to his feet. The former First Councilor was shaking as he spoke. \"Abaddon had pronounced sentence,\" was all he said.\n\nIts defeat had come in time to save Splendid Dust, but not the others. He blinked, then started when he realized that Trial was not with them. He turned a haunted, questioning gaze to Bornstellar, mutely asking for answers.\n\n\"Let us go back,\" Bornstellar said to Splendid Dust. \"And we will all tell our stories.\"\n\nAnd so they did, each briefly analyzing what they had experienced. It was a somber retelling. The deaths of so many, especially Trial, were deeply felt by all of them. Only the assurance from Bornstellar and Chant that they believed the mission to be successful made the losses slightly bearable.\n\nIt was time to leave the dead capital, and let the Domain begin its work of healing\u2014if it truly could\u2014in peace. Falling Stars commanded one of the new ships, which Bornstellar named the Bravado, and Tread-with-Care took control of the newly dubbed Impudence.\n\nBornstellar had requested that Chant and Dust stay with him on Audacity. There were things that needed to be said.\n\nFirst, he turned to Chant. \"Why did you not give the key to me? Do you know why Trial took it from you?\"\n\n\"I asked Splendid Dust why he wanted Lifeworkers,\" she said. \"I would have come regardless, because of the Librarian's request. Splendid Dust said that long-ago rumors suspected that the . . . that Abaddon was alive, in some way. Once I saw what was happening, how Abaddon was re-creating our own, familiar technology in a more organic fashion, I realized it was learning from us. And . . . I suspected it needed a template of some sort to be revived.\" Not repaired, he noted. \"I think Trial believed as I did, that Abaddon needed a Lifeworker mind, or genetic pattern, or something from one of us. She had always told me that the most important thing in life was how one faced one's trials. And she did not want me to sacrifice myself.\"\n\nTheir eyes met. Bornstellar longed to speak his heart . . . but not now, not in front of Splendid Dust, to whom he currently turned his attention.\n\n\"Chant was wrong,\" the former First Councilor said. \"I did not intend to sacrifice a Lifeworker. I merely believed we needed them with us, perhaps to advise, to see something a Builder or a Warrior-Servant or an Engineer wouldn't.\"\n\n\"Did you know slotting in the key would be lethal to the one who did so?\"\n\nSplendid Dust shook his head. \"I thought it might be. I didn't know. I still don't understand what happened. I don't know if it even worked. Trial and Voices and Glory and Finder could all have died for nothing.\"\n\n\"But yet you let Chant take the key.\"\n\nSplendid Dust nodded. \"I failed you all. As I have failed so many. As we all did. It was too powerful, and I felt too much remorse. And so I stayed, to let Abaddon judge me.\" He lifted his eyes to Bornstellar. \"We did so many things wrong. We were so foolish, Bornstellar. So unspeakably arrogant. We thought we knew everything, and in reality, we knew nothing.\"\n\nBornstellar did not contradict him. Splendid Dust looked away for a moment, as if upon the ancient suns that gave him part of his name. \"I want to do something I know will help the Reclaimers.\" He cleared his throat, straightened himself, and met Bornstellar's gaze. \"I agree that the Forerunners need to leave this galaxy.\"\n\nBornstellar listened, having no idea where he was going with this.\n\n\"We will leave the Ark to the Reclaimers. But they will not understand it, not right away. They will need a . . . not a guide so much as an interpreter. Someone to share what the Forerunners have learned. I want that interpreter to be me.\"\n\n\"But how?\" And then, with an awful certainty, Bornstellar knew.\n\nSo did Chant, who tensed beside him. \"Splendid Dust, you cannot be serious,\" she said.\n\n\"I am. The . . . Abaddon . . . We did that to it.\"\n\n\"No. Mendicant Bias did that, not us,\" Bornstellar said.\n\n\"But we made Mendicant Bias!\" His voice broke. \"Our technology! Forerunner technology! We didn't listen to him when he attempted to ask for help\u2014we were blind to what the Gravemind was doing to him. We failed Mendicant Bias. And we failed Abaddon. It gave us the Domain. For eons, it had only ever been helpful to us. And we . . . I do not want to let the humans down as well. Therefore, I will stay behind. In the only way I can, I will stay. And I will wait for the Reclaimers to come.\"\n\nSplendid Dust had been a politician, one used to interacting with others. It would be more difficult for him than most to adjust to centuries, perhaps millennia, utterly on his own.\n\n\"You will be completely alone,\" Bornstellar warned.\n\n\"I accept that. I want to atone.\"\n\nLike Trial, and Chant. Like Mendicant Bias. Like me. Like everyone . . . except the Didact. Who am I to deny him the chance?\n\n\"Then you shall.\"\n\nSplendid Dust accepted the act of being composed with more dignity and grace than he had ever displayed hitherto. Bornstellar wept and was unashamed. He thought of Guilty Spark, once a human known as Chakas. Once his friend.\n\nToward the end, Splendid Dust had been his friend too.\n\n\"I name you the protector and guardian of the Lesser Ark. You will keep it safe for the true inheritors of the Mantle. Any thoughtlessness, or cruelty, or arrogance is washed clean from you now. Yours is not\u2014cannot be\u2014a happy end. And thus I name you Tragic Solitude . . . for you shall be alone, and your noble sacrifice shall aid the Reclaimers . . . but in doing so, it shall break what is left of your heart.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting,\" said the hovering monitor, its single eye unwavering. His voice was familiar now; in time, it would become more mechanical. In time, he would forget Splendid-Dust-of-Ancient-Suns.\n\nBut the Forerunners, wherever they would be, under an ancient or perhaps a young sun, would always remember.\n\nWith Tragic Solitude now the Ark's caretaker, the final duties of the last Forerunners in the galaxy dwindled to an accessible few. The vessels were checked again, the options discussed, the holographic simulations run two or three times more.\n\nIn the midst of the bustling activity, Bornstellar and Chant had carved out time to be alone. As they lay quietly together, without armor, their hearts fully open and their unprotected skin so sensitive to each other's touch, they spoke of Trial. Bornstellar recounted to Chant of Trial's words in his head, and Chant revealed that she too had been addressed.\n\n\"It was Trial, but also not her. I do not know if she was destroyed, or integrated, or . . . or something else. Abaddon is far beyond even our best guess. But I think she did it, Bornstellar. Trial let us keep our promise. I think the Domain will recover, in time.\"\n\n\"But not in time for Forerunners.\" The thought, oddly, did not distress him. He glanced over at their discarded armor and mused if, in whatever brave new world awaited them, they would choose to leave it behind on the ship.\n\n\"What will it be like in our new galaxy, I wonder?\" Chant said.\n\nHe looked into her eyes and placed her hand on his chest.\n\n\"It will be like this,\" he said. And smiled.\n\n## SHADOW OF INTENT\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nJOSEPH STATEN\n\nThis story takes place in 2553 following the Great Schism, a sudden and violent civil war within the Covenant alliance (Halo 2: Anniversary), and in the wake of the thirty-year-long Covenant campaign against mankind (Halo 3).\n\nThe longer the countdown went, the more the bunker smelled like fear.\n\nThe Prelate scowled at the two Jiralhanae looming beside him. One was covered with rust-red hair, and the other with dirty white. Both warriors were so tall that they had to duck their helmeted heads to keep from banging them on the bunker's low, flat ceiling. The thickly muscled, sharp-toothed Brutes stood still and silent, like monuments to violence. But all male Jiralhanae were prone to pungent pheromones that mirrored their emotions, and now, so close to the activation of the device, these usually fearless creatures' panicked stench permeated the cramped, dark room.\n\nThe Prelate, Tem'Bhetek, wanted to shout a reprimand. He had handpicked the two Jiralhanae for their strength and mental fortitude. And besides: they were adults, certainly mature enough to regulate their pheromones. But Tem held his tongue, partly because he didn't want to startle the insectile Yanme'e nervously monitoring the device's final activation sequence, but mostly because the Prelate knew the Jiralhanae weren't the real cause of his slowly building rage.\n\nAs much as the Prelate's nostrils recoiled at his warriors' sharp, sour scent, it was the noise filling his lobeless ears that made him truly angry. A noise that rose over the rapid clicking of the Yanme'e's claws on the luminous glyphs shining through the surface of the bunker's obsidian walls. A noise that muted the rumble of the device in the test chamber many levels above. A noise so infuriating that the Prelate finally broke his silence with a strangled hiss: \"Why would they sing at a time like this?\"\n\nThe Minister of Preparation shrugged inside his dark orange robes. His high, thin voice was full of concentration. \"We never understood each other. Not really.\"\n\nBoth the Minister and the Prelate were San'Shyuum, hairless, slick-skinned creatures with elongated necks that thrust forward from between their shoulders. They shared their species' large, amphibian eyes. But the Prelate's eyes were two different colors: one dark green and the other deep blue. Considered auspicious in earlier ages, this trait now marked the Prelate as a member of a genetic line that was overbred and out of fashion.\n\nThe Minister, Boru'a'Neem, was two decades older than the Prelate, violet-eyed with a pronounced waddle of fleshy sacks that dangled from his chin. The two had the same pale-gray skin, but the Minister's was deeply wrinkled and bunched down his skull and along his neck like the meat of a freshly shelled nut. In the tradition of most San'Shyuum of his age and exalted rank, the Minister sat hunched in a bowl-shaped titanium throne that floated above the floor with the help of embedded anti-gravity units. The Prelate stood on his own two feet, his broad shoulders and wiry arms held tight against his black tunic as he glared past the Minister at a holographic projector integrated into the bunker's primary control surface.\n\nThere, in a flickering pillar of lavender light, were the small-scale images of three Sangheili warriors, stripped of their armor and kneeling with their arms bound behind their backs. The Prelate knew the display was one-way; the Sangheili in the test chamber couldn't see or hear anything inside the bunker. But their leader, a muscular, middle-aged warrior with light-brown skin and bright amber eyes, stared directly at the recording unit, proud and unafraid, as he led his companions in song.\n\n\"Do you know the words?\" the Minister asked.\n\n\"I do not,\" replied the Prelate.\n\n\"Sangheili, to be sure, but they have so many dialects. Perhaps it's a battle anthem. . . .\" The Minister's voice trailed off as a line of glyphs scrolled rapidly across the control surface. His fingers fluttered against the intricate symbols, rotating them back and forth to fine-tune the device's charging sequence. \"No matter. This will be their final verse.\"\n\nThe Sangheili hadn't sung at first. Indeed, the two younger warriors had bellowed in pain when the Jiralhanae slashed the tendons above their large cloven feet to bring them to their knees, a practical cruelty to keep them from moving too far from the device. The Sangheili leader had said nothing, barely moving his four interlocking jawbones when the Jiralhanae made their cuts. When this stoic Elite refused to fall, the Prelate ordered his Jiralhanae to smash his knees with their armored fists\u2014but, even then, the amber-eyed warrior hadn't said a word.\n\nIt wasn't until power began to surge to the device, and the younger Sangheili had begun to groan with fear, that their elder finally cleared his throat and started singing. Soon all three were joined in defiant harmony.\n\nThe Prelate clenched his fists. I should have ordered my Jiralhanae to cut their throats as well. But the Minister had been clear: the test would be worthless if the Sangheili were already dead when he activated the device.\n\nNear the Minister, the last of the glyphs pulsed and stabilized. The walls of the bunker began to vibrate as the device held its charge. The Jiralhanae growled and the Yanme'e chittered in anticipation as the Minister lifted a single, long finger . . . and gently pressed the static surface of the final glyph.\n\nThe Prelate had expected a sound, something spectacularly loud when the device fired. But instead there was a deafening silence, an aural vacuum that seemed to pull every other sound into it. The growling, clicking, singing\u2014even the Prelate's surprised intake of breath\u2014were sucked out of existence as the holographic view of the test chamber filled with blinding light.\n\nAnd yet, as the light faded, a ghostly chorus remained. An echo of the Sangheili song rang in the Prelate's ears for the long minutes it took the Yanme'e to deactivate all the bunker's warning and containment systems. Then the Minister led them all through a series of thick, saw-toothed shield doors to a gravity lift that whisked them up to the test chamber, where they inspected what remained of the Sangheili.\n\n\"Nothing, in fact,\" the Minister of Preparation said, carefully inspecting an analysis of the chamber's air, scrolling up the arm of his throne. \"I would say vaporized. But that would mean trace particles remain.\" One corner of the Minister's wide mouth curled into a smile. \"They are, simply, gone.\"\n\nThe Prelate watched as the Yanme'e fluttered on iridescent wings around the device: a ring of marbled onyx, ten meters high and honeycombed with glinting circuits.\n\nThe ring stood in the middle of the test chamber, a long room with white, pearlescent walls that angled together high above. This place and everything in it was the creation of the Forerunners: an ancient, vanished race that both the San'Shyuum and Sangheili worshipped as gods\u2014or, rather, used to. For while their shared faith had been the foundation of the Covenant, this millennia-old alliance between the San'Shyuum and Sangheili was recently and irreversibly broken. The device, a miniature version of one of the Forerunners' seven sacred Halo rings, no longer held any religious significance for the Prelate. Now it was an object to be feared, not revered. And he truly hoped the three Sangheili warriors had felt terror before the end.\n\n\"My lord,\" the rust-haired Jiralhanae asked the Minister, his gruff voice halting and unsure, \"is it possible, perhaps, that the prisoners could have\u2014\"\n\n\"Their journey was short and led to nowhere,\" the Prelate snapped. \"Signal the ship and tell them it's safe to approach. Once we're aboard, we depart immediately.\"\n\nThe Jiralhanae shared a dissatisfied glance with his white-haired companion, but they both bowed their heads and retreated from the test chamber across the stretch of floor where the Sangheili used to be. The Prelate noted that even the pools of indigo blood from the Sangheili's wounds were gone, and the Jiralhanae's shaggy feet left no prints as they walked the length of the chamber and disappeared into a passage beyond.\n\n\"They refuse to understand, no matter how many times I tell them,\" the Prelate said.\n\n\"Can you blame them?\" the Minister replied. \"The Jiralhanae's belief in the Forerunners was stronger than that of anyone in the Covenant. In less than three ages, we lifted them from savagery to starships. They believed\u2014as we all once did\u2014that the Halo rings would open the path to godhood.\" He waved a hand over the arm of his throne, blanking the test results. \"Do you remember what the Prophet of Truth used to say?\"\n\nWith as much calm as he could muster, Tem'Bhetek recited one of the deceased Covenant leader's better-known aphorisms: \" 'There is nothing stronger than the conviction of the newly converted.' \"\n\nBoru'a'Neem settled deeper into his throne. His reedy voice was tired, but his words still had all the precision of a practiced politician. \"Truth said and did many unfortunate things, but he was right about the Jiralhanae. They will do anything you command, so long as they believe. And while this test may have shaken what remains of their faith in the Great Journey, it has proven, without a doubt, the validity of our plan and the clarity of our purpose.\"\n\nThe Prelate stared hard at the miniature Halo.\n\nRevenge.\n\nIn a flutter of waxy wings, the Yanme'e pulled away from the ring. The Prelate could see a large crack in one of its marbled veins where some of the embedded circuits had burned away. Yanme'e were clever, and in swarms even more so, but this damage far exceeded their technical ability. The Drones hovered nervously until the Minister released them with a swift hand signal, and then they buzzed down a wide shaft behind the ring to examine how the Forerunner power systems buried deeper in the installation had weathered the test-firing.\n\nWhen they had arrived here, many weeks ago, the Minister of Preparation had painstakingly trained the Yanme'e in their tasks. But the truth was not even Boru'a'Neem, a San'Shyuum renowned for his ability to pick apart and repurpose Forerunner relics, truly understood how this particular device worked. Until recently, the Halo rings had been legend\u2014articles of faith, not something anyone in the Covenant had ever seen. It was only after a Halo had been found and activated, briefly, that this installation and others like it had revealed themselves on the Luminaries and other scanning equipment of Covenant deep-space survey ships.\n\n\"If only Truth had told me about this installation sooner. . . .\" The Minister tugged at one of the many loose threads in his robe. The heavy garment was embellished with platinum brocade that used to dazzle but was now grimy and tattered. They had been on the run ever since the fall of the holy city, High Charity, several months ago. The Minister hadn't slept for days as he prepared to test-fire the device, and now some of the Prelate's anger crept into Boru'a'Neem's voice as he considered the ring with his weary eyes. \"I could have transported this prototype to High Charity\u2014brought all the resources of my Sacred Promissory to bear! But that's all gone now. Wasted.\"\n\nThe Prelate flinched, seized with a sudden sadness. He heard the faint echo of a different song. . . .\n\nThe Minister softened his tone. \"Forgive me, Tem'Bhetek. My losses were nothing compared to yours.\"\n\n\"Many died that day, my lord.\"\n\n\"But I did not. And for that, I am forever in your debt.\"\n\nThe Minister dipped his long neck and head, tipping slightly forward in his throne. The Prelate bowed in response, although muscle memory encouraged him to kneel. According to the old Covenant hierarchy, the Minister Boru'a'Neem was many times his better. Tem'Bhetek was a soldier, the Minister's sworn protector. But after Tem had accomplished their escape from High Charity, Boru'a'Neem had made things clear: they were now partners, with different but equally important parts to play in the execution of their plan.\n\n\"Bring the Half-Jaw and his ship to me,\" the Minister said. He nudged his throne close to the Prelate, reached up, and placed his hands on the younger San'Shyuum's shoulders. \"And I promise: we will make the Sangheili pay for everything they have done.\"\n\nFrom orbit, Rahnelo looked pristine. While the planet had a thin equatorial band of deep greens and golden browns, it cooled rapidly as it arced toward its poles, and its caps were icy blue. Bathed in the light of its star, the frozen Sangheili colony world sparkled as it spun about its axis. The effect was breathtakingly beautiful, and staring down at Rahnelo from a distance of a few hundred kilometers, it was easy to get distracted. But distraction was exactly what the Half-Jaw wanted.\n\nSince his Phantom dropship had begun its descent, the Half-Jaw, Rtas 'Vadum, had done everything he could to keep his mind occupied. He double-checked his pilot's glide path toward a line of craggy peaks on the wintry edge of the northern hemisphere. He ordered scans of the storm that was brewing there, even though he knew the Phantom was rated to withstand far worse hazards. Having exhausted these by-the-book operations, and not wanting to become a nuisance to his crew, the Half-Jaw busied himself by watching the storm grow larger in the Phantom's viewscreens.\n\nFor a handful of heartbeats, as the craft nosed into the bright tops of the stratus clouds, the Half-Jaw felt a surge of confidence. You are Sangheili! Born and bred for war. This is what you live for! But then the Phantom broke into the dull gray light beneath the clouds, and his false bravado shattered.\n\nThe first evidence of the assault was Rahnelo's ruined spaceport. Through the snow whipping past the Phantom's swept-back nose, the Half-Jaw saw launchpads raked by plasma cannons and a hulking orbital transport burst open from the inside, its fuel tanks boiled by sustained laser fire. The port's smaller craft were slagged inside their hangars, likely before their pilots even had their engines spinning. It was a precise, thorough attack, clearly the work of an experienced foe. But the Half-Jaw knew this was just the beginning.\n\nThe broad road from the spaceport to Rahnelo's largest settlement was cratered by heavy plasma bombardment. Deep pits walked up the frozen flagstones, and near misses had vaporized the ice fields on either side, creating holes of blackened tundra. The craters continued into the settlement, where direct hits had destroyed many of the high-walled family compounds, littering the ground with slate roof tiles, iron structural spars, and foundation stones that had stood for generations.\n\nFor the Half-Jaw, it felt as though he was trapped with his eye against some sort of macabre microscope. As the Phantom descended, layers of magnification clicked into place, each one revealing horrific new details. The final lens belonged to the corpses; stark, dark lumps scattered in the snowy streets leading up to the settlement's keep.\n\nHaving been a warrior most of his life, Rtas 'Vadum thought he had seen the aftermath of war in all its grim variations. During the Covenant's long campaign against the humans, he had witnessed the destruction of many of their cities. On rare occasions, he had seen Covenant fleets unleash their might on entire human worlds, bathing their planets in plasma fire until they shone like glass. And most recently, Rtas had witnessed High Charity itself fall to the devastating parasite known as the Flood.\n\nBut until this moment, the Half-Jaw had never seen the annihilation of a Sangheili world. He had always feared the humans might someday deal a blow like this. But he never imagined he would see one of his species' settlements savaged by creatures who used to call themselves Covenant.\n\nAs his Phantom flared for landing, the Half-Jaw felt unusually heavy inside the silver armor that covered him from head to toe. Rahnelo's gravity was slightly less than that of the Sangheili homeworld, Sanghelios. But the Half-Jaw's legs were leaden as he marched down the Phantom's ramp and into the icy intersection of two wide cobblestone streets. He forced himself to strike a confident pose, his flanged, white-striped helmet held high and his shoulders set against the frigid wind. He hoped the dozen Sangheili warriors forming a perimeter around him wouldn't see any difference in his demeanor\u2014wouldn't guess the truth that the Half-Jaw had known for some time but didn't dare admit to anyone, least of all himself:\n\nI am tired. And I don't want to fight anymore.\n\n\"Cowardice!\" The word momentarily stunned the Half-Jaw. But then he realized the Blademaster wasn't speaking to him. The gold-armored Sangheili stood in the middle of the intersection near an overturned sledge, his fists balled on his hips beside his two inactive energy blades. Years of shouting orders had accustomed Vul 'Soran to speaking at maximum volume regardless of the situation. And now, even though the elderly warrior's voice was hoarse and cracked, his words easily carried over the Phantom's idling hum: \"Only the accursed Jiralhanae would attack a world with no defenses!\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw strode to the Blademaster, snow squealing beneath his armored feet, and appraised the scene around the sledge. A du'nak lay dead, tangled in its lines. The woolly, two-trunked draft animal had pulled the slat-wood sledge into a sharp turn that bent its bronze runners and left it balanced precariously on one side. Spilled baskets of mustard-colored grain lay in a jumbled pile beside the sledge. Nearby were two Jiralhanae corpses: one facedown, the other on its back. The latter figure was headless, and the missing part lay a few meters away, upright in the snow, staring back at its body with a tight-lipped grimace of profound disappointment.\n\n\"Not entirely defenseless . . .\" the Half-Jaw said, staring at the bodies. He knelt beside the facedown corpse. \"Help me move this mess.\"\n\nThe Jiralhanae were both clad in dark-blue heavy-plate armor. Their shaggy limbs were blood-stiff, frozen at awkward angles. When, after considerable effort, the Half-Jaw and Blademaster finally rolled the corpse onto its back, they discovered the body of a male Sangheili who had been crushed beneath it in the snow.\n\nThe dead Sangheili was even older than the Blademaster, probably in his ninth decade. His open eyes were clouded, and his deeply tanned skin was stretched tight across his cheeks. The elder wore no armor, just a long, thick cloak spun from du'nak wool, mottled gray and white, likely shorn from the same animal lying dead beside him. The wool had done little to stop what the Half-Jaw recognized were wounds from Jiralhanae plasma rifles; deep, charred pits in the elder's chest. But the old Sangheili still held the hilt of an energy blade in one fist. And although the weapon's patina indicated it was even older than its owner, the blade, expertly wielded, had been more than enough to stop his much larger foes.\n\n\"He tangled his du'nak. Flipped his sledge,\" the Blademaster said.\n\nThe Half-Jaw nodded in agreement. \"Made himself some cover, then fought a last stand.\"\n\nNow that the second Jiralhanae was on its back, the Half-Jaw could see the wounds from the elder's energy blade: two crosscut slashes in the armor that wrapped the Jiralhanae's belly. The metal around the cuts was heated to a rainbow sheen, but there was no blood or spill of viscera such as the Half-Jaw had seen when human soldiers had gotten lucky with their primitive combat knives. The elder's energy blade had instantly cauterized the flesh it cut. The wounds it made were so clean that they almost looked painless . . . but the Half-Jaw knew from personal experience that this was not true.\n\nAs with all Sangheili, the Half-Jaw's mouth was split vertically and horizontally into four separate mandibles. But the hinged jawbones on the left side of his face were cut almost clean away, the result of his own close call with the energy blade of another Sangheili whose mind had been possessed by the Flood. This was before the parasite's infestation of High Charity, and even though the wound was almost a year old, it still stung, especially when the Half-Jaw spoke. To avoid the pain, he moved his mouth as little as possible, and as a result his voice was a near-constant growl.\n\n\"They came right for him,\" the Half-Jaw said. \"Bunched up and eager for the kill.\"\n\nThe Blademaster huffed dismissively at the Jiralhanae. \"Fools should have taken their time. Split up, circled 'round.\" Then he gave the dead elder a respectful nod. \"I hope I'm still that good when I'm that old.\"\n\nYou are that old, the Half-Jaw almost said. But the jest was as tired as he was, and he let the Blademaster build to his bluster.\n\n\"When I find the Jiralhanae chieftain who led this attack,\" Vul 'Soran shouted, his breath steaming in the cold, \"by the blood of my father, by the blood of my sons, I swear he will learn what my blades can do!\"\n\nThe Blademaster was Sangheili-ai, a master swordsman. He had been a fleet champion in his prime, and even as he made the slow slide through middle age, he still humbled younger opponents looking to burnish their reputations with his defeat. But the Blademaster was already in his sixties when the Covenant started fighting the humans, and that long campaign had sapped his strength. Now Vul 'Soran's deep-blue skin was splotched gray, and even the gilded armor that denoted his master rank had lost its luster. Indeed, the armor was covered with so many dents and abrasions that the Half-Jaw frequently worried about its integrity and had even considered ordering Vul 'Soran to commission a new set.\n\nBut a Sangheili's armor was his honor, a public record of glorious victories and narrow escapes. Every battle-born imperfection was a mark in the tally of his esteem. And few things short of death could pry him out of it.\n\nThe Half-Jaw knew from their recent sparring matches that Vul 'Soran's technique with dual energy blades remained flawless. But his second-in-command wasn't as quick as he used to be and he tired easily. Would the Blademaster have slaughtered these two Jiralhanae? Yes. But could he defeat one of their mighty chieftains in single combat? The Half-Jaw's ruined jaws twitched with sudden pain. Forgive me, old friend. But those days are long behind you. . . .\n\n\"Shipmaster, movement to the north.\" The voice crackled in the Half-Jaw's helmet. He glanced at a second Phantom orbiting overhead, its purple hull easy to spot, even in the whirling snow. \"Scans read friendly,\" the Phantom's pilot clarified, and the Blademaster shouted for the perimeter guards to make way. Soon another sledge glided into view, pulled by a single du'nak with yellowed horns that spiraled backward in an illusion of speed, mocking the animal's deliberate pace.\n\nA Sangheili youth sat on the sledge's elevated seat, bundled in a glossy black du'nak cloak many sizes too big for its frame. A second Sangheili in a similarly colored cloak and hood strode beside the sledge, holding the du'nak's bridle in one hand and a double-bladed energy lance in the other. One of the lance's elongated, diamond-shaped blades glowed cyan hot, lighting a path for the draft animal through the snow. As the sledge neared the Half-Jaw, the Sangheili with the lance gave the bridle a gentle tug and the du'nak lumbered to a stop, venting clouds of steam through its trunks. The animal was exhausted; spit hung in icicles from its whiskered jowls, and its muscular back legs trembled.\n\n\"I am the shipmaster of the carrier Shadow of Intent,\" the Half-Jaw said. \"We received a call for help and\u2014\" But before he could finish, the Sangheili with the lance strode between him and the Blademaster, heading straight for the overturned sledge. The newcomer knelt beside the dead elder, lance planted in the snow. For a long time, the only sound was the crackle of the lance's blade, flash-vaporizing any flakes that blew too close.\n\n\"The attack on us was days ago,\" the Sangheili finally said. The voice was muffled by the hood\u2014but it was unmistakably female. The Half-Jaw saw her shoulders slump inside her cloak. The weariness he recognized. The anger he didn't see until she stood, wheeled on him, and snapped in the sharp, clipped cadence of Rahnelo's Sangheili dialect: \"Now what help can you give?\"\n\nThe Blademaster bristled. \"That is no way to address a shipmaster\u2014\"\n\nBut the Half-Jaw silenced the Blademaster with an upraised hand. \"I am truly sorry,\" he said. \"We came as quickly as we could.\"\n\nThe female Sangheili threw back her hood. She wore a round-nosed, backswept battle helmet, deep red with delicate gold scrollwork that flashed as bright as her amber eyes. She started to speak, then clenched her jaws tight, which said everything the Half-Jaw needed to know about how fast she thought he should have come.\n\nThe young Sangheili meanwhile leaped from the sledge and trudged through the snow to the elder's corpse, dragging the tails of his coat behind him. \"Who is it, sister?\"\n\n\"The miller, Gol 'Rham-ee.\" The female Sangheili emphasized the honorific at the end of the elder's name, making sure the Half-Jaw and Blademaster knew that he had once been a Covenant warrior, not just a grinder of grain.\n\n\"They killed his du'nak too?\" The boy's voice cracked between a snarl and a sob. He gave the nearest Jiralhanae a ferocious kick. \"I hate them all!\" The Jiralhanae's body barely moved.\n\n\"What's done is done and cannot be undone,\" the female said. Then, softening her tone: \"Come, let's take the miller to the keep.\"\n\nThe sister and brother reached for the elder's body, and when the Half-Jaw and Blademaster realized what the siblings were doing, they helped them heft it onto the sledge, where more Sangheili corpses had been placed under layers of wool blankets. It was hard to tell how many bodies there were. All were horribly blistered and burned; some were fused together, locked in a final, protective embrace.\n\n\"We found them near the craters, on the road to the port,\" the youth explained. \"They were running for the keep. But the Jiralhanae ship cut them down.\"\n\n\"What kind of ship?\" The Blademaster took an impatient step toward the youth. \"Are you certain there was only one?\"\n\nThe young Sangheili stood his ground, but his eyes went wide with fear. The female put a protective hand across her brother's chest and shot the Blademaster a withering glance. \"All questions come to me,\" she said.\n\nThis rebuff set the Blademaster's blood boiling. But it was clear to the Half-Jaw that both brother and sister were still raw from the attack, and the last thing they needed was more demands, however well intentioned, on their already frayed nerves.\n\n\"Blademaster, rally the squad,\" the Half-Jaw said. Then to the female Sangheili: \"We would like to accompany you to the keep and speak with your kaidon.\"\n\nThe female Sangheili said neither yes nor no. Instead, without a word, she helped her brother climb back aboard the sledge, tugged the du'nak around by its bridle, and then fell into step beside the animal as it plodded back the way it had come, pulling the sledge through its own deep ruts. The Half-Jaw, Blademaster, and their dozen warriors followed, and soon all were tramping through the deepening snow up a gently sloping road past more ruined compounds, the Blademaster barking reminders to check every Jiralhanae corpse they passed. The Half-Jaw and female Sangheili walked together on either side of the du'nak, heads bowed against an icy wind.\n\nAfter many silent steps, the Half-Jaw said, \"You wear the armor of a warrior.\"\n\n\"Does that surprise you?\"\n\n\"No. What else would the daughter of a kaidon be?\"\n\nThe female flicked her eyes at the Half-Jaw; a glance of respect for an educated guess. On Sanghelios, tradition held that children grew up without knowing their fathers. Instead, they were raised by their uncles and aunts\u2014a system designed to emphasize clan rather than parental loyalty. On colonies such as Rahnelo, where populations were smaller and families tighter knit, the Half-Jaw knew the rules were different.\n\n\"I am Tul 'Juran,\" the female said, \"first and only daughter of Kaidon Tulum 'Juranai, captain of his guard and scion of his keep.\"\n\n\"Rtas 'Vadum.\" The Half-Jaw fumbled the V at the beginning of his surname, which was especially hard to say with missing jaws. Embarrassed, he continued in a deeper growl: \"I would speak with your father\u2014ask the kaidon all he knows about the attack, so I can punish those responsible.\"\n\n\"You can speak to the kaidon,\" the Scion said, \"but not to my father.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"The kaidon . . . rides behind you.\"\n\nHad the Half-Jaw been less fatigued, his mind less focused on maintaining the outward appearance of calm authority, he would have immediately understood. But it took him a few more steps, crunching through the snow, to work out the answer. One of the corpses on the sledge . . . ? No . . . the kaidon is her brother. Which was, at first, difficult to believe.\n\nKaidons were mature masters of their keeps, rulers of entire provinces. The youth on the sledge was less than a decade old. Pale, protective scales still hung from his neck, an evolutionary holdover from the days when Sangheili parents used to carry their offspring in their toothy jaws to keep them safe from predators as they hunted and gathered across Sanghelios's coastal plains.\n\n\"Most of my brothers died in the war,\" Tul 'Juran continued. Rahnelo, like most Sangheili colony worlds, had seen heavy recruitment during the Covenant's long fight against humanity. \"The two who remained joined my father in his final charge against the Jiralhanae. That was three days ago. We haven't seen any of them since.\"\n\nWhich meant the youth on the sledge was the last of the kaidon's sons. Although the Scion was older, well into her second decade, she was female. And according to Sangheili tradition, no female could ever be kaidon. Mistress of her keep, ruler of her kaidon husband, yes. But never owner and heir to her father's lands and other possessions.\n\nIf the Scion's youngest brother had also died or gone missing in the Jiralhanae assault, Rahnelo's lesser kaidons would soon be vying for the Scion's inheritance, attempting to secure her hand in marriage, either to themselves or to one of their own sons. If the Scion refused, she could fight, and the annals of Sangheili history were filled with brave and steadfast kaidon daughters who did exactly that. Some held out for years. A few, such as the Gray Maiden of Konar, had lived out their lives in perpetual siege, fortified in their keeps, aided by loyal vassals and the foolishness of rival kaidon suitors who wasted decades fighting among themselves.\n\nAs the Scion strode through the snow, the Half-Jaw caught glimpses of her armored torso and legs as they split her cloak. The red metal bands were spattered with Jiralhanae blood, and the Half-Jaw knew in an instant that she would defend her honor and her keep just as fiercely against any male Sangheili challengers.\n\n\"I've been counting corpses,\" the Half-Jaw said. \"You fought off at least two companies of Jiralhanae as well as their ship\u2014\"\n\n\"A light cruiser,\" the Scion interjected. \"It bombed the port and bastion compounds, then it dropped its infantry. . . .\" She lowered her voice so her brother wouldn't hear. \"The Jiralhanae swarmed the streets, killing any Sangheili who stood their ground. We sallied out from the keep to save those we could. When the Jiralhanae drew close, we held the gates. But soon there were no more stragglers, and my father ordered me inside\u2014up to the walls to direct the guards' fire. Then the kaidon charged, my two brothers at his side, straight for the Jiralhanae's leader.\" The Scion took a deep breath, then swallowed anger and frustration. \"We had their leader in our sights, but he moved too quickly\u2014faster than anything I've ever seen. And then . . . he was gone.\"\n\nThe Blademaster had marched up to join the Half-Jaw during the Scion's tale and now said: \"I've never heard of a Jiralhanae chieftain who could move like that. How large was his hammer?\"\n\nThe Scion spat her words like bitter fruit. \"Their leader was San'Shyuum.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw and Blademaster shared a surprised glance, and then listened, rapt, as Tul 'Juran described what she had seen.\n\nA San'Shyuum without a throne. A warrior in black armor who had evaded her keep's finest marksman and disappeared into the smoke of the burning settlement. An enemy that could have reignited its cruiser's plasma cannons and vaporized the keep but instead had pulled its ship from orbit and disappeared almost as quickly as it came.\n\n\"A Prelate,\" growled the Half-Jaw.\n\n\"It can't be,\" the Blademaster said. \"They all died at High Charity.\"\n\n\"Evidently not.\"\n\nThe du'nak bellowed with relief as the street finally crested and the keep appeared through the driving snow: a fortress with soaring walls of rough-hewn granite built between two mountain spurs\u2014the farthest fingers of a line of jagged, snowcapped peaks. The keep's iron gates were open, and small groups of Sangheili settlers and keep guards were gathered outside the walls, near the smoldering remains of a large funeral pyre. With all these eyes upon them, the Half-Jaw and his warriors unloaded the corpses from the sledge. Everyone waited in silence for the bodies to catch fire on the warm heap of ash and bone. The oily smoke rose, twisting in the wind, and the pyre consumed the last of its sorry fuel.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" the Half-Jaw asked the siblings as they turned their tired du'nak back onto the road.\n\n\"To find my father and my brothers,\" the young kaidon said. \"To bring them to the fire.\"\n\n\"If you haven't found them by now, you never will,\" the Half-Jaw said, as kindly as he could. \"At least, not here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" asked Tul 'Juran.\n\n\"If a Prelate came here just to kill, this keep would be a pit in the ground.\"\n\nThis observation pricked the pride of the keep guards in the crowd, who grumbled among themselves. But the Scion's eyes grew wide with a hope she hadn't dared to consider. \"If this . . . Prelate spared the keep. If he let us live . . .\"\n\n\". . . He might have taken prisoners,\" the Half-Jaw said.\n\nThe Blademaster locked his arms across his chest. \"And why, by the balls on every blasted Prophet's chin, would he have done that?\"\n\nWhich was a very good question. But the Half-Jaw had no answer.\n\nTul 'Juran tossed back her cloak, baring her armored chest, and spoke loud enough for all to hear. \"I invoke my right, as Scion of this keep, to free my kaidon from his imprisonment and take revenge upon his captors!\" She stepped to the Half-Jaw and bowed her head. \"For this, I humbly beg passage on your ship and enlistment in your crew.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw heard nothing humble in the Scion's voice, however. Her words were steel determination, and the right she had invoked was ages old and just as rigid. . . .\n\nThe entire recorded history of Sanghelios could accurately be described as one long war for control of its thousands of familial keeps. Even after the Sangheili built interstellar spaceships and found other foes, kaidons still fought bitterly, and in these skirmishes, one kaidon sometimes captured another\u2014a terrible fate, not just for a kaidon, but for all Sangheili warriors who believed that being stripped of armor and denied a noble death in battle was the ultimate humiliation. A kaidon's captor never intended to release his prisoner. Instead, the vanquished would languish in their cells, a mockery to themselves and all their kin\u2014unless one of their bloodline invoked the \"right of release\" and was then bold and clever enough to see it through.\n\nThese liberations were the stuff of legends. But the most famous, and the one the Half-Jaw knew best, was the ballad of Kel 'Darsam, First Light of Sanghelios.\n\nKel 'Darsam was a warrior renowned for his bravery and cunning. In the earliest eras of Sangheili history, before the first Forerunner relics were discovered and these new gods conquered the old, Kel was a beloved member of the Sangheili pantheon\u2014a demigod born to a mortal mother and a divine father who was none other than Urs himself, lord of all other Sangheili gods and namesake of the largest and most sacred of Sanghelios's three suns.\n\nIn the days when Urs ruled Sangheili spiritual life, the seas that covered much of their home world were still vast and mysterious and filled with monstrous, semimythical creatures. Kel 'Darsam was famous for slaying many of these: the Sand Dwellers of Il'ik; the many-mouthed Watcher of the Lonely Harbor; the nine serpents of Dur'at'dur, whose endless thrashing was thought to cause those islands' deadly currents. Indeed, Kel was so keen on ridding the seas of their terrors that he had little interest in becoming kaidon, a position he gladly left to his uncle and mentor, Orok 'Darsam.\n\nDuring one of many wars to defend his keep, Orok was captured by a powerful sea lord and rival kaidon, Nesh 'Radoon, and Kel dutifully invoked the right of release. Without a navy of his own, Kel was forced to sail alone, under cover of night and through a line of squalls, to the sheer walls of his rival's keep. After scaling the walls and slaying the keep's best swordsmen, Kel and Orok raced to make their escape. But as Kel perched on the wall, preparing to dive to safety, a spear struck him in the back. Mortally wounded, Kel tumbled to the waves far below.\n\nOddly, the Half-Jaw knew, there were two versions of the ballad: one in which Nesh 'Radoon threw the spear that killed Kel 'Darsam, and another in which the spear was instead thrown by his uncle, Orok. In the latter version, the entire capture was a ruse\u2014a trap designed by Orok, who was deeply fearful that Kel would someday tire of slaughtering monsters and decide to claim the title of kaidon for his own.\n\nBut both versions of the legend had the same ending.\n\nAs Kel 'Darsam fell, dying, toward the waves, he was touched by the first rays of Urs as the god-star rose over the edge of the sea. In this moment, Kel was transformed into pure light; an eternal reflection of his divine father's pride and grief.\n\nAfter the founding of the Covenant, many of the old myths faded away. But the Sangheili continued to sing the ballad of Kel 'Darsam to their sons and daughters, just as they taught them that the Sangheili word kel means \"light (that dances on the waves).\"\n\n\"Ridiculous!\" the Blademaster said, glowering at the Scion. \"I've never heard of a female invoking the right of release. And I know for certain that no female has ever been\u2014or ever will be\u2014a warrior on a ship!\"\n\nThe Scion glared right back at the Blademaster. \"That is not your decision.\"\n\nShe was right, the Half-Jaw knew. As shipmaster, it was his decision. And, looking at the Scion's determined eyes, he was surprised to realize he had already made it.\n\n\"You can't be serious!\" the Blademaster sputtered after the Half-Jaw had approved the Scion's enlistment and pulled his second-in-command aside for a private conference. \"This is unprecedented\u2014a breach of the most fundamental rules of recruitment! And more than that, it's an affront to honor and tradition!\"\n\nAs Vul 'Soran continued his impassioned protest, the second Phantom landed and deployed its troops: two squads of silver-armored Sangheili rangers\u2014and one Unggoy. This stout, bandy-legged creature was also clad in ranger silver, but unlike his Sangheili comrades, he wore a cylindrical tank across his shoulders and a breathing mask on his face. The Unggoy was unusually tall for his species, and the spiny top of his crustaceous head nearly reached the shoulders of the Sangheili. Typically, Unggoy were the subservient, lesser members of a Covenant military unit. But when this Grunt gave a curt hand signal, the Sangheili rangers formed ranks and stood at attention. For he was the rangers' leader, and they obeyed him without question.\n\n\"I'm sorry you feel otherwise, but she is coming with us,\" the Half-Jaw said to the Blademaster. \"That's my final decision.\" Then, directing Vul's gaze to the Unggoy ranger, Rtas noted in a softer tone, \"Besides, if you can get used to that, you can get used to anything.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw and his troops stayed long enough to help the Rahnelo settlers drag the Jiralhanae corpses from their streets, pile them into the large craters on the road to the spaceport, and then bury them with rubble. This solution came at the suggestion of the Scion's brother. The settlers would not dignify the Jiralhanae with a funeral pyre, but were content, in the years to come, to let their du'nak trample their attackers' graves as they hauled their loads to and from the port. It was a wise first decision for the young kaidon, the Half-Jaw thought, and although he was undoubtedly bereft, the Scion's brother stood strong as his sibling departed the keep, taking only her armor and her lance and leaving a promise to return.\n\nBy then the storm had passed, and when the two Phantoms rocketed skyward, Shadow of Intent was bright above them, its long, hooked prow glinting in Rahnelo's reflected light. From the bottom, the mighty assault carrier looked like two iridescent blue teardrops, one larger than the other, joined at their tapered tails. The ship was a little more than five kilometers long and nearly two kilometers wide in the thickest part of its aft section, which housed the reactors for its maneuvering engines and slipspace drive. Heavily armored and bristling with plasma cannons, Shadow of Intent looked invulnerable. But only from afar.\n\nOn approach to the primary hangar, the Half-Jaw could see all the damage the venerable carrier had endured: dull spots in its shimmering metal skin where human missiles' thermonuclear detonations had burned through the carrier's energy shields and seared its hull; blackened gaps in rows of point-defense laser batteries where their former enemy's Longsword fighters had gotten lucky shots; hastily patched penetrations from MAC rounds, the hypersonic, magnetically accelerated slugs that were the humans' most powerful naval weapons.\n\nOn top of all this damage were scars from Shadow of Intent's attempt to blockade High Charity. There the carrier had traded plasma torpedoes with San'Shyuum vessels desperate to flee the Flood, and a particularly close call had left a bubbled streak on the starboard side of the carrier's prow.\n\nShadow of Intent looked as tired as the Half-Jaw felt. And a few months ago, when the Arbiter, Thel 'Vadam, had offered him the mission to take the carrier far away from Sanghelios, Rtas had gladly accepted.\n\nWhen the Covenant shattered, not all Sangheili had abandoned the idea of Forerunner divinity. After the fall of High Charity and the cessation of hostilities against the humans, tensions had flared between those Sangheili who still revered the Forerunners and the Arbiter's faction, which did not.\n\nThe Arbiter and the Half-Jaw had been rivals for a time, after the failure to keep the humans from destroying Halo was laid at the Arbiter's feet. But during the Schism, when the Prophets removed the Sangheili from command positions in the Covenant military and replaced them with the Jiralhanae, the two had forged a tight bond in the sudden fight against their common foes. The Arbiter was now the widely accepted leader of the Sangheili, but as the threat of Sangheili civil war increased, the Arbiter had asked Rtas 'Vadum to pilot Shadow of Intent away from Sanghelios. The assault carrier was presently the last operational ship of its type in the Sangheili fleet\u2014a hugely powerful vessel that the Arbiter wanted out of reach of other shipmasters whose loyalties weren't as certain.\n\nSo the Half-Jaw had gathered his crew and charted a course for the sparsely populated frontier of the former Covenant Empire. It was here, not far from Rahnelo, that the Half-Jaw had hoped he and his warriors could finally rest and recuperate. The Half-Jaw sighed. It was good while it lasted. . . .\n\nShadow of Intent's hangar had room for scores of Phantom dropships and Seraph fighters. But now the Half-Jaw's two Phantoms had the cavernous space all to themselves. Most of the missing craft were casualties of war. The others Rtas had abandoned; he simply didn't have the crew to man them. Indeed, there were fewer than two hundred Sangheili on Shadow of Intent, a small fraction of the carrier's capacity, just enough to keep the ship's most important systems running. But enough to win a fight against a Prelate?\n\nThe Blademaster had given his own answer to this question during their flight back to the carrier: Shadow of Intent would have the upper hand against a single cruiser, even with its reduced crew; this Prelate was clearly dangerous, but hitting an essentially defenseless colony wasn't the same as naval combat; they had the advantage in both weapon strength and tonnage. It was a reasoned response. But the Half-Jaw wanted a second opinion, and so after the Phantoms landed, he sought out the Unggoy.\n\nNear the aft wall of the hangar was a line of floor-mounted methane-recharge stations. These clusters of tanks and hoses were designed to service dozens of Unggoy, but Stolt was alone. In fact, he was the only Unggoy\u2014and the only non-Sangheili\u2014in the Half-Jaw's crew.\n\nBut if Stolt was lonely for his own kind, he never showed it. The Unggoy seemed as relaxed as always, his back resting against the recharge station, his hard-shelled arms hanging loosely at his sides. Like the rest of his body, Stolt's thick forearms were dotted with stubby spines, evidence of his species' crustacean ancestry. The ranger leader's small, dark eyes betrayed no emotion as he listened to Rtas explain their new mission. And when his shipmaster was done speaking, the Unggoy simply scratched the seal of his mask with a barnacled finger and stared appraisingly at the Scion.\n\nThe female Sangheili had disembarked from her Phantom and was standing in a line with the other male Sangheili warriors, her red armor standing out against their silver. Holding her lance at her side, Tul 'Juran pointedly ignored their curious glances and muttered assessments and was the first to comply when the Blademaster shouted for them all to shut their jaws and come to attention.\n\nThe Half-Jaw knew that Stolt had faced similar scrutiny when he had joined Shadow of Intent's complement of rangers during the human war. Rangers were an elite force, trained in the demanding art of zero-g combat. The humans had called them \"ship killers,\" and for good reason: many human vessels had perished when Covenant rangers breached their hulls and tore them apart from the inside out. Unggoy rangers weren't unheard of, but they were rare. And at first, most Sangheili on Shadow of Intent had regarded this Unggoy as a Grunt who would never be their equal.\n\nThey were wrong.\n\nStolt had survived encounters with human soldiers that saw many of his comrades fall. When he wasn't battling the enemy, he outfought any Sangheili who sparred against him, enduring their melee strikes until they tired, and then pummeling them into submission with his chitinous fists and feet. After a chance encounter with one of the humans' fearsome Spartans, in which the Unggoy wounded the enhanced human so grievously that it was forced to withdraw, even the Blademaster approved Stolt's promotion to ranger leader.\n\n\"So, then,\" the Half-Jaw said after the Unggoy's tank was full and he had pulled away from the station with a wet pop and hiss, \"do you believe we can kill a Prelate?\"\n\nStolt kept his beady eyes on the Scion as he savored a long breath from his tank. \"I think,\" he said, his gravelly voice rumbling through his mask, \"we'll need all the help we can get.\"\n\nIn the Prelate's dreams, his return to High Charity was always the same.\n\nThe holy city's simulated star had dimmed, giving the dome's floating towers a warm, sunset glow. Barges draped with colored streamers and fragrant flowers filled the air, except for the space around the bone-white Forerunner Dreadnought at the center of the dome. Here there were fireworks; explosions of celebratory glyphs that formed phrases such as A CHILD FOR THE AGES! or BLESSED WITH TWINS! or SHE HAS HER MOTHER'S NOSE (THANK THE GODS!). Some of these were fiery proclamations about individual San'Shyuum's reproductive potency that, despite their artful innuendo, sorely tested the Committee of Concordance's laws on public decency.\n\nBut on this night, all was permitted. San'Shyuum children were rare, and when the birthing season reached its peak, all of High Charity rejoiced. Even the dour Sangheili joined in the festivities. Above the Dreadnought and below the star, Sangheili Banshee fighter craft flew aerobatics in tight formation. Watching from the barges or temporary grandstands cantilevered out from their towers, tipsy San'Shyuum revelers would roar their approval and pound their fists against their anti-grav thrones whenever the pilots demonstrated particular daring.\n\nThis picture of High Charity at its finest\u2014bright and bawdy and hopeful\u2014spread out above the Prelate as he exited the stalk and flew up into the dome.\n\nViewed from the outside, High Charity looked like a mushroom that, hidden in the deep black night of interstellar space, had grown to shocking size. The cap that formed the city's dome was hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The stalk was longer than the dome was wide and bristled with dry docks and manufacturies that served fleets of capital ships and countless smaller vessels. Novice shipmasters were often daunted by the arcane procedures and quasi-religious communication protocols that governed flight operations in and around the holy city. But Tem'Bhetek had logged plenty of approaches, and after many months away from home, he was quick to dock his cruiser in its bay and disembark the moment the gantries latched.\n\nLike most of his voyages, this last one had been wrapped in secrecy, and communications to and from his cruiser had been tightly constrained. But his wife had gotten one message through: We two are now three. And every day away from High Charity after that had seemed like an eternity.\n\nThe Prelate had instantly understood her cryptic message's meaning. He was desperate to see his newborn child, as any first-time parent would be. But Tem's urgency was amplified by the fact that he had never thought he would be a father.\n\nSan'Shyuum society was incredibly strict about which genes passed from one generation to the next, and the Prelate's bloodline had fallen out of favor ages ago due to overbreeding. He was officially listed on the Roll of Celibates, and once designated as such, it was impossible to be removed . . . or so the Prelate had thought. After he had been selected to enter the Sacred Promissory\u2014after the Minister of Preparation had used the Promissory's Forerunner machines to alter his genes and enhance his mind and body\u2014the Prelate was able to petition for his removal from the Roll and was matched with a suitable female: Yalar'Otan'Elat. And she was more than he had ever hoped for.\n\nYalar was beautiful, long-necked, and delicately limbed. While her family members were wealthy owners of mining concerns on a handful of Covenant worlds, Yalar was noble and humble in equal measure\u2014a rarity in San'Shyuum high society, which was rife with snobbery and striving. Tem fell instantly in love with her clever tongue and guarded smile. But over time, what devoted him body and soul was that Yalar accepted the three things that he could never be: home more often than he was away; honest about his ongoing service to the Minister; and confident that the experimental alterations to his genes wouldn't somehow ruin their chances for a healthy child.\n\nYalar accepted all of these conditions. But she was anything but demure.\n\nWhen her pregnancy was confirmed, Yalar had refused confinement, a precaution embraced by most expectant San'Shyuum mothers. Instead, long after her belly began to swell, Yalar continued her work in High Charity's lower districts, ensuring the Unggoy, Kig-Yar, and other \"lesser\" species (a categorization she rejected) had all the resources and services they were owed as loyal members of the Covenant. She was an irrepressible champion of the alliance's ideals, and the Prelate knew their child would thrive even if it inherited just a small part of its mother's spirit.\n\nAs the Prelate soared higher into the dome, so did his anticipation. After years of secrecy and sacrifice, he was about to reap the only rewards he had ever wanted: a child, a family. He maxed power to his anti-grav belt and sped toward a future that was as bright as the fireworks bursting above him. . . .\n\nAnd then the nightmare began, like it always did, with a sphere of shimmering light that appeared near the apex of the dome.\n\nThe sphere remained stable for as long as it took High Charity's citizens to look up from their revels and draw a collective breath. Then the slipspace portal imploded with a thunderous crack louder than any firework. It rang High Charity like a bell, jerked the Prelate from his flight of fancy, and reminded him of the real reason for his haste:\n\nTonight does not have to be the same. Tonight I can save them!\n\nOut of the collapsing portal a ship emerged that the Prelate instantly recognized as a human frigate. The lightly armored vessel was essentially a MAC cannon sandwiched between two engine pods. What frigates lacked in defensive capability, however, they made up for in speed and agility. So even though it emerged from slipspace at high velocity, the frigate was able to pull up hard and bank to avoid the wall of the dome. Then, in a cacophony of crumbling stone and wrenching metal, the ship buried itself up to its engines in one of the floating towers. It hung there, shuddering and burning, like a flaming arrow plunged into the heart of the Covenant.\n\nIn the stunned silence that followed, the Prelate wanted to scream: Go, you fools! Flee the city! While there's still time! But in this nightmare his voice failed him, as it always did, and he watched in mute horror as the ruined vessel unleashed its horrible cargo.\n\nA thick cloud of Flood spores spewed through the rents in the frigate's hull, flowed around the damaged tower, and quickly spread to the two adjacent spires, swallowing them whole. The ship's engines sputtered inside the miasmic cloud, giving it a dim and dreadful pulse\u2014a semblance of life that turned the Prelate's blood cold.\n\nSuddenly the city snapped out of its stupor. Celebrations ended in a rolling panic as the Flood cloud spread both ways around the dome. San'Shyuum abandoned their towers, crowded onto barges, or simply flung themselves toward the stalk and its waiting ships, trusting their anti-grav thrones and belts to break their fall. Many who moved too slowly disappeared into the spores. The Sangheili Banshees broke formation and began strafing the Flood cloud, but their firepower was woefully inadequate, and soon the Prelate found himself fighting upward against a tide of screaming, wild-eyed evacuees.\n\nThe tower Yalar had picked for them was old; a black marble obelisk with crenellated balconies that was one of the first carved from the mammoth hunk of the San'Shyuum homeworld that served as the dome's foundation. In a habitat where the status of one's living quarters was determined by three criteria\u2014size, altitude, and proximity to the Forerunner Dreadnought\u2014their cramped, low-slung tower near the wall of the dome was decidedly low-class. But while they could have lived somewhere better, Yalar wanted to be near to her work in the lower districts, and they both soon realized there were advantages to close quarters. The tower's tight hallways and narrow gravity lifts gave them license to press close together in full view of their neighbors, touch and whisper and begin the tender intimacies of their reunions before they reached the privacy of their chambers.\n\nBut now the Prelate cursed their tower's claustrophobic conditions as he was forced to lean power to his anti-grav belt and decelerate into its low-ceilinged entry hall. His feet grazed the hall's polished stone floor as he swung to avoid a trio of San'Shyuum in their thrones, so laden down with personal possessions that they didn't see him coming. Having avoided this collision, he angled up a ramp to the gravity lifts, chose a tube that served his apartment, and boosted into its shimmering field. Ten, twenty floors went by in a blur. But then the whole tower shuddered, slamming the Prelate against the tube's glassy walls. Sliding and tumbling upward, he almost missed his apartment, but managed a wild thrust with his arms, caught a railing, and levered himself into the entry passage.\n\n\"Yalar!\" the Prelate shouted as he palmed the lock on the apartment's door and shouldered through before it split fully open. \"Yalar, I'm here!\" He cut power to his belt, landed hard on his feet, and sprinted across the bare floor of their common room, hurdling a low wooden table, and then knifed through a curtain strung with garnet beads into the triangular hall that led to their sleeping chamber. A few steps into the hall and the tower shook again\u2014more violently this time. Motes of lavender light burning in alcoves that ran the length of the hall sputtered out, and suddenly the Prelate was in total darkness.\n\nThis was the moment in his nightmare when Tem'Bhetek became fully aware he was dreaming. All that came before\u2014the fireworks, the frigate, the Flood\u2014these were inevitable. But now, with the tower trembling around him, Tem was conscious of his ability to alter what came next. He held his breath and listened . . . and heard a mewling in the dark.\n\nThe Prelate stepped toward the muffled cries, hands groping along the walls. As he entered the sleeping chamber, he stopped and let his vision adjust to a wan light seeping through the curtains drawn across the balcony window. Slowly the shape of his wife resolved, sitting in the middle of their padded sleeping pallet. Yalar was draped in a diaphanous pale-yellow nursing gown. Their child was cradled in her arms, swaddled in a copper blanket. As the babe redoubled its wail, Yalar began to sing:\n\nThis path, where does it lead?\n\nTake my hand, walk with me.\n\nInto the light, forever free?\n\nTake my hand, walk with me . . .\n\nIt was an old San'Shyuum lullaby, and as Yalar hummed its sweet melody, the Prelate's mind raced with all the things he'd said before\u2014all the ways he'd tried in previous dreams to get his wife to leave their bedchamber before it was too late. But as always, the nightmare didn't wait. And before he'd landed on something new to say, Yalar stopped singing, raised her large, long-lashed eyes, and said:\n\n\"We waited for you.\"\n\n\"I . . . I was close.\" The Prelate's voice was ragged. \"Just outside the city.\"\n\nYalar lowered her gaze to the child crying in her arms. \"But you weren't here.\"\n\nThe Prelate felt a change in the air; something old and patient and powerful stretching out from the deepest shadows of the room. \"Please, my love.\" He stepped forward, hands outstretched. \"Come with me. Now.\"\n\nBut Yalar shrank back into the folds of her gown and began to sing again:\n\nThis path, where does it lead . . . ?\n\nA single Flood spore wafted past the Prelate. It took all his strength not to reach out and crush its ragged spines, its ugly, pulsing core. He had tried once before, but fighting back had only accelerated what was to come.\n\n\"We can leave this place,\" Tem said. \"You and me and . . .\" He looked blankly at the child. We two are now three, Yalar had said in her message. But she had told him nothing else\u2014not revealed the gender of their child.\n\n\"Our son? Our daughter?\" Yalar said. \"I wanted it to be a surprise. But now\"\u2014she choked back a sob\u2014\"you will never even know its name.\"\n\nThe Prelate winced, trying to keep his own emotions in check. \"I fought through the Sangheili ships. I made it to the stalk.\" But then his rage began to build, just as it always did. \"But the dome was overrun! And the Minister told me that the Flood\u2014!\"\n\n\"Boru'a'Neem!\" Yalar said with disgust. Her head rose up on her long neck like a serpent preparing to strike. \"You went wherever he ordered you to go! Did whatever he needed you to do!\" Her voice plunged to a whisper and then stepped back to a scream. \"But when we really needed you . . . You. Weren't. Here!\"\n\nTheir child loosed a full-throated wail, wriggling its little limbs inside the blanket. Yalar rocked it close to her chest and continued:\n\nTake my hand, walk with me . . . !\n\nBut she was out of tune now and frantic. Her body shook. She began to cough. Arms trembling, Yalar thrust their baby toward the Prelate. \"Take it, Tem!\" she gasped. \"Take it and go\u2014!\"\n\nThen her lips exploded open, releasing a cloud of Flood spores.\n\nThe first time the Prelate had this dream, this was the moment he woke, eyes wide and screaming. But he'd since learned to fight the urge to wake\u2014coaxed his body to release some of the Promissory-implanted chemicals designed to enhance his combat capabilities to keep him focused on the dream. Each time the nightmare came, he was able to stay submerged a little longer. Like a diver with limited air, he willed his body to relax into the depths of his despair. . . .\n\nTem'Bhetek now snatched the wailing child out of his wife's arms and leapt away as pulsing green boils rose on Yalar's neck and shoulders. Flood tendrils, slick and sharp, burst from these sores, tore through her gown, and coiled around her body. She pitched backward onto their pallet, thrashing her arms and legs and shrieking as the parasite burrowed into her brain.\n\nJust then, the balcony window shattered. Light stabbed through the curtains as a Phantom dropship hovering outside opened fire with its nose-mounted turret. The Prelate rolled to the floor and curled around his child, shielding it from the plasma bolts as they seared overhead and burned into the bedchamber's walls. Even before the firing stopped, the Prelate heard the clang of armored feet, the telltale crack and sizzle of activating energy blades. He rose to find three Sangheili in silver armor circling the pallet, eyeing his Flood-stricken wife.\n\n\"Don't touch her!\" the Prelate roared, rising to his feet.\n\nThe Sangheili snapped their heads in his direction. The one closest to the Prelate snarled and raised its blade. . . .\n\nBut right as it swung to cut the Prelate down, tendrils shot out from Yalar's body and wrapped around the Sangheili's sword arm, stopping it mid-swing. More of the muscular Flood fibers whipped around the Sangheili's neck. Then Yalar flung herself backward, pulling the warrior with her, using whatever part of her mind that remained in her control to try to keep her family safe.\n\nBut it wasn't enough.\n\nThe other Sangheili went to work, slashing Yalar with their blades until there was nothing left but sizzling flesh and bloody cloth. Feet locked to the floor, Tem loosed a guttural, wordless cry that ended in a wail as the Sangheili prodded Yalar's remains with the two-pronged tips of their blades.\n\nThen the swordsmen came for him.\n\nIn the Prelate's dream, the Sangheili's eyes began to glow bright as their blades as they slid through the slanting shadows cast by the tattered curtains. Their limbs stretched, and they flowed around him like quicksilver, rattling their bony jaws.\n\n\"I'll kill you!\" The Prelate squared his stance, cradled his child with one hand, and made a fist with the other. \"I will kill every last one of you!\"\n\nThen his baby laughed. The Prelate looked down into the infant's eyes; one blue, one green, just like his own. The child gurgled a string of happy nonsense words.\n\nYalar's voice echoed in the shadows:\n\nInto the light, forever free . . .\n\nAnd Tem felt a surge of hope: Tonight is not the same. Tonight I will save my child!\n\nHe activated his anti-grav belt and launched himself through the cordon of Sangheili, twisting to avoid their blades. As the Prelate hurtled through the window frame, the Phantom's turret tracked him and opened fire. But Tem was already halfway into a dive that took him under the Phantom's belly, beyond its field of fire. Flying with his back to the lower districts, the Prelate stared at his reflection as it rippled across the Phantom's polished hull. Stay asleep, just a little longer. . . . Then he was up behind the dropship, where he maxed power to his belt and shot toward the holy city's star.\n\nThe atmosphere was thick with spores now. The other towers, the arched walls of the dome\u2014everything except the star's bright disc had disappeared into the murk. Two empty barges appeared above the Prelate, trailing limp streamers and shedding flowers. He jerked hard right to avoid a collision. A tower somewhere off to his left groaned as its anti-grav systems failed. Tem waited for the crack and boom of exploding stone as the tower hit the lower districts. But instead there was only a wet, muffled crunch. He looked down and saw dark shapes moving in the sea of spores below: tendrils winding back and forth, like animals tracking his scent.\n\nThen the spores began to thin, and the Prelate burst through the top of the cloud, no more than a kilometer below the simulated star. This close, he could clearly see how the illusion worked\u2014how the star was really just a broad disc of many overlapping energy fields that filled a hole in the apex of the dome wide enough to accommodate the Forerunner Dreadnought, should the San'Shyuum ever need to move it. Viewing platforms hung around the rim of the disc, and the Prelate knew these were linked to passages through High Charity's hull, emergency shuttle bays, and, finally, escape from the nightmare. You're close! Closer than you've ever been before! Tem willed his belt to lift him higher, faster. . . .\n\nA Flood tendril slashed up from below, striking him across the arms and pulling his child from his chest. The little bundle tumbled down and out of reach, a loose corner of its copper blanket fluttering behind it. The Prelate spun head over heels, kicking the tendril aside, and dove after his child, following its cries as it careened toward the undulating clouds of spores. An instant before the child disappeared, Tem caught it by its blanket. Then he arched his neck and spine and, straining against the g-forces, climbed once again toward the star.\n\nThe child was beside itself. There was no laughter now, only tears. The little creature thrashed its arms against the Prelate's chest. He held the infant tight, but this only made it more upset.\n\nIt screamed, loud enough to jar Tem half awake. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath . . . and sang.\n\nThere is a path, where does it lead?\n\nTake my hand, walk with me!\n\nInto the light, forever free?\n\nTake my hand\u2014!\n\nBut before he could finish the verse, tremendous spouts of Flood biomass rose from the clouds; pulsing stalks of half-consumed flesh; grotesque monuments to the holy city's millions of devoured souls. Tendrils sprouted from these stalks, crisscrossing the air above the Prelate. He tried to maneuver through the gruesome thicket, but the Flood lashed around him, trapping his legs, his chest, his child.\n\nTem'Bhetek strained his anti-grav belt well past its operating limits. The device's lifting pods buzzed a warning, growing hot and heavy on his hips. . . .\n\nAnd then, through the fields of the simulated star, the Prelate saw a ship. A gleaming vessel with a hooked prow, the pride of the Sangheili fleet\u2014Shadow of Intent, maneuvering into position above the holy city. For most Covenant in need of rescue, seeing this assault carrier so close would be a profound relief. At first, even the Prelate's heart leapt. But his hope shattered as soon as he saw the carrier prepare to fire the plasma fountain in its prow.\n\n\"No!\" the Prelate shouted. \"We're still alive, you Sangheili bastards\u2014!\" But the rest of the curse died in his throat as Flood tendrils coiled around his neck and plunged into his mouth. Tem bit down, trying to sever the fleshy cords as they slid rapidly past his teeth. But the Flood held his jaws open, keeping him trapped in a gurgling rictus of rage.\n\nThe capacitating torus of Shadow of Intent's plasma fountain quavered as it built its charge. Targeting vanes irised into position around the magnetized muzzle, preparing to direct the superheated gases already flooding the breech. There was no sound when the fountain lit, but High Charity rumbled as a pillar of white-hot fire struck the holy city's star, obliterated its fields, and then lanced into the dome. The Flood clouds ignited with a roar. A wall of pressure and heat rushed toward the Prelate. He struggled in the Flood's grip, his child screeching in his arms, but just as the wall hit\u2014\n\nThe Prelate fully woke, his ears ringing with the insistent wail of an alarm that told him his cruiser had successfully made a slipspace exit.\n\nTem lay on his back upon his cabin's narrow pallet, his black tunic wet with sweat and plastered to his skin. As his heart pounded in his chest, keeping time with the alarm, he felt a Flood tendril slither along his neck. He reached to grab it . . . but of course there was nothing there.\n\nBalling his fists into his eyes and closing his mouth to mute his rage, the Prelate screamed. He had gone deeper into the nightmare than he ever had before, but at the end, there it was: Shadow of Intent. There was no hope of saving his family, not even in his dreams.\n\nThe Half-Jaw had robbed him even of that.\n\nTem smashed a fist into his cabin's metal wall, again and again, until he left a dent in the glossy turquoise panel and his hand was throbbing. You fool! It never mattered anyway. It was always just a dream!\n\nFor the reality was the Prelate hadn't been inside High Charity when it fell. He had not seen his wife or his newborn child consumed by the Flood. Not with his own eyes.\n\nInstead he had been at the helm of his cruiser, locked in combat with Sangheili warships in the space around the holy city. This fight was the culmination of his long years of training, the climax of the Schism. The Sangheili hadn't expected such a vast and well-prepared mutiny, and in the moments before the human frigate infested with the Flood slipped into the dome, the Prelates and their Jiralhanae crews were winning. But then, one by one, the Prelate-controlled warships had peeled away from the battle to evacuate High Charity's San'Shyuum.\n\nWhat had been a perfectly executed surprise attack became a defensive scramble as the Prelates switched from trying to defeat the Sangheili warships to merely keeping them at bay while the San'Shyuum filled their own ships and slipped away. At first, the Sangheili let these vessels go. Then, as the threat of the Flood spreading beyond High Charity increased\u2014as the Flood spilled down from the dome to the stalk where the rescue vessels had been docking\u2014the Sangheili sent a message in the clear: ALL SHIPS ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE THIS SECTOR WILL BE DESTROYED.\n\nThe Flood had almost doomed the galaxy once before, and the Sangheili weren't willing to let that happen again.\n\nShadow of Intent was the linchpin of this grim quarantine, and the Prelates had no ships that could match it one-on-one. The plan had been to overwhelm the carrier with multiple cruisers after the Sangheili fleet's lesser vessels had been dispatched. But by then the San'Shyuum fleet had dwindled. And while Tem'Bhetek was still in the fight, his focus had shifted from how to destroy Shadow of Intent to how to save his family. When Tem received the Minister of Preparation's desperate call for rescue, he quickly disengaged and hastened to the stalk.\n\nAs soon as the Prelate was docked and had a hard line to the city's communication network, he had attempted to call Yalar. But the network had either been down or overloaded, and he couldn't reach her. Waiting on the boarding gantry for the Minister to arrive, he had thought of abandoning his post, flying up into the dome. And he had just made up his mind to do it when the Minister's Jiralhanae honor guard hustled him through the gantry airlock. Even though the shaggy warriors' panic-stricken reek told him volumes about what had happened in the dome above, the Prelate asked the Minister: \"My family. Can they be saved?\"\n\nBoru'a'Neem had leaned forward in his throne and grasped the Prelate's arm. \"The Sacred Promissory is lost!\" His eyes were filled with a wild and consuming fear. \"Nothing lives inside the city now except the Flood!\"\n\nThis had been too much to take. The Prelate had shrugged off the Minister's grip and staggered toward the airlock.\n\n\"They're gone, Prelate!\" the Minister shouted after him. \"There is nothing you can do!\"\n\nTem'Bhetek's knees had buckled under the weight of this pronouncement. And the only thing that had brought him back to his feet\u2014the only thing that kept him from kneeling there in the gantry until the Flood spilled down the stalk and devoured him as it had his wife and child\u2014was the Minister's solemn promise:\n\n\"Help me escape this place, and I swear, we will make the Sangheili pay for what they've done!\"\n\nAt that moment, the Prelate had no real understanding of what the Minister meant. It would be many days before his mind could process anything but grief and he learned the full extent of the Sangheili's betrayal. How they had failed to contain the Flood on the sacred Halo ring. How the Arbiter had turned on the Covenant by forging an alliance with the Flood's Gravemind as well as with their human foes. By that time, the Prelate's cruiser had joined a flotilla of San'Shyuum ships that had managed to escape High Charity. This brief rendezvous was joyous for some as they were reunited with loved ones thought lost.\n\nBut there was no news of Yalar or his child, and by the time the Prelate and the Minister had broken away from the flotilla and set their course for the secret Forerunner installation, all the Prelate's hope had turned to vengeance.\n\nThere was a heavy knock on the cabin door, and the Prelate admitted his first officer, a thick-browed Jiralhanae with grizzled fur and one shoulder that stooped lower than the other. As the officer confirmed their arrival in a second Sangheili colony system and relayed the details of their latest scans of the system's star, the Prelate silently donned his battle armor.\n\nThe deep black plates were light but strong, the finest creation of the Minister of Preparation's foundries. Self-repair systems had removed all the damage the armor had sustained on Rahnelo. The Prelate smoothed the armor's interlocking bands around his neck, removed a plasma rifle from his weapons locker, and holstered it in the small of his back. He removed his helmet from its stand and paused to look at his own reflection in the glazed surface of its chevron visor. Would you know me now, Yalar? Would you walk this path with me?\n\n\"The settlements have seen us,\" the Jiralhanae said. \"They are broadcasting distress signals on all channels. Do you want us to jam them?\"\n\n\"No. Let the signals through.\" The Prelate tucked his helmet under his arm and marched past the Jiralhanae toward the command deck.\n\nLet the Half-Jaw hear them scream.\n\nShadow of Intent exited slipspace near the colony world Duraan, third planet of five in close orbit around its system's red dwarf star.\n\nLike its neighboring worlds, Duraan was gravity locked. One side of the mottled, orange-and-brown, arid planet was bathed in constant starlight, the other in perpetual dark. But even half-habitable worlds were rare, and Duraan's wide-open spaces appealed to minor Sangheili families whose ambitions were constrained by the limited real estate on the crowded worlds closer to Sanghelios. Here there was ample room to lay the foundations of new keeps, and three generations ago, thousands of Sangheili had begun settling the shores of the spidery seas that spattered Duraan's light side like ink blown on parchment. Far from the front lines of the human war, these settlements had enjoyed a quiet existence . . . until now.\n\nIt had taken the Half-Jaw three days to journey from Rahnelo to Duraan. While Shadow of Intent was tunneling through slipspace, the carrier had been unable to receive any communications. Now, with its titanic maneuvering engines pulsing with just enough power to stay two hundred thousand kilometers ahead of Duraan on its path around the red dwarf star, Shadow of Intent's command deck rang with frantic transmissions from the planet's many small settlements, all begging for assistance.\n\n\"Target in sight!\" the Blademaster said. The old Sangheili's fists were wrapped around the scuffed bronze railing of the command deck's central holo-tank. He leaned forward and cocked an eye at the real-time image of Duraan that filled the charged air above the tank's petaled projector. \"He's firing!\" Icons blossomed around a glowing representation of the Prelate's cruiser as it unleashed a volley of plasma. A few moments later, the loudest of the settlements fell silent.\n\n\"Intercept course calculated!\" a Sangheili officer shouted from his post, one of many dimly lit alcoves spaced between thick beams that ribbed the command deck's walls.\n\n\"All weapons locked and tracking!\" another officer said.\n\nThe Blademaster tightened his grip on the railing, making his armored knuckles creak. \"Shipmaster, I recommend an immediate attack!\"\n\nRtas 'Vadum sat in his command chair, the only seat on an elevated platform above and behind the holo-tank. Throughout Shadow of Intent's exit from slipspace and the flurry of activity that followed, the Half-Jaw had been silent. Elbows bent on his chair's worn metal arms, his ruined chin resting in the valley of his fists, Rtas stared hard at the holo-tank. When he finally spoke, it was quiet, almost to himself: \"He could have glassed every settlement and been long gone before we arrived.\" More silence, and then: \"Why is he still here?\"\n\n\"He miscalculated.\" The Blademaster turned to face the Half-Jaw. \"We killed plenty of Prelates at High Charity. They aren't perfect.\"\n\n\"And they killed plenty of us,\" Rtas replied. As Vul 'Soran chewed on that, the Half-Jaw rose, stepped down a ramp to the command-deck floor, and joined the Blademaster at the holo-tank. \"Show me the scan of that star.\"\n\nWith a few quick taps on a control panel embedded in the railing, the Blademaster shifted the image in the tank. Duraan shrunk to centimeter size, and the red dwarf became a giant. Shadow of Intent's databases had grown stale during the human war, at least as far as Sangheili colonial scientific surveys were concerned. But Rtas had learned all he could about Duraan during their slipspace journey, and he knew the planet's star was at its maximum, a period of extreme disturbance in its magnetic field resulting in frequent, violent stellar storms.\n\nOne of these storms was raging now. Two overlapping arms of fire, each one millions of kilometers long, lashed out from a confluence of dark spots on the star's crimson surface. Invisible to the naked eye, radiation from these hellish upheavals was now racing toward Duraan in the form of light-speed particle waves\u2014and similar storm fronts had likely been hitting the planet for days. Duraan's magnetosphere would have shielded the Sangheili settlers from the storm's worst effects. But their star's distemper was the least of their concerns.\n\n\"He's maneuvering. Heading for another settlement.\" The Blademaster shook his head at the star. \"Storm or not, we must attack!\"\n\nAt full capacity, Shadow of Intent's energy shields could withstand a punishing amount of firepower, much more than the Prelate's cruiser could mete out. But Shadow of Intent was no match for the turbulent star, and even now the carrier's warning systems were flashing in the command deck's empty engineering cocoons. The officers who would have been stationed there had the ship been at full capacity had moved nearer to the carrier's reactors to manage the slipspace exit. The Half-Jaw, the Blademaster, and two officers responsible for Shadow of Intent's navigation and weapons were the deck's only crew.\n\n\"His shields will be weak,\" the Blademaster said.\n\n\"Ours will be, too.\"\n\n\"We outgun him!\"\n\n\"A fact I'm sure he clearly understands.\"\n\nThe Blademaster lowered his voice from its usual roar. \"I know you as well as I know my own sons, Rtas 'Vadum. But by the time you puzzle out this Prelate's plan, thousands more Sangheili will be dead.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw knew his old comrade was right. But as much as his hearts ached for the Sangheili on Duraan, he knew the choices he made in the next few moments would also mean life or death for everyone on his ship. And if he chose poorly\u2014if he and his warriors perished and Shadow of Intent was destroyed\u2014who would stop the Prelate then? How many other worlds would he leave burning in his wake?\n\nRtas took a deep breath and slowly rolled his armored shoulders. It's not the battles you've fought that make you tired. It's realizing you still have more to fight.\n\n\"Accelerate to attack speed!\" the Half-Jaw said, loud enough for the officers to hear. \"Keep the shields up as long as you can. The storm coming off that star will harm every exposed system on this ship!\"\n\nThe Blademaster opened a ship-wide channel and relayed the Half-Jaw's order to the rest of Shadow of Intent's crew. Fully loaded, the carrier's decks would have thundered with thousands of footfalls as those onboard rushed to their action stations. But now, except for the deep rumble of its maneuvering engines initiating a turn toward Duraan, Shadow of Intent was largely silent. It was a strange way to go into battle, Rtas thought, and the relative quiet only increased his unease.\n\nHaving walked into plenty of traps over the years, the Half-Jaw knew one when he saw one. The reason he was still alive was, by this point, he usually had a pretty good idea of the terrible trick his opponent was about to play. But while the Half-Jaw didn't yet fully understand the Prelate's scheme, he now possessed a new and vital clue.\n\nHe knew the cruiser's name.\n\nAs Shadow of Intent completed its turn, the Half-Jaw keyed a series of commands into the holo-tank's controls so it displayed a view from the carrier's prow. He then opened a secondary perspective that showed a zoomed image of the Prelate's ship.\n\n\"Kel 'Darsam Silket . . .\" Rtas said.\n\nThe Blademaster nodded in agreement. \"Spear of Light.\"\n\nThe cruiser's name wasn't painted on its prow like it would be on a human vessel. Instead the Half-Jaw and Blademaster had read the cruiser's name in its distinctive shape, in the battle scars along its hull, for they had both seen the ship before.\n\nDespite its illustrious name, the Prelate's cruiser was of an older design that predated the Human-Covenant Conflict. It had been one of a group of ships the Sangheili had given to Jiralhanae chieftains whose loyalty the San'Shyuum wanted to reward. These \"gifts\" were common in the scramble to meet the human threat. At that time, it had made good sense to have as many vessels as possible in the fight, even though most of these ships had been deliberately hobbled\u2014their major weapons and other systems disabled\u2014to keep the prideful and cantankerous Jiralhanae Chieftains from becoming too powerful. No self-respecting Sangheili shipmaster had wanted to give up the possibility of frontline glory to train the Jiralhanae in the operation of these underpowered, surplus ships. And that was where the Prelates had come in.\n\nThey were considered purely technical advisors. Like all good lies, this was half true. But what the San'Shyuum left unsaid was that the Prelates, on the order of the Prophet of Truth, were secretly retrofitting the Jiralhanae's ships and training them to attack the Sangheili. Contrary to what he preached, Truth knew only a blessed few could follow him on the Great Journey. And after the Sangheili committed the ultimate sin of losing the first Halo ring, they quickly fell out of favor. So the Prelates redoubled their clandestine preparations and, as much as Rtas hated to admit it, had the Flood not intervened in the battle for High Charity, the Prelates likely would have succeeded in carrying out Truth's wishes.\n\n\"Enemy cruiser initiating a burn!\" the navigation officer said. \"He's heading for the dark side of the planet!\"\n\nThree-dimensional space gave modern Sangheili shipmasters many more options for engaging their foes than when they clashed long ago on the seas of Sanghelios. But tactics still boiled down to the same age-old choice: hit your enemy head-on, or maneuver for advantage. Given Shadow of Intent's dominant firepower, the Half-Jaw's decision made perfect sense.\n\n\"Plot an intercept course the opposite way around the planet,\" Rtas told the navigation officer. \"We'll meet him nose-to-nose.\" Then, to weapons: \"Shield status?\"\n\n\"Eighty percent and falling, Shipmaster. Stellar particle count increasing.\"\n\n\"No way to avoid the storm,\" Vul 'Soran said, \"but that blade cuts both ways.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw nodded in agreement. \"His reactors are weaker. His shields will drop before ours.\" But he left unsaid: So why isn't this Prelate running? Why isn't he firing up his slipspace drive and avoiding a fight when the odds are so clearly in our favor?\n\nHundreds of capital ships had taken part in the brutal, close-quarters melee that was the battle for High Charity. In that fight, the Prelates had more total ships under their command than the Sangheili, but cruisers had been the largest vessels in the Prelates' fleet. The Sangheili had Shadow of Intent and one other assault carrier, Eternal Reward, which should have tipped the balance in their favor. But in a surprise betrayal that began the battle, the three Prelate-controlled cruisers and five Jiralhanae destroyers tasked to support Eternal Reward opened fire at close range, damaging that carrier so badly that its surviving crew was forced to abandon ship. All the attacking vessels were annihilated save one: Spear of Light.\n\nRtas assumed this was the same Prelate who had commanded Spear of Light that day . . . the one who had gone on to disable or destroy six more Sangheili ships at High Charity\u2014two of which were cruisers of superior type\u2014before retreating to participate in the evacuation of the city. This Prelate had kept Spear of Light docked to the stalk until the Flood overran it, and then shot his way through the Sangheili blockade that had halted dozens of other San'Shyuum ships.\n\nThe Half-Jaw frowned, considering the puzzle of his opponent's plan from a different angle. This Prelate is a fighter, and he clearly wants to go another round. . . . And then a vital, missing piece fell into place.\n\nRahnelo and Duraan were bait.\n\nThe Prelate had lured Shadow of Intent to these remote worlds just so he could isolate and destroy it\u2014so he could finish the fight he started at High Charity. The Half-Jaw was now certain of this. He just couldn't see how the Prelate planned to do it.\n\nAs Spear of Light completed its orbit around Duraan, everyone on Shadow of Intent's command deck fell silent. The Blademaster marched a nervous lap around the holo-tank, hands clasped behind his back. Rtas did his best to ignore a painful twinge in his missing jaws.\n\nThe navigation officer broke the silence. \"Target back in visual range! No deviation from intercept course!\"\n\n\"Forward plasma cannons fully charged!\" the weapons officer announced. \"Ready to fire on your command, Shipmaster!\"\n\nInside the holo-tank, Spear of Light emerged around the limb of Duraan's dark side. Shadow of Intent's cluster of intelligent circuits had been estimating the cruiser's speed, trajectory, and other flight characteristics based on data processed before it disappeared behind the planet. This computational matrix was primitive compared to the artificial intelligences that ran most human ships. But now that the carrier's many electronic eyes had reestablished line of sight, the matrix realized it had made one significant miscalculation\u2014that the Prelate had done something unexpected while out of range\u2014and it quickly corrected the error.\n\nThe Half-Jaw was the first to notice the change inside the holo-tank. \"Look,\" he said, pointing to the image of Spear of Light. \"He's turned his ship around.\"\n\nSquinting close to the tank, the Blademaster couldn't quite believe what he was seeing: Spear of Light was now hurtling engines-first toward Shadow of Intent. \"Why would he do that?!\"\n\nBut Rtas had no answer. All he knew was that the Prelate's trap was closing and he was running out of time to stop the jaws from snapping shut. \"Shield status,\" he growled. \"Both ships!\"\n\n\"His no longer register on the scan,\" the weapons officer replied. \"Ours are sixty percent forward, twenty percent lateral and aft\u2014but falling fast! Optimal range in fifteen seconds!\"\n\nShadow of Intent had seven heavy plasma cannons evenly spaced in a deep depression that ran port to starboard around its prow. The weapons could fire individually, or combine their energy into a single devastating mass that would annihilate the smaller cruiser. But there was a catch. Rtas needed to lower Shadow of Intent's shields before he fired any of its plasma weapons, otherwise the shaped energy charges would detonate against the inner surface of the shield, wreaking havoc on his own ship instead of the Prelate's.\n\nThis was standard procedure\u2014a necessary dropping of one's guard before mounting an assault. The Prelate would know this, would have planned for this. But the Half-Jaw had no more time to ponder, and he made the only decision that made any sort of sense.\n\nForget how tired you are and throw the hardest punch you can!\n\n\"Pool all channels into cannon number four!\" Rtas shouted to his weapons officer. \"Fire when ready!\"\n\nThe command deck dimmed as Shadow of Intent's reactors shunted power to the plasma cannons. The shields around the carrier's prow scintillated and then dispersed. A split second later, a bright magenta streak of superheated gases wrapped in magnetic guidance fields shot out from the carrier's nose. If Spear of Light had taken evasive action, the plasma torpedo would have altered its trajectory to stay on target. But the cruiser kept right on coming.\n\n\"Our shields are back up!\" the weapons officer cried. \"Five seconds to impact!\"\n\nThe Blademaster leaned closer to the tank, his eager eyes glued to an icon that showed the estimated point of impact. \"We'll hit his cruiser dead astern and burn a hole right through it!\"\n\nBut as the tremendous plasma torpedo neared Spear of Light, something strange began to happen. While the ship hadn't deviated from its path, the torpedo's fields sparked and flared as if lit by an invisible flame. Plasma vented quickly through widening weak spots in the torpedo's fields, and it veered off course\u2014only by a few degrees, but enough so that it only grazed the cruiser's portside plating instead of slamming into its engine cluster.\n\n\"Minimal damage to target!\" the weapons officer said.\n\nThe Blademaster pounded a fist on the holo-tank railing. \"Impossible! How could we have missed?!\"\n\n\"The storm . . .\" Rtas said, as another puzzle piece snapped into place. He now pictured the red dwarf's maelstrom hitting Duraan's light side, churning against the planet's magnetic field and then spilling around its dark side in violent, unpredictable vortices of highly charged particles. These whorls of radiation had torn away the torpedo's fields just as they were slowly reducing Shadow of Intent's shields\u2014just as they had already disabled the shields around Spear of Light.\n\n\"Quick charge forward cannons!\" the Half-Jaw barked. \"Divert all necessary power from lateral and aft shields! Fire all cannons in sequence, quarter-second dispersal!\"\n\nAgain the lights on the command deck dimmed. The cruiser shuddered as the cannons shot in quick succession. In the holo-tank, seven smaller torpedoes streaked toward Spear of Light, which was now less than ten thousand kilometers from Shadow of Intent. Already the torpedoes' fields were shimmering wildly as the storm did its worst. But the torpedoes had much less distance to cover now, and Rtas only needed one to hit. . . .\n\nSuddenly a miniature star erupted in the holo-tank as Spear of Light's engines engaged, full thrust. The Half-Jaw watched three of his shots go wide, a fourth boil a deep scar across the cruiser's back, and the rest evaporate in the particle furnace of the cruiser's exhaust. Venting atmosphere and shuddering terribly as it decelerated at a rate far exceeding its structural limits, Spear of Light came alongside Shadow of Intent close enough to scrape the outer limits of the carrier's portside shields\u2014but these shields were gone now, their energy siphoned off for the Half-Jaw's hasty volley.\n\nBoth ships were flying side by side at point-blank range. For the moment, however, neither could harm the other. The Half-Jaw couldn't order another plasma shot without suffering splash damage to his own ship. And even Shadow of Intent's less powerful point-laser batteries would need time to recharge.\n\n\"They'll be running for their escape pods . . .\" the Blademaster said. But his boisterous voice betrayed his age, and he stammered a little, trying to rationalize everything that had just occured. \"The Prelate has no choice! If . . . if he stays where he is, we take him apart with lasers. If he moves, we use the cannons. Surely he knows he's doomed?!\"\n\nBut \"escape pods\" was all the Half-Jaw heard. For in that moment, Rtas felt his enemy's trap snap shut, and he finally understood: The Prelate never intended to destroy Shadow of Intent. He planned to steal it.\n\n\"All hands!\" Rtas shouted into a ship-wide channel. \"Arm for battle! Close quarters!\" Then, locking eyes with the Blademaster: \"This Prelate will not take our ship!\"\n\nThe escape pod blasted out of its mooring socket, and Tem'Bhetek slammed backward into his harness. A reactive gel layer inside his armor protected him from the punishing acceleration as the pod sped across the narrow gap of space between the two capital ships. The pod's viewport blast shields were down, and it was running dark. But through the low-light optics in his visor, the Prelate could see the sharp outlines of five Jiralhanae crammed into harnesses around him, each one fully enclosed in deep-blue, vacuum-rated armor that glimmered with reflections of the pod's flashing status lights.\n\nBehind the Prelate's pod, nine more were launching, each with five Jiralhanae inside. These fifty warriors\u2014the entirety of Spear of Light's remaining crew\u2014knew they had just punched a one-way ticket, that there was no turning back. But whatever nervousness the Brutes might have felt when they were near the miniature Halo was absent now. Hurtling toward an enemy, weapons in hand, these ruthless creatures were in their element. Tem felt a surge of confidence. We are going to make it inside that carrier and tear the Sangheili apart!\n\nIt had been an audacious plan. A single light cruiser against an assault carrier. Outmatched in arms and armor, the Prelate had known one thing for certain: Spear of Light would never survive the fight. But the genius of his strategy was accepting the inevitable destruction of his ship and turning it to his advantage.\n\nThe Prelate had visited Duraan's system once before, on one of the many training missions that had kept him far from home. Back then he and his inexperienced Jiralhanae crew had been surprised at just how rapidly Duraan's red dwarf star had degraded their cruiser's shields. But the Prelate had filed away this miscalculation, as he did with all his missteps, as a tool for self-improvement. Years later, when he had wracked his brain for the best place to spring a trap, his memories of the red dwarf's powerful storms, as well as Duraan's small, poorly armed settlements, quickly sorted this planet to the top of the list.\n\nLike most plans, this one had variables the Prelate couldn't control, the biggest of which was the Half-Jaw himself. The red dwarf could do only so much to degrade Shadow of Intent's defenses. For the Prelate's gambit to work, he needed the Half-Jaw to throw everything he had at Spear of Light\u2014to so desperately want to kill the Prelate here and now before he could do any more harm that he would be willing to expend Shadow of Intent's many advantages in a single devastating blow.\n\nThe Half-Jaw had swung hard, but the Prelate was still standing. And now the odds were no longer in the Sangheili shipmaster's favor. In a close-up fight, the Prelate knew his Jiralhanae could match any Sangheili. And as for the Half-Jaw? Tem'Bhetek fingered the hardlight shield projector and plasma rifle attached to his anti-grav belt. I will deal with him myself.\n\nFive seconds out of the socket, and Shadow of Intent's point lasers still hadn't fired on his pod. This was good, because the pods had no significant shielding; even a single laser salvo would mean the end of the Prelate and his Jiralhanae. The pods' primary advantage\u2014the one thing that made them superior to standard boarding craft in this situation\u2014was their straight-line acceleration. They were designed to get away from a dying ship very quickly. And a burst of speed was all the Prelate needed to reach Shadow of Intent.\n\nNow more than halfway across the gap, the Prelate knew the laser batteries must be down, crippled by the stellar storm. Which left one last problem to overcome: the pods had no rams\u2014reinforced docking gantries built into the noses of Covenant boarding craft that they used to lamprey onto a target vessel's hull and cut their way inside.\n\nInstead, the pods could enter only through a door that was already open. And fortunately for the Prelate, Shadow of Intent had one that was very hard to miss: the entrance to its port-side hangar. An energy field barred the hangar, keeping the carrier's artificial atmosphere in and all unauthorized vessels out. On a feed from his pod's forward-facing camera that the Prelate had slaved to his visor, he could see the field's telltale violet glow. But the hangar door was flickering, clearly weakened by the storm, and the Prelate knew their velocity would carry the pods safely through.\n\nFifteen seconds after the Prelate's pod had burst from its socket, its smart circuits cut the main engine thrust and fired its maneuvering rockets, applying as much braking force as possible. A moment later, his pod was across the hangar threshold, still moving fast, but angled toward the deck. The pod landed hard on its belly, rocked onto its rounded nose, and screeched forward at an angle, shedding ablative tiles, stabilizing fins, and other exterior parts until it ground to a halt halfway across the hangar. As the Prelate wrestled out of his harness, he could hear the other pods hit and rasp across the deck, occasionally colliding with a bone-jarring crunch.\n\nBut when the Prelate blew the seals on his pod's airlock and moved outside, more wobbly on his legs than he would have liked, he was relieved to see that all ten pods had made it safely inside the hangar. Their hatches exploded open, and the Jiralhanae emerged, some a little shaken, but all with weapons ready.\n\nThe bay stretched out before the Prelate, half a kilometer to the carrier's starboard side, where there was another large energy-field door. To his right were passages to the carrier's reactors and engines. To his left were vehicle repair bays and armories that led to Shadow of Intent's ship-to-ground gravity lift. Beyond the lift were passages that spanned a graceful arc connecting the ship's teardrop stern section to its hooked prow. In the dead center of the prow, protected by hundreds of meters of hull plating and honeycombed superstructure, was the carrier's command deck. This was Tem'Bhetek's objective, and if he could survive the sprint from here to there, this carrier would be his.\n\nBright green plasma bolts skipped across the hangar floor. The Prelate spun back behind his pod as the barrage spattered up and over the ship and then hit a Jiralhanae out in the open on the other side. The Jiralhanae's chest plate buckled, his organs boiled and burst, and he fell backward with a mournful howl. As the Brute hit the floor, the Prelate closed his eyes and drew a deep breath . . . and his body did what it was designed to do.\n\nOf all the Forerunner technologies the San'Shyuum had tried to unlock, genetic engineering had proved the most difficult. This was largely due to the fact that the Forerunners had refined their bio-enhancing tools and procedures for their own physiologies, not for other sentient creatures. Coupled with San'Shyuum taboos against doing anything that might further jeopardize their already limited ability to reproduce, research into this particular brand of Forerunner magic was completely ignored by all of their ministries save one: the Ministry of Preparation.\n\nThe Prelate slipped his left hand into his hardlight gauntlet and pulled it away from his belt. He activated the gauntlet with a forearm snap, and as its bright blue, crescent-shaped shield appeared at his wrist, the Prelate felt the world slow around him. The roars of the Jiralhanae and sharp reports of their weapons stretched and faded into the background. By the time the Prelate was around the front of his pod, shield up and sprinting forward, his enhanced nervous system and musculature were already fully engaged, and he now acted almost without thinking.\n\nThe plasma fire had come from the aft side of the hangar. Six Sangheili had emerged at the top of a ramp leading to Shadow of Intent's reactors. All of these warriors were lightly armored and carried only plasma pistols, and had likely been tasked with engineering duties rather than ship security. The Prelate went right for these unlucky first responders, half running, half gliding across the hangar, dodging their wild shots with quick lateral pulses from his anti-grav belt and swatting away accurate ones with his hardlight shield. In mere moments, the Prelate was across the hangar and up the ramp, a few paces from his foes.\n\nHe swung his shield in a low arc at one Sangheili, severing both its legs at the back-bent junctions of its calves and elongated ankles. There was barely any resistance as the shield's photonic edge slid through armor, flesh, and bone. Spinning through the cut, the Prelate caught two more Sangheili with his primary weapon, a variant of the Covenant plasma rifle preferred by the Jiralhanae. Colored red instead of blue, the snub-nosed weapon was nicknamed \"blood-hand,\" and true to its name, it fired twice as fast as the standard model and required a firm grip to keep it from bucking off target. The Prelate expended half his rifle's charge, hitting the two Sangheili in their lightly armored abdomens. As they crumpled to the deck, the Prelate squared his stance and brought his elbow up into the neck of a fourth charging warrior. The Prelate wheeled to follow this Sangheili as it fell, and then pulsed his rifle into its astonished face.\n\nBy then, a squad of four Jiralhanae had made it halfway from the pods to the ramp, and they dispatched the last two Sangheili with their own rapid-firing plasma rifles.\n\nTem'Bhetek forced himself to take two deep breaths. Enhanced hormones were surging through his system, but he didn't want to peak too early. He and the other Prelates had trained long and hard in the Sacred Promissory. Deep in its halls within the rocky foundation of High Charity's dome, they had learned the dangers of pushing their altered bodies too far: sudden, debilitating exhaustion, seizures, and, in rare cases, death.\n\nIn short bursts, the Minster of Preparation had told the Prelates, you can defeat any foe. Even, the Minister had hoped, the humans' demonic Spartan soldiers.\n\nBut that had been a different time and a different war. As far as Tem'Bhetek knew, he was now the last of his kind. All the other Prelates had died at High Charity.\n\nAnd if you aren't careful, you're going to join them!\n\nUncannily quick, the Prelate raised his hardlight shield and deflected three shots from a Covenant carbine rifle. The bright green hypersonic slugs ricocheted with glassy pings, sparking radioactive fuel. A glance to his right and the Prelate identified the shooter: an Unggoy standing on the other side of the bay, at the top of a bow-side ramp. Two squads of Sangheili rangers were spilling down the ramp past the Unggoy. Mixed in among the silver-suited warriors was a Sangheili armored red, carrying an energy lance. Even at this distance, the Prelate knew this Sangheili was female\u2014and familiar . . . but he had no time to collect his thoughts before his body was sprinting forward, preparing to meet these new threats.\n\n\"Squads four and five, join squad two! Take the reactors!\" the Prelate ordered as plasma fire sizzled past him from behind. Without looking, he knew more Sangheili were emerging from the engineering bays, but he guessed they were small in number and that the remaining Jiralhanae could handle them. \"The rest of you, to me!\"\n\nThe Jiralhanae he'd tasked against the oncoming rangers were already charging in that direction, some of them bent forward in a feral hunch, pawing the deck with their armored claws. But when these Brutes were within leaping distance of their foes, the rangers activated the maneuvering jets embedded in their armored shoulders and heels. The carrier's artificial gravity was still operational, and while the jets' chemical propellants performed far better in zero-g, they helped the rangers match the impact force of the heavier Jiralhanae. After a terrible crash of armor and a quick skirmish in which five Jiralhanae and three rangers fell\u2014one with a cut across the neck from the Prelate's shield\u2014the two sides retreated into a stalemate, trading shots from the cover of loose, opposing rows of crated Phantom parts.\n\nAlthough the Jiralhanae still outnumbered the Elite rangers almost two to one, the Prelate knew he couldn't afford to get bogged down. His plan relied on surprise and speed, and he now had precious little of both. He had no firm idea how many Sangheili were aboard Shadow of Intent, nor how many were still between him and the command deck. But more were certain to spill into the hangar soon. \"Squads one and two: disengage and head for the command deck!\" the Prelate shouted. \"All other squads: covering fire! Keep those rangers pinned!\"\n\nInstantly, the Jiralhanae unleashed a volley of fragmentation grenades from their heavy, belt-fed launchers. As the grenades' orange-and-blue explosions filled the enemy's position with shrapnel, the Prelate sprinted toward the same ramp the rangers had used to enter the bay. But as he accelerated, the Prelate saw from the corner of his eye that the Unggoy and the red-armored Sangheili female were breaking cover to try to cut him off. As much as it galled him to avoid a fight, the Prelate would not stop to engage them. His primary objective was the command deck\u2014and the only enemy that really mattered was the Half-Jaw.\n\nA clang of armor behind the Prelate told him his rear guard had tangled with his two pursuers. As the Prelate topped the ramp and sped into the passage beyond, he checked the motion tracker in his visor and noted seven Jiralhanae charging close behind him. These were all the troops he'd have to help him take the command deck, and as the Prelate felt a dizziness creeping up the back of his skull\u2014his enhanced nervous system's first warning of excessive exertion\u2014he throttled his speed and let the Jiralhanae catch up.\n\nTem'Bhetek didn't need a map to the command deck. In his mind's eye, he saw Shadow of Intent's passages spread out before him. He knew the carrier so well that he often found sleep by making phantom sprints through its warrens of anodized, deep-purple corridors. If he was fortunate, these waking dreams would carry with him into slumber, replacing his usual nightmarish journey through High Charity.\n\nBut quite often, the two dreams would bleed together.\n\nTem would see Yalar walking Shadow of Intent's twisting trapezoidal halls, her thin yellow gown billowing behind her, only to disappear around the bend of a passage or whisk up a gravity lift before he could reach her. Sometimes Yalar would be waiting for him on the command deck, sitting in the Half-Jaw's empty chair, staring at him with sad eyes, cradling their crying child. . . .\n\nThe Prelate shook his head, forcing himself to breathe. He was nearing Shadow of Intent's gravity lift, which was halfway to the command deck. Muscles aching with spent fury, the Prelate knew he had just a few more bursts of hyperlethal speed before his body completely seized. With his Jiralhanae panting behind him, the Prelate raced through a four-way intersection into a high-ceilinged muster bay, slowed as he passed through one of the bay's sally ports, and then came to a full stop on the wide platform that ringed the gravity lift beyond.\n\nShadow of Intent had been the bane of other ships, human and Covenant alike. But it was also a prodigious troop carrier that had played a key role in the invasions of many human worlds, and the lift at the center of this large, arched chamber was the fastest way to deploy its armored infantry. Hovering low above the surface of a planet, Shadow of Intent could send hundreds of troops per minute down the lift\u2014or pull them back up, depending on the direction of the anti-grav field, which was produced by a machine of Forerunner design suspended from the roof. When active, this chandelier of crystalline tines projected its field down a circular shaft through the carrier's hull, more than a hundred meters wide and at least that many deep. At the bottom of the shaft was a ponderous armored platform that was always the first item down the lift. Once the platform was placed firmly on the ground, it served as the receiving end of the anti-grav field and a temporary firebase for the descending troops.\n\nAll of this was familiar to the Prelate from his study of the ship, and while the Jiralhanae that came up behind him were momentarily dazzled by the prismatic light of the gravity lift's Forerunner machinery, the Prelate's eyes immediately focused on the two Sangheili moving fast toward his position. He knew them by their armor: the Half-Jaw and his Blademaster, running opposite ways around the lift's yawning shaft.\n\nTem had always imagined he'd kill the Half-Jaw on the command deck. It seemed a fitting stage for the fight that would determine who controlled the mighty ship.\n\nNo matter. I will gut him here and watch his blood spill down the lift.\n\nThe Prelate willed his body again to its full potential. . . .\n\nBut before he could unleash it, he felt three sharp slaps between his shoulders, and he staggered forward onto a knee. The Prelate's shields had kept the carbine's radioactive slugs from penetrating his armor, and the chemicals in his bloodstream had dulled the pain. But craning his long neck around to zero in on the shooter, the Prelate was shocked to see that the Unggoy, as well as the red-armored Sangheili female and four rangers, had already caught up to his Jiralhanae rear guard\u2014and was shooting past them. Tem cursed his decision to slow his pace as he turned to meet his pursuers.\n\nIf this Unggoy wants to die first? Very well. The Half-Jaw can wait.\n\nAnd yet it was the female Sangheili who charged the fastest through the sally port, meeting the Prelate as he surged forward. She spun her lance, deflecting a burst from his plasma rifle, and then twirled sideways to avoid a slash from his hardlight shield. The Prelate slid past her in a crouch, swept a ranger off his feet, and then fired an arc of plasma that sent the other rangers and the Unggoy diving for cover. But the female Sangheili stood her ground, legs planted in a ready stance. She barely flinched as the last of the Prelate's shots burned past her helmet.\n\n\"Where are they?\" she demanded, her voice low and steady. \"My father. My brothers.\"\n\nThe Prelate considered her question for a moment, and then his earlier feelings of familiarity settled into fact. \"Dead and gone,\" he replied, remembering the three Sangheili he had captured on Rahnelo\u2014the ones who had died on their knees before the miniature Halo. \"I saw to that myself.\"\n\nThen she came at him, jaws wide in a high-pitched roar.\n\nShe was fast, to be sure, and the Prelate didn't have much experience against a lance. For a few seconds, it took all his focus to deflect her attacks: deep thrusts and counterrotating slashes that she delivered with a dancer's grace and a demon's fury. But then he feigned an opening\u2014dropping his shield and tempting her to overreach\u2014and when she stabbed her lance toward his midsection, the Prelate stepped aside and grabbed the weapon on its shaft, right between her hands, and then pulled her close and smashed his helmet into hers. She staggered backward, dazed, and collapsed onto her side.\n\nThe Prelate spun the lance around his hand, altering his grip for a downward thrust to spike the female to the floor. But as he raised the weapon, the Prelate felt the vibration of heavy footfalls from behind, and he spun to meet them instead of making the kill. The lance's energized tip stopped in midair, vibrating and crackling against the Half-Jaw's energy blade.\n\n\"If you want my ship,\" Rtas 'Vadum growled, \"you'll need to be faster than that.\"\n\nThe Prelate's wide lips tightened into a sneer. \"As you wish.\"\n\nAt long last, he was facing the traitorous Sangheili who had allowed the Flood to invade High Charity\u2014the one responsible for killing his wife and child.\n\nTem'Bhetek exhaled, released the last of his mental gates, and attacked the Half-Jaw with the full measure of his fury.\n\nShoving away his foe's sword arm with the lance, the Prelate fired a point-blank burst with his rifle. But the Half-Jaw flowed with the lance and out of the line of fire, and then ducked under the Prelate's arm and brought his blade around and down onto the Prelate's armored neck. Tem's shield flashed but held, and he shrugged the blade away, answering the Half-Jaw's counterattack with a savage kick to the ribs.\n\nTheir duel was a blur until the Prelate found a hole in the Half-Jaw's defenses and caught him in the shoulder with his hardlight shield\u2014a cut that burned through Rtas's armor and into flesh. The two combatants stepped away from each other, breathing heavily. All around them, the Sangheili rangers and Jiralhanae were locked in their own deadly dance.\n\n\"You will . . . not win this fight,\" the Half-Jaw said through ragged breaths.\n\nHis own chest heaving, the Prelate flicked his eyes to: the Unggoy leaping onto a Jiralhanae's back and choking it to the floor; and the Blademaster using one of his plasma swords to sever a Jiralhanae's weapon arm and then sending its head flying with the other. Two more Brutes lay dead on the deck along with the rangers that had taken them down\u2014which left only three of the Prelate's warriors still standing, and he realized that the Half-Jaw just might be right.\n\nTem's rapidly spinning mind recalled his primary objective: take Shadow of Intent and bring it to the Minister of Preparation.\n\nA glance at a troop roster in his visor showed that the Jiralhanae squads in the hangar were still alive. If they secured the reactors, and if he made it to the command deck, they could execute a slipspace jump back to the Forerunner installation. . . .\n\nThe Prelate glared at the Half-Jaw through the cautionary pain wrapping around his brain.\n\nI may not win this battle, but I can still bring you to your doom.\n\nCasting aside the energy lance, the Prelate increased power to his belt and suddenly soared over the Half-Jaw and into the gravity lift chamber. He was well past the breaking point; his enhanced nerves were frayed and his muscles were beginning to spasm. His vision was constricting but still focused on the only thing that mattered: an open passage on the far side of the shaft leading to the command deck. Without his Jiralhanae to slow him down, he could easily outpace his pursuers, lock himself inside the command deck, open the airlocks, and vent all the cursed Sangheili into space\u2014\n\nThen the Prelate saw Yalar, standing in the arched doorway to the passage.\n\nFearful of smashing directly into his beloved, the Prelate slowed his flight across the shaft, and in that moment one of the Blademaster's hurled swords caught him between his shoulders, instantly depleting what remained of his shields and flipping him head over heels. The Prelate's momentum carried him across the gap and onto the platform on the far side, where he landed hard and rolled to a stop, facedown on the burnished metal floor.\n\n\"Yalar . . . !\" the Prelate groaned as his wife drifted away into the passage. At the same time he heard the staccato bursts of maneuvering jets, felt something land and plant its feet on either side of his waist. But all of these sensations were dull and far away.\n\n\"Please!\" Tem said, reaching a hand toward the retreating ghost. \"Don't go!\"\n\nYalar stopped, looked over her shoulder, and frowned.\n\nThis path, where does it lead . . . ?\n\nThen the Unggoy smashed his hard, spiny fist into the side of the Prelate's helmet, and his world went black.\n\nWhen the Prelate woke, he was uncertain how much time had passed. It couldn't have been that long, for his muscles still ached and his head throbbed from his exertions.\n\nI'm alive, at least. That's a start. . . .\n\nHe slowly opened his eyes and discovered he was in a holding cell\u2014a small room with a scuffed metal floor and walls made of hexagonal bronze tiles. One of the cell's walls was filled with a translucent blue energy field that served as its door. Tem'Bhetek was still in his armor, although someone had removed his helmet, and he was slumped at the base of the wall to the left of the cell door. Tem tried to reach up and massage an ache in his head where the Unggoy had applied his fist, only to find that his hands were bound to his ankles with heavy, magnetized manacles that kept him firmly rooted to the deck.\n\nHe was a prisoner. But he was not alone in his cell.\n\n\"Your Jiralhanae are all dead,\" the Half-Jaw said. He was sitting opposite the Prelate on a bench protruding from the wall. The Half-Jaw's silver armor was flecked with Jiralhanae blood. \"We just cleaned the last of them out of the engineering decks.\"\n\nUnfortunate, if not unexpected, news. But the Prelate was glad to see a long, freshly cauterized gash across one of the Half-Jaw's shoulder plates where his hardlight shield had left its mark.\n\n\"Did you offer them terms?\" The Prelate did his best not to slur his words. But he could taste the residue of chemicals in his mouth, and he knew, after how far he had pushed himself, that he was lucky he could speak at all.\n\n\"Yes. They refused.\"\n\n\"If they hadn't, I would have killed them all myself.\"\n\nFor a long time, the Half-Jaw and the Prelate simply stared at each other. Tem saw that his enemy was unarmed. This was almost certainly a diplomatic gesture, meant to put the San'Shyuum at ease. But it had the exact opposite effect. I hate him more than anything in the universe, and he hopes I will be content to sit here and talk?!\n\nThe Prelate shut his eyes and curled his long neck back against the wall. Its tiles were cool and damp, and he hoped this would slow the anger creeping up his spine.\n\n\"We've also captured Spear of Light,\" the Half-Jaw said. \"Most of its systems were beyond repair. But the navigational database was intact. We know everywhere you've traveled. Duraan, Rahnelo . . . as well as where you came from\u2014the system you have been using as a base of operations.\"\n\nBut nothing else, the Prelate thought. Or I would already be dead, and we wouldn't be having such a pleasant chat.\n\n\"We know the system is in a hidden sector,\" the Half-Jaw continued, knitting his long fingers together in his lap. \"One of many the San'Shyuum kept for themselves.\"\n\nNow Tem couldn't resist: \"And you want to know what's in it.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know what the only Prelate to survive the fall of High Charity deems so important that he would be willing to murder thousands of innocent Sangheili in order to protect it.\" The Half-Jaw clenched his fingers tight. \"Yes. I would like to know that.\"\n\nAt the mention of High Charity, Tem'Bhetek's anger exploded at the base of his skull. But he gritted his teeth and held his tongue . . . until the Half-Jaw took one step too far.\n\n\"Tell me what is in that sector, and your death will be quick and painless.\"\n\nTem almost choked on his hatred. \"Where was your mercy?\" He strained against his manacles, ignoring the needling chemical aftertaste that warned him to remain still. \"When you incinerated my family and everyone else inside the holy city?!\"\n\n\"I cleansed an infestation.\"\n\n\"The Flood?\" the Prelate shouted in disgust. \"They were just an excuse!\"\n\n\"An excuse?\"\n\n\"For you and all the other shipmasters to commit your final act of betrayal!\"\n\n\"You speak nonsense.\"\n\n\"I speak the truth!\"\n\n\"Ah. Just like the Prophet?\" The Half-Jaw leaned forward and angled one eye and his ruined jaw at the Prelate. \"I don't know which one of us was the bigger fool\u2014me for believing Truth's lies, or you for ignoring them.\"\n\n\"I am no fool, and the Minister of Preparation will\u2014!\" Tem snapped his mouth shut. Calm yourself, before you say too much!\n\n\"Preparation?\" The Half-Jaw wrapped his hands around the edge of the bench. \"I'm surprised he made it out alive. By the time we breached the stalk, the Sacred Promissory was teeming with Flood. And the dome's lower districts . . .\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw paused and looked past the Prelate at a spot far beyond the walls of the cell. When he spoke again, the Prelate was surprised by how tired and regretful the Sangheili sounded.\n\n\"There were still San'Shyuum alive in their towers. We heard their transmissions, saw some of them in the air, trying to reach us. But the parasite was thick around us then. We couldn't hold our position, although many Sangheili died trying. When I realized there was nothing more we could do, only then did I give the order to burn the city.\" The Half-Jaw met the Prelate's angry gaze. \"I am sorry for your family. Believe me when I tell you that I would have saved them if I could.\"\n\nThe Prelate was stunned\u2014not by the Half-Jaw's apology but by his admission. There were still San'Shyuum alive in their towers. . . . As much as the Prelate wanted to remain silent\u2014as strongly as he suspected the Half-Jaw's sincerity was merely a ruse to get him to divulge more information\u2014he couldn't help the words that slipped past his trembling lips: \"You lie. There was no one alive in the city when I left it.\"\n\n\"Who told you that? The Minister of Preparation?\" The Half-Jaw shook his head. \"I'm telling you what I saw with my own eyes.\"\n\n\"My family. Is dead.\"\n\n\"Alas, they are. But not by my hand.\"\n\nThe Prelate did not\u2014could not\u2014believe anything the Half-Jaw said. Because if this Sangheili's account of the fall of High Charity was true, there was a chance he might have been able to rescue Yalar and his child. A chance that their blood was on his hands.\n\nIn this moment of sickening possibility, Tem'Bhetek felt more anger than he ever had before. Not at the Half-Jaw, but at himself.\n\n\"What is in this hidden sector?\" the Half-Jaw asked again.\n\nThe Prelate lashed out, desperate to redirect his rage. \"Exactly what you deserve!\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw leaned back against the wall. After a long silence, he said: \"Your ship, Spear of Light . . . do you know the song behind that name?\"\n\nThe Prelate remembered the proud voices of the Sangheili prisoners kneeling before the ring. But his mind was reeling, and for a moment he imagined the prisoners singing Yalar's lullaby instead of their own, defiant tune.\n\nTake my hand, walk with me . . .\n\nTem shuddered in his restraints. \"Damn you. And damn your songs, Sangheili.\"\n\n\"The ballad of Kel 'Darsam is very old,\" the Half-Jaw persisted. \"Something I learned as a child. There is one verse . . .\"\n\nAnd then the Half-Jaw sang.\n\nDespite his ragged jaws, the words that came out in his native tongue were melodious and sweet. The Half-Jaw sang beautifully, in fact, and it made the Prelate hate him more than ever.\n\nWhen the Half-Jaw was done with the verse, he translated it into standard Covenant: \"Kel 'Darsam fell, spear in his back, down to the rocks where the waves did crack.\" The shipmaster shrugged. \"No one really knows who killed Kel 'Darsam. Some believe his enemy threw the spear. Others think it was his uncle\u2014that the spear was a betrayal even that great warrior could not see before it struck him in the back.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw stared hard at the Prelate as he rose from the bench. \"I've already set a course for the hidden sector. Before we arrive, you might want to reconsider who has told you the truth and who has not.\"\n\nThe Prelate watched in mute fury as the Half-Jaw stepped to the cell's energy field. The barrier shimmered a lighter shade of blue, and the Sangheili walked through it and out of sight.\n\n\"I hope your investigations went better than mine,\" Rtas said to the Blademaster and the Unggoy, who were waiting in the guardroom outside the cell. Both still wore their battle armor. Vul 'Soran was nervously fingering the twin hilts of his energy swords. Stolt was calmly holding his breath while he cleaned his mask. He toggled a valve with one of his thick thumbs, heard a satisfying hiss of methane, and then clipped the mask back into place.\n\n\"Well, the good news first, then,\" the Blademaster said. \"The Jiralhanae didn't cause any damage to the reactors. Strange, I know. But none of those hairy curs is alive to tell us what they were thinking, so let's just be thankful that we still have enough power for the slipspace drive.\"\n\n\"And the bad news?\" the Half-Jaw asked.\n\n\"All forward plasma cannons offline. Most lasers down too,\" Stolt said. \"This ship might look tough from far away. But it can't fight.\"\n\nRtas nodded his head, only half listening to his two lieutenants. His mind was churning over a new puzzle, courtesy of the Prelate: Why would the Minister of Preparation, one of the San'Shyuum's most brilliant Forerunner technologists, send the last living Prelate to capture my ship? The Half-Jaw had no idea. But he had a strong suspicion that the answer he sought was waiting for him in the hidden sector.\n\nRtas fought the urge to rub the gash in his shoulder. The pain from the wound was intense, worse than he would ever let the Prelate or his own warriors know. And yet, once again, here he was, barely recovered from one battle and off to fight another. I don't know if I have the strength for this. . . . And in this moment of weakness he went one step further: If the Minister wants this old, worthless ship so badly? Fine. He can have it!\n\nThis idea was, of course, ridiculous, self-indulgent, and a betrayal of the Sangheili warrior code. But instead of feeling a rush of embarrassment and regret, Rtas was oddly energized. The pain in his shoulder suddenly fell away as the Half-Jaw realized: he had been so busy staring at his enemies' puzzles that he failed to notice that he held\u2014had always held\u2014the most important piece.\n\n\"I need volunteers,\" the Half-Jaw said to Stolt. \"Enough to manage a slipspace jump, but no more than we can fit into two Phantoms. Get the wounded and everyone else off of Shadow of Intent and down to Duraan's surface.\"\n\nThe Unggoy's beady eyes crinkled with questions. But content in the knowledge that he'd just placed his own name at the top of the list of volunteers, Stolt grumbled his assent and trotted out of the guardroom, methane tank rattling on his back.\n\n\"The ballad of Kel 'Darsam. . . . Haven't heard that one sung in years.\" The Blademaster glanced at the Prelate, brooding on the other side of the cell's energy-field door. \"Which do you think it was\u2014spear in the front or in the back?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Rtas said. \"But we're about to find out.\"\n\nShadow of Intent slid forward, its hull reflecting the yellow, pink, and sapphire clouds of a nearby nebula that nearly filled the black horizon. As Rtas watched the colors shift across the carrier's glossy hull, he was reminded of the sea predators that prowled the tidelands near his childhood home, a keep on the edge of one of Sanghelios's warm equatorial oceans.\n\nThe carrier was headed for a dark world without a star\u2014a rogue planet spun out from an unknown cataclysm long ago, which was now content to carve its own stubborn path across the galactic disk, ignoring the feeble tugs of distant suns.\n\nOrbiting this planet was something that looked uncannily like a sea urchin, one of the clusters of needle-sharp spines that had bedeviled Rtas's explorations of his keep's shoreline at low tide.\n\nOnce, when Rtas was barely out of his first decade, stripped to nothing but his loincloth and scampering on rocks close to shore, looking for small fish to spear, the sea had pulled quickly back, exposing a previously unseen world of limestone ridges and valleys, shaped and sharpened by ages upon ages of crashing waves. In fact, the water had receded so fast that countless sea creatures Rtas had only ever seen bulging from the deep-water nets of the keep's fishing fleet were now caught unaware, trapped and splashing in rocky puddles much too shallow for their bulk.\n\nFor a young Sangheili hunter with ambitions that had outgrown the minuscule prey close to shore, this was a golden opportunity. Rtas had eagerly threaded his way through the limestone, spearing glistening creatures until his woven shore-grass shoulder bag hung wet and heavy across his back. But even then, he did not return to shore. There were pools farther out filled with even rarer prizes: snap-tails and electric kesh that now lay gasping on the rocks. Rtas picked his way out to these magnificent specimens, shouldered his spear, and stroked their scaly flesh, imagining he was taming them with nothing but his touch. . . .\n\nThen Rtas had seen the wave\u2014a dark wall of water on the horizon that grew taller by the second. He looked back at the high walls of his keep and was terrified to see how far he'd come. Entranced by the bounty of the pools, he'd clambered almost a kilometer offshore, which would have been a quick sprint on even ground. But now his retreat was a razor-sharp maze, and by the time Rtas made it back across the rocky beach and limped through the water gate of his keep, his bare feet were swollen and burning with toxins from the urchins he'd been moving too fast to miss. His hands and knees bled from countless limestone cuts, and the sting of salt water in these wounds left him dizzy with pain.\n\nRtas hadn't thought of that day in decades. But the memory came back now, crystal clear, as he watched Shadow of Intent draw within a thousand kilometers of the orbital. Then, without warning, the urchin-like structure blazed brighter than the nebula behind it. And in that moment, something hit the Half-Jaw with a force far greater than the tsunami that had long ago crashed against the walls of his keep.\n\nThe energy wave, or whatever it was, slammed into the Half-Jaw's mind. One instant he had the complete memory of that day in the tide pools. The next moment he did not\u2014and never would again. When the energy wave hit, the foremost thoughts in the Half-Jaw's mind were scoured clean. And when the light from the orbital finally faded from his eyes, Rtas was surprised to find he was screaming.\n\nHe was not the only one.\n\nThe pilot sitting beside him in the Phantom's cockpit was shouting a string of unintelligible words. At first Rtas thought he was talking in some alien tongue. But then he realized the pilot was speaking Sangheili and that, for a moment, the Half-Jaw had forgotten the language he had spoken all his life.\n\n\"C-calm down!\" Rtas stuttered, reaching for the pilot's shoulder. But the Half-Jaw's arm was heavy, and it took tremendous concentration to move his hand, as if it some vital nerves had been severed and his brain was now threading a new path around the cut. \"Can you . . . still control this ship?\"\n\n\"Y-yes, Shipmaster,\" the pilot said. He was a ranger, the very picture of menace in his silver armor and vacuum-rated, full-face helmet. But he sounded like a frightened child, and when the sharp chirp of an emergency transmission rang from the cockpit control panel, the pilot grabbed his helmet and began to wail, rocking back and forth in his seat.\n\n\"Report!\" Rtas shouted, stabbing a holographic switch to accept the transmission. The message was coming from the other Phantom, a few kilometers to starboard, and he expected to hear the Blademaster, who was serving as that dropship's copilot.\n\nBut after a brief pause, it was the Scion who announced: \"Shipmaster, we have c-casualties! I don't know what . . . or h-how . . .\" She, too, was having trouble forming the right words. \"Three r-rangers are unresponsive . . . and Vul 'Soran as well.\"\n\nRtas clenched his jaws. He had known a slipspace jump into the hidden sector was a dangerous move. But he and his navigation officer had carefully studied Spear of Light's database and chosen an entry point far outside the volume of that cruiser's previous arrivals and departures. As soon as Shadow of Intent had emerged from slipspace, Rtas had launched the two Phantoms. For several minutes, while the dropships had maintained what they hoped was a safe distance, the Half-Jaw had watched the carrier drift toward the orbital on the visor of his own full-face helmet. There was no crew aboard Shadow of Intent. It was now a decoy, piloted by its computational matrix, which was slaved to Rtas's Phantom in the event that he needed to give the carrier different commands.\n\nAt some point, Shadow of Intent had crossed an invisible line, and the orbital had fired. And in that respect, the Half-Jaw's plan had worked perfectly. If he or his crew had been on Shadow of Intent when the wave hit, they would all be incapacitated\u2014or worse. In war, Rtas knew, there was always a price to pay for bold maneuvers. He thought of the Blademaster and his injured rangers and grimaced at the cost.\n\nBut it was about to go even higher.\n\nThe Half-Jaw heard the muffled discharge of a plasma pistol in his Phantom's troop bay. Warning glyphs blazed on the cockpit control panel, and he punched another switch, opening a comm channel to the bay.\n\n\"Status!\" he shouted, but there was no response. Rtas shrugged out of his shoulder harness and stepped groggily to the rear of the cockpit. He heard another plasma burst and felt the Phantom's engines groan. The cockpit's control panel suddenly shut down, and all interior lights went dark except for the violet emergency backups. By the time Rtas had manually cycled through the troop bay door, he already knew what he would find.\n\nBringing the Prelate with them had been a calculated risk. While the Prelate had said no more about the Minister of Preparation following his initial interrogation\u2014indeed, had said nothing else at all\u2014it was clear to Rtas that the two San'Shyuum were partners in their scheme. If the Minister was truly here, the Half-Jaw had reasoned, he might be willing to negotiate for the Prelate's release, which might save Shadow of Intent from another fight. Rtas had mitigated the risk by keeping the Prelate restrained and putting him under the watchful eye of the Unggoy and the best of his rangers. But that hadn't been enough.\n\nAll of the Sangheili in the troop bay had been stunned by the energy wave and were either unconscious or struggling feebly in their harnesses. Stolt had wrestled free of his own shoulder harness, but was now facedown on the floor, his armor sparking from an overcharged plasma pistol shot. The Unggoy was trying to crawl toward the Prelate, who stood, wrists and ankles manacled together, at the center of the bay, near a smoking hole in the troop bay floor. The Prelate had stolen a plasma pistol from one of the unconscious Sangheili, and after blasting Stolt, he had pumped more plasma into a critical relay between the cockpit and the Phantom's engines. As soon as he saw Rtas, the Prelate steadied his stance and held down the pistol's trigger to build another overcharged bolt.\n\nRtas froze. He had his energy blade, but no ranged weapon. Yet instead of shooting the Half-Jaw, the black-armored San'Shyuum aimed the pistol at his own feet. A green bolt of superheated plasma splashed the Prelate's boots, instantly depleting his armor's energy shields\u2014but also melting away his ankle manacles. A holographic meter near the pistol's rear sight flashed red, indicating the weapon's battery was depleted.\n\nSeeing his opening, Rtas tore his energy blade from his belt and rushed across the troop bay. The Prelate tossed the pistol to the deck and for a moment seemed ready to meet the Half-Jaw's charge. But as Rtas brought his blade down in a vicious vertical slash, the Prelate quickly raised his hands, splayed wide apart\u2014and Rtas's blade cut clean through the Prelate's wrist manacles with an electric snap. The Prelate whirled aside to let his enemy pass, and as the Half-Jaw's momentum carried him to the back wall of the bay, the Prelate stepped calmly into the circular energy field that formed an airlock in the troop bay floor, and then dropped out of sight.\n\nRtas shoved away from the wall with an angry roar.\n\n\"Tried . . . to stop him,\" Stolt said, his voice weak in the Half-Jaw's helmet.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Rtas said, swallowing his temper. He holstered his blade and pulled a carbine rifle from a nearby weapon rack. \"I'm going after him.\"\n\nThe Unggoy rose slowly to a knee. \"I'm . . . c-coming with you.\"\n\n\"No. See to your rangers. Reestablish a connection with Shadow of Intent.\" Rtas stepped to the edge of the airlock. \"If my transponder goes dark, tell the carrier to fire all remaining weapons . . . and destroy that orbital.\"\n\nWith that, he plunged through the field.\n\nAs Rtas entered the cold emptiness of space, there was no sound inside his helmet except his own uneven breaths. He fired his thrusters and stabilized his orientation so that he was facing the orbital, which was just off Shadow of Intent's prow; a stark blossom of dark spines against the brilliant nebula. A bright chemical burst betrayed the Prelate's position as the San'Shyuum course-corrected and accelerated toward the orbital. Just as the Half-Jaw was about to do the same, his motion-tracker flashed, and Tul 'Juran appeared beside him, holding her energy lance.\n\nUnlike the rangers, the Half-Jaw and the Scion didn't have thrusters integrated into their armor. But they had mounted ancillary units before the mission, and while Tul 'Juran had had only a short time to train, she managed a smooth stop beside Rtas, quickly corrected an incipient spin, and then said over a local comm channel: \"He killed my k-kaidon and my kin . . . his life is mine to take.\"\n\n\"He killed many more than that . . . and he's not our only concern.\" The Half-Jaw pointed at the orbital. \"We have to shut that down, before it fires again . . . or all the lives we've lost will be for nothing.\"\n\nHe and the Scion stared at each other through their thick polymer visors, their faces covered with the luminous war paint of their reflected heads-up displays. The Scion nodded, and Rtas saw in her eyes that she understood.\n\nThis is bigger than me. This is bigger than the both of us.\n\nThen, together, they fired their thrusters and rocketed after the Prelate.\n\n\"It's a trick!\" the Prelate shouted. \"Prepare the ring to fire again!\" He was hurtling past Shadow of Intent, and at present speed would reach the installation in less than a minute. Tem'Bhetek didn't need to look behind to know the Half-Jaw would soon be upon him.\n\n\"What happened?!\" The Minister of Preparation's thin, precise voice crackled in the Prelate's helmet. \"I attempted to hail the carrier, but you did not respond!\"\n\nThe Prelate knew the Minister had been expecting him to arrive in full control of Shadow of Intent. Tem didn't have the energy now to explain how the Half-Jaw and his warriors had departed the carrier just outside the prototype Halo's effective range\u2014how he himself had been captured and then made his escape.\n\nTem's mind had also been rattled by the activation of the ring. But he had the advantage of knowing what was coming\u2014had used his mental enhancements to blank his thoughts and let the crippling wave wash over him\u2014and in this way recovered a few seconds faster than his ranger guards. He had clubbed the nearest Sangheili with his manacles, taken his plasma pistol, and then shot the Unggoy, who had been the quickest to regain his wits. But the Prelate saved all of this explanation for later and instead simply said:\n\n\"Just have the ring ready by the time I reach the bunker!\"\n\nThere was a long pause. Nothing but static. The Prelate had never been this direct with the Minister. He thought he might have pricked the older San'Shyuum's pride, giving him an order like he was one of the Jiralhanae.\n\n\"I will fire when I see fit, Prelate,\" the Minister said, his voice suddenly cold. \"Whether you have returned to the bunker or not.\" Then he cut the connection.\n\nThe Prelate felt a gnawing doubt take a giant bite out of his resolve. After the Half-Jaw had told him his own version of events at High Charity, Tem had gone over and over Boru'a'Neem's description of events. The Sacred Promissory is lost! the Minister had said. Nothing lives inside the city now except the Flood! And in subsequent conversations, while Preparation had provided a few more details about the holy city's fall, they were mostly about his failed defense of the Promissory . . . nothing about events inside the dome.\n\nAt the time, because the Prelate had already been convinced of the Half-Jaw's guilt, he hadn't pressed the Minister. But having stared the Half-Jaw in the eye and heard the genuine remorse he showed for the Prelate's loss . . . things weren't as black-and-white as they used to be. And the Prelate's anger was only growing stronger in the gray.\n\nTem shot through a gap formed by four crossed spines, out of the nebula's light and into the installation's darkened interior. Unlike the energy fields on Covenant ships, the Forerunner structure had no visible separation between hard vacuum and atmosphere. More magic we never understood. . . .\n\nBut the Prelate didn't dwell on this. He throttled the output of his anti-grav belt and glided through a long diamond-shaped bay large enough to accommodate three Phantoms side by side. Following the course of a narrower, upward-sloping hall at the end of the bay, he soon emerged into the bright white expanse of the test chamber. The Minister was waiting for him near the lift that led to the bunker. He was surrounded by Yanme'e\u2014some stood awkwardly on the floor on their curved, clawed legs, and more used these limbs to cling to the chamber walls. There were at least two dozen of the Drones, all armed with plasma pistols and needle rifles.\n\nThe Prelate kept his voice relaxed as he eyed the Yanme'e's weapons. \"What are those for?\" He cut power to his anti-grav belt, alighted on the floor, and removed his helmet.\n\n\"In case you did not come alone,\" the Minister of Preparation said. He waved a hand, and the insectoid creatures lowered their guns. \"Where is the Half-Jaw?\"\n\n\"Alive and not far behind me. We should get to the bunker, charge the ring . . .\" The Prelate took a step toward the Minister, and as he did, Preparation drew back his throne. The move betrayed the subtle shimmer of the throne's energy shield.\n\n\"Careful, Tem'Bhetek,\" the Minister said. The Yanme'e's feelers twitched, and their glowing eyes darted to the Minister's fingers, watching for a signal. But Preparation's hands remained still in the sleeves of his threadbare robe. \"The device is . . . unstable,\" the Minister continued. \"It will not survive another firing.\" The Prelate saw that the crack along the ring's upper arc was much longer now; the circuits embedded in the rent had burned away, leaving a blackened cavity in the marble. \"I cannot risk its destruction\u2014not until we transport it to its final destination.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" the Prelate asked. To a certain extent, he was just keeping the conversation going, trying to work out a way to get the answers he wanted without rousing the Minister's suspicion. But now he was truly curious. \"Transport the ring to where?\"\n\nThe Minister cocked his head to one side. He looked genuinely puzzled and disappointed that Tem hadn't already guessed. \"To Sanghelios, of course.\"\n\nTem'Bhetek drew a long, slow breath. For him, revenge against the Half-Jaw had always been the end. He had really never considered what else the Minister might have planned. But now, after a few moments' thought, Tem discerned Boru'a'Neem's next step. \"Shadow of Intent . . . You're going to use its reactors to charge the ring.\"\n\n\"Spear of Light was a noble ship and served its purpose well. But it was never strong enough to make it past Sanghelios's defenses or to provide power to the ring.\" The Minister stroked the fleshy wattle hanging from his chin. \"I have been testing the device at only a fraction of its power. Even if we were to increase the pulse by twenty percent, that would be more than enough to wipe all sentient life from Sanghelios and its moons. We shall annihilate the Sangheili home system and set back their species for ages to come!\"\n\n\"Surely whoever was on board Shadow of Intent would also perish in the pulse,\" Tem said. \"Who did you have in mind?\"\n\n\"My finest Prelate, of course. But I have the distinct feeling he is not as . . . committed as he once was.\"\n\n\"As I was when you told me my family was dead?\"\n\nThe Minister pursed his lips. \"So. We have come back around to that.\"\n\nJust then, two red lights flashed on the Prelate's visor, his motion-tracker alerting him to a pair of hostile contacts nearing the installation. A similar warning flashed on the arm of the Minister's throne.\n\n\"I'm afraid we do not have time for questions,\" the Minister said.\n\n\"I have only one.\"\n\n\"Do you want to know the truth, or what I knew you needed to hear?\"\n\nWith that, the Prelate had his answer. His heart ached. Oh, Yalar, forgive me . . .\n\nBut he still needed to hear it. \"Why lie to me, Boru'a'Neem?\"\n\n\"Because I needed your anger\u2014I needed your blind rage to see this through.\"\n\n\"You took my family from me.\"\n\nPreparation slammed his fist on his throne. \"You never would have had a family if not for me!\" The wrinkled folds of skin on the Minister's neck pulsed with his contempt. \"I have listened to you endlessly mourn those two small deaths, but you have no idea how much value was lost! My Sacred Promissory held more priceless relics\u2014more Forerunner wealth\u2014than any other vault in the Covenant!\" The Minister's limbs trembled, and his voice was shrill. \"You lost a wife and child? I lost everything!\"\n\nThe Minister's words hit the Prelate harder than any wounds he'd ever received in battle. Under this verbal assault, his enhancements had triggered automatically, and his body was tensed to defend itself. But now the galvanizing rage that always accompanied these preparations was gone.\n\nThe Prelate felt empty, and his voice was hollow. \"I did everything you asked of me. I saved your life,\" he said.\n\n\"There were not many San'Shyuum who could match your skills or your devotion\u2014and now perhaps there are none.\" The Minister flared the sleeves of his robe and settled his arms softly on his throne. \"But we are not the only ones who escaped the Holy City, and there will be many, full of rage or hungry for glory, who will gladly take your place.\" All the artifice dropped from the Minister's voice; his words were flat and final. \"I don't need you anymore.\"\n\nWith a twitch of his fingers, Preparation signaled the Yanme'e to open fire. The chamber filled with plasma bolts and needlelike explosive shards, all directed at the Prelate. But even though Tem'Bhetek was in motion before these lethal rounds were in the air, he was not the first thing to reach the Minister's throne.\n\nAn energy lance arced over the Prelate's head and struck the Minister's shield, dead center. The shield knocked the lance aside, but then wavered and collapsed. Immediately after, two carbine bursts cooked past the Prelate, hitting the Minister between his right shoulder and the base of his neck.\n\nThen the Prelate ran into a wall of Yanme'e fire impossible to dodge. His own shields fell. He felt one plasma bolt boil into his thigh and a needle hit below his ribs and then explode out his back. As he tumbled toward the ring, Tem saw the Minister accelerate backward in his throne and into the bunker lift, frantically clasping his wound as pale-red blood pumped through his fingers. Boru'a'Neem locked eyes with the Prelate one last time. Then the saw-toothed door to the lift closed and the Minister was gone.\n\n\"Leave him!\" Rtas shouted as the Scion sprinted for the Prelate. \"Kill those Yanme'e!\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw shot one Drone out of the air, and as it dropped, the Scion slid onto her knees, scooped up its plasma pistol, and came up firing. By the time the two Sangheili had made it to the ring, the greasy remains of seven more Yanme'e were smeared on the floor or dripping down the walls. Some of the Drones had retreated to the bunker lift, where they found cover behind its door frame, which protruded out from the chamber wall. More were buzzing in the highest reaches of the chamber, leaping back and forth between the support beams, trying to find the best angles for their shots.\n\nCrouching beside the Scion at the base of the ring, Rtas eyed the ammunition counter on his carbine. \"I have ten rounds left!\"\n\nThe Scion inspected her pistol. \"Less than a quarter charge!\"\n\n\"Get your lance! I'll cover you!\"\n\nAs the Scion leapt into the open, Rtas briefly considered the onyx relic pressed against his back. It was shocking to be so close to a Halo ring again. And while it would have been easy to mistake its small scale for a lack of power, the Half-Jaw knew from the conversation he had just overheard between the Minister and the Prelate: If I fail, and they bring this infernal ring aboard my ship, Sanghelios will be lost!\n\nRtas stood and fired past the Scion, braining two Yanme'e who had just stuck their heads out from behind the door frame. Then he aimed upward, killing the first of a trio of Drones swooping down for an attack. The two other Yanme'e scattered, and the Half-Jaw and the Scion, now with lance in hand, ducked back behind the ring.\n\n\"The Minister of Preparation is through that door!\" Rtas said as angry shots from the dozen or so remaining Yanme'e sizzled overhead.\n\nThe Scion took a quick glance over the lower arc of the ring. \"There's a control panel. On the left side of the frame!\"\n\nNeither of them had any idea if they would be able to manipulate the Forerunner door controls; undoubtedly the Minister had locked the door from the other side. But both Sangheili knew they were now sitting right beside the very device that had nearly wiped their minds clean. And if the Minister was preparing to unleash another wave . . .\n\n\"Stay close!\" Rtas activated his energy blade. \"Don't stop until we make it to the door!\"\n\nTul 'Juran nodded as she gave her lance a shake. The tips of the weapon crackled diamond bright.\n\nThen, together, they stepped out from behind the ring.\n\nThe two Sangheili were blurs of glittering light as they whirled their blades around themselves, deflecting the Yanme'e's fire. They cut apart a group of Drones that dove from above and made it halfway to the grav-lift door when the ring suddenly powered on behind them with a deep, almost inaudible hum that shook their skulls inside their helmets\u2014a terrifying sensation that stopped them in their tracks. Rtas and Tul 'Juran braced against each other, back to back, growing panic limiting their urges to either fight or flight. Neither seemed ideal.\n\nMeanwhile, the Yanme'e were just as unnerved as the two Sangheili. All the Drones that remained were now clawing at the door, ignoring the Forerunner control panel and its pulsing glyphs. Rtas scowled. If they don't know how to open it, how will we? At the same time, what chance did they have to outrun this Halo ring? The Half-Jaw could feel the Scion's body shudder as the relic's rising wave pulsed against her mind\u2014could feel his own thoughts start to slip.\n\nWhy else would I imagine someone . . . singing?\n\nBut then Rtas recognized the voice, and he knew the song was real.\n\nDuring the firefight, the Prelate had dragged himself to the shaft beside the ring that led down to the installation's power systems. Resting with his back against the low wall that circled the shaft, the Prelate was now staring at the spot on the floor before the ring where his Sangheili prisoners had once stood.\n\nAs the Prelate gently sang lilting San'Shyuum verses Rtas didn't understand, he slowly unfastened his anti-grav belt and wrapped it around a satchel of plasma grenades that he had recovered from the corpse of a nearby Yanme'e. When this explosive bundle was gathered in his lap, the Prelate ceased his song. He laughed ruefully and coughed: \"Why not sing at a time like this . . .\" Then he rose partway up the wall and looked directly at the Half-Jaw.\n\n\"The spear was always in my back,\" the Prelate said. Arm shaking, he held his bundle out over the shaft. \"I wish I'd felt it sooner.\"\n\nRtas had a vague idea what the Prelate meant, but the pulse from the ring was overwhelming now, and he was losing the ability to think, let alone speak, clearly. He gave the Prelate a grateful nod and grabbed the Scion by the shoulder. Then they activated their thrusters and raced away from the ring.\n\nTem'Bhetek waited until the Half-Jaw and female Sangheili were out of the test chamber before he dropped his belt. The bundle clattered against the wall of the shaft, once, twice, and then continued its descent in silence. The Prelate slid down the barrier, leaving a smear of blood from the gaping hole in his armor, and settled, legs akimbo. He pulled his hands into his lap. Without a weapon to hold, they felt uncomfortably empty.\n\nHe closed his eyes and whispered: \"This path. Where did it lead?\"\n\n\"To me, my love . . .\"\n\nSlowly, the Prelate opened his eyes. Yalar stood before him, her thin yellow gown fluttering in the ring's invisible waves.\n\n\"It led to us.\"\n\nThen there was a weight in Tem's arms; a warm and fussy wriggling. He looked down and saw his child. \"What is it?\" he asked. \"Boy or girl?\"\n\nHis wife smiled. \"Whatever you want it to be.\"\n\nThe ring's silhouette wavered as it began its final charging cycle. The Prelate felt his mind slipping . . . but he willed his enhancements into a final barricade.\n\nPlease, just a little more time . . .\n\nYalar glanced at the ring.\n\n\"It's all a lie,\" Tem said, choking back a sob. \"It won't take us anywhere.\"\n\nHis baby laughed.\n\nYalar held out her hand. \"How do you know for sure?\"\n\nGritting his teeth, the Prelate rose. He took Yalar's soft fingers in his armored glove. Then, wife in one arm and child in the other, he limped toward the ring.\n\nTem felt the floor shudder beneath his feet as his belt finally detonated far below. A hot wind roared at his back. He was close to the ring now, and his defenses were crumbling. But the strange thing was, as all the sensations of the real world began to fade, the ghosts in his arms seemed more real than ever.\n\n\"I'm frightened,\" Tem said.\n\nYalar leaned close, kissed his neck, and whispered in his ear: \"Into the light, forever free!\"\n\nIn that moment, the Prelate remembered happiness, love, contentment\u2014all the joys they shared before . . . and then he knew nothing else.\n\nShadow of Intent hung in high orbit above Duraan. Most of the carrier's crew was on the planet, recovering from their wounds or simply enjoying the hospitality of the grateful settlers. Rtas 'Vadum, however, was alone on the command deck, except for the flickering image of another Sangheili in the holo-tank. Tall and proud, but with a weariness in his shoulders not unlike that of the Half-Jaw, this Sangheili wore dark-gray, ornately carved armor that looked even older than his strong, serious face.\n\n\". . . and then the installation exploded, before the ring had an opportunity to fire a second time,\" Rtas was saying, adding the last details to what had been a long and extensive debrief. \"We scanned every fragment. There was nothing to recover.\"\n\n\"Then Sanghelios is safe,\" the Arbiter said. \"And all of us are in your debt.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw shook his head. \"I did not do it alone.\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" the Arbiter said. \"The warriors who were with you at the ring\u2014are they recovering?\"\n\n\"Slowly but surely. The Blademaster was the worst, but even he is awake now and back to his usual bellowing.\" Rtas stepped closer to the tank. \"In fact, he wanted to speak with you. To discuss the revocation of certain naval codes . . . specifically those forbidding the enlistment of female crew.\"\n\nThe Arbiter chuckled deep in his throat. \"I hoped your voyage would be restful, but I never thought Vul 'Soran would find it that relaxing.\" Then, serious once more: \"The time has come to change many of our old ways. This Scion is very welcome on your crew. I look forward to meeting her and honoring her. When will you leave Duraan?\"\n\n\"Ten days, perhaps twenty,\" Rtas said. \"But we will not be returning to Sanghelios.\"\n\nThe Half-Jaw thumbed the control panel in the railing around the holo-tank and transmitted an annotated report on Spear of Light's navigational database. His officers had since completed a more thorough study and uncovered evidence of a rendezvous of San'Shyuum vessels after the fall of High Charity. It had been a sizable flotilla, enough to carry thousands of San'Shyuum. Although the details were fragmentary at best, there were slipspace signatures to follow, trajectories to track\u2014the beginnings of a long hunt, for someone with the spirit to undertake it.\n\n\"High Charity . . .\" the Arbiter said, when he'd finished reading the report. \"So Preparation wasn't the only snake who slithered out of that nest.\"\n\n\"There will be others like him,\" Rtas said. \"Hiding, scheming.\"\n\n\"Someone will have to stop them.\" The Arbiter clasped his hands behind his back. \"But it does not have to be you, Rtas 'Vadum. Many shipmasters have given up their commands, returned to their keeps here to farm the land or fish the seas. Sanghelios needs wise leaders, now more than ever. I would never order you to leave Shadow of Intent. But know that if you do, no one will doubt your bravery or commitment.\"\n\nRtas grasped the railing of the holo-tank. Through it, he could feel the distant rumble of the carrier's reactors\u2014the familiar rhythm of his ship. It would be difficult to give this up . . . but to be done with war entirely? To rest and let someone else carry on the fight?\n\nThe Arbiter's offer was tempting, and the Half-Jaw almost took it. But then there was the matter of the Prelate's final, selfless act.\n\n\"There will be some San'Shyuum who deserve the full measure of our fury,\" Rtas said at last, \"and others who will not. I would like the opportunity to try to sort one from the other, if I can.\"\n\n\"And so you shall, then,\" the Arbiter said. \"I cannot think of anyone more qualified for such a vital mission.\" He paused, clearly reluctant to sever the transmission. \"I will expect regular reports.\" And then, finally: \"Until we meet again . . .\"\n\n\". . . In Urs's everlasting light.\" The Half-Jaw finished the traditional good-bye, and the holo-tank went blank.\n\nAs he stood there in Shadow of Intent's armored heart, Rtas 'Vadum thought:\n\nMaybe, in the end, this was the best that any warrior could hope for. A chance to reconcile with your enemy, or, failing that, to fall in the pursuit of peace.\n\nThis thought energized Rtas, and for the first time in a long while, he did not dread the coming battles. Because although he wasn't certain where this new voyage would take him or what dangers he might face along the way, Rtas could see more than one ending, and that gave him the will to start.\n\n## THE BALLAD OF HAMISH BEAMISH\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nFRANK O'CONNOR\n\nA long time ago on a military ship\n\nA boy signed on to a perilous trip\n\nA would-be cadet\n\nWith a penchant for danger\n\nHe signed on for thrills\n\nIn a cryosleep manger\n\nCorbulo's the name\n\nOf his life's destination\n\nA military school\n\nWith a fine reputation\n\nAn officer's life\n\nWas the life he had chosen\n\nAs he and his chums were cryonically frozen\n\nAnd off into slipspace the young people headed\n\nBut a problem arose that starfarers have dreaded\n\nThe long sleep of storage\n\nWas to be interrupted\n\nBy a technical flaw\n\nAnd some code that corrupted\n\nAs the good ship Jamaica flew on through the night\n\nThe seal on his chamber grew a bit less than tight\n\nThe cryopod opened a decade too soon\n\nAnd Hamish thawed out 'neath an alien moon\n\nAlone and afraid in the space between spaces\n\nHe gazed with fear at his companions' faces\n\nHe wiped frost from their visors\n\nBut onward they slept\n\nSafe and preserved while poor Hamish just wept\n\nWhen he got it together, he resolved to survive\n\nAlone on a starship, now surely he'd thrive\n\nAll he'd need is some heat and a good source of food\n\nBut on waking the AI, the news wasn't good\n\n\"Apologies, Beamish, but this ship is unmanned\n\n\"You and the others are effectively canned\n\n\"We ship you like cargo to some distant star\n\n\"But this uncrewed transporter has no buffet bar\n\n\"Nor heating for humans, but there's plenty of air\n\n\"So if you wrap up in blankets, you might still make it there\n\n\"Your sleep chamber's ruined\n\n\"And the backup is rusted\n\n\"So if you get to Corbulo\n\n\"You'll be all old and busted\n\n\"It's been called a flat circle\n\n\"And a relative hitch\n\n\"But the fact of the matter's\n\n\"Time is gravity's bitch\n\n\"So you have my condolence\n\n\"And I'll help if I can\n\n\"But I suggest that indolence\n\n\"Is the best kind of plan.\"\n\nSo the darkness and cold would make anyone spooked\n\nAnd young Master Hamish knew that his goose was cooked\n\nHe examined his options\n\nAnd set in for the flight\n\nHe'd be cold and hungry for this long, lonely night\n\nSo he needed some fuel for a possible fire\n\nAnd protein to eat lest his body expire\n\nHe looked high and low\n\nAnd through every dark passage\n\nBut all he could find was an Oberto sausage\n\nTwo hundred years old\n\nDiscarded, incredible\n\nBut because it was jerky\n\nIt was still kind of edible\n\nAs he chewed the last meat\n\nThat he might ever enjoy\n\nHe thought about girls and he thought about boys\n\nThough frozen intact, nails and hair would still grow\n\nAnd the seeds of his madness had started to show\n\nHe would shave them and clip them\n\nWith tender composure\n\nAnd burn hair and eat nails lest he die of exposure\n\nThe smell, it was dreadful\n\nAnd the sight even worse\n\nBut better this madness\n\nThan a flight in a hearse\n\nAnd so ten long years passed\n\nAnd Corbulo drew near\n\nAnd Hamish's madness\n\nReplaced all his fear\n\nHe got used to the routine\n\nAs we are wont to do\n\nBut he dreamed of poutine\n\nAnd he played his kazoo\n\nOh, I didn't explain that he kept that toy whistle?\n\nOr that he wore a tattoo of a plain Scottish thistle?\n\nHis buzzing lament did not keep him sane\n\nIn fact, you could argue it addled his brain\n\nSo when the ship at last reached the Corbulo banner\n\nHe was thirty years old and as mad as a spanner\n\nThe medics tried hard to habilitate Hamish\n\nHis exploits aboard were disturbing but famous\n\nThey found him a job doing what he does best\n\nWhich is making the most of a terrible mess\n\nSo they put him in whites and they gave him a broom\n\nAnd set him about cleaning room after room\n\nThe other cadets soon forgot Hamish's story\n\nAnd Hamish got used to his missed chance at glory\n\nHe'd never a soldier or an officer be\n\nBut he never got used to the odor of pee\n\nHe'd clean it in bathrooms from floor to the sink\n\nBut I never revealed . . . what did poor Hamish drink?\n\nSo here is the moral of this dreadful tale\n\nCheck all of your gaskets before you set sail\n\nAnd if in your world, you're aware that it's cleanish\n\nRemember the ballad of poor Hamish Beamish\n\n## DEFENDER OF THE STORM\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nJOHN JACKSON MILLER\n\nThis story takes place near the end of the Forerunners' three-hundred-year war with the Flood, a little more than 100,000 years BCE (Halo: Cryptum, Halo: Silentium).\n\nAncilla, can you confirm what I just saw?\"\n\nThe electronic voice at the back of Adequate-Observer's mind responded: \"You will have to be more specific.\"\n\nYou can read my mind, the Forerunner thought. How is it that you do not already know what I mean?\n\nHe growled in frustration and hurried from one window of the station to another. No, there was nothing special outside\u2014and if there had been, it was gone now. The station was rotating too fast. From each port he beheld only clouds racing through the darkness of the gas giant Seclusion, the same picture he'd seen for the past fifteen solar years.\n\nAdequate-Observer was a lookout who rarely saw anything. Rated a Warrior-Servant, the Manipular had neither gone to war nor been of much service. Filed away far from inhabited space, he stood guard over this gas-mining station designated as Seclusion Spiral. A pinwheel ten kilometers across, the station twirled along atop the clouds of an immense eternal storm on the planet. Rows of electrostatic collection devices lined each of five colossal vanes. A single collector could draw enough exotic particles from the storm to supply the needs of a Forerunner world for a solar year.\n\nEven after all this time, Adequate still didn't know what the particles were, or why the Forerunners needed them. His ancilla\u2014his armor's mental assistance system\u2014had explained it all once, but it hadn't made much sense to him. The universe was teeming with things to know; an individual could easily get bogged down with useless trivia. Adequate didn't require the specifics of what happened to the product of Seclusion Spiral, so he didn't clutter his mind with it. Sometimes it was better that way.\n\nIn truth, having an ancilla handy had given Adequate an excuse to forget many things. The designers of his armor had intended to create a symbiotic relationship between wearer and suit, and in this, they had succeeded perhaps too well. Adequate-Observer had no need to think about the big issues or the small ones anymore. Keeping track of his location on the station? The ancilla handled that. Bodily functions? The ancilla regulated them. On days when he was feeling particularly frustrated with his assignment, he was tempted to ask the ancilla to move his arms and legs for him while he made his rounds.\n\nYet he never resorted to that option. It felt too much like cheating\u2014and he worried that his superiors would find out. The ancilla answered to them too, after all. If his masters wanted a robotic drone, they would have sent one. No, his great hope was getting off the station and into the fight against the biological terror known as the Flood, and the only way to prove his worth was to do his job, such as it was.\n\nThat meant spotting things, even when his own ancilla didn't believe him.\n\n\"There it is again,\" Adequate said, pointing as a mass darker than the surrounding maelstrom swept past. \"Something is out there. In the storm.\"\n\n\"There are more than six hundred known substances circulating in the winds of the vortex,\" the artificial intelligence responded. \"You could have seen any one of them.\"\n\n\"I have been here for fifteen years, ancilla. I know what is outside.\" He really didn't, not with any specificity. \"Whatever that object was, it was not dust. It was solid and dark\u2014mostly.\" He frowned. \"You are controlling my combat skin. The armor's sensors must have seen the same thing I did, correct?\"\n\n\"If the sensors noticed anything, nothing exceeded parameters enough for the systems to issue an alert. But there is a simple way to find out. I am rerunning the imagery now. Tell me when you see it.\"\n\nAdequate stood still as a statue and closed his eyes as the ancilla, through the symbiotic mental interface in his armor, replayed the seconds in question. Since the images were being piped directly into the theater of his mind, shutting his eyes was unnecessary\u2014in theory. In practice, since receiving his first Warrior-Servant combat skin as a young Manipular, he had never been very good at shutting out the outside world.\n\nThe ancilla did its job, and the moment reappeared to him, as clear as any memory he ever had. \"There,\" he said, when an amorphous form peeked out from the clouds.\n\n\"Evaluating.\" The image froze, and Adequate saw symbols dancing alongside the dark blob, the result of his ancilla's studies. \"Spectroscopic analysis is unrevealing\u2014but the strongest possibilities are all Class-D ices, which accrete in the upper elevations of the atmosphere near here and get swept into the storm.\"\n\nAdequate's brow furrowed as he tried to concentrate on the image. \"What is that in the center? It seems to be\"\u2014he tried to focus\u2014\"It almost appears to be a light.\"\n\n\"There is intense electrical activity below us, Adequate. Anything that drifts into the cyclone is bound to be struck by lightning.\" The ancilla paused. \"Does that resolve the matter?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" he replied. \"That is all.\" The image vanished from the part of his mind that his ancilla had access to but remained in his living memory. It was a curious thing, and he had seen something like it twice before during his posting. But he had never mentioned it, certain that if it were anything special, his ancilla would have caught it.\n\nHe was only an Adequate-Observer, by nature.\n\nHe was also sure his ancilla was correct that nothing could survive in the storm below. He rose for every duty shift relieved that Seclusion Spiral only rode the top of the great storm. Immense enough to encapsulate whole planets, the storm had raged on the gas giant's equatorial region for half a million years so far and showed no signs of dissipating. As long as it churned and wobbled its way across Seclusion's relatively warm midsection, the dynamo would run indefinitely.\n\nThat, he understood. What the ancilla had never been able to dispel his confusion about was how it was possible for Adequate to move about on the station without being tossed around or becoming violently ill. The forces of gravity and motion were somehow constantly being compensated for\u2014not just at the station's hub, but along the hallways several kilometers long heading out to the tips of the twirling vanes. The Builders responsible for the station clearly knew things far beyond his comprehension. He'd stopped asking about how the station functioned after the first solar year.\n\nStill, there was something odd about what he'd seen. He idly tapped against the window with his boltshot, his trusty directed-energy pistol. Trusty because it was always at his side, not because he'd ever had occasion to use it. What benefit was it in this place?\n\n\"Your metabolic rate is increasing,\" the ancilla said. \"Would you like me to have your armor apply a minor relieving agent?\"\n\n\"I have no need for it.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would like to discuss your concerns instead. I theorize your agitation may be at least eighty-four percent explained by tomorrow's arrival of the annual transport ship.\"\n\n\"Eighty-four percent.\" He shook his head and started walking up the hall, continuing his rounds. \"How do you calculate these things?\"\n\n\"Is that a rhetorical question?\"\n\n\"It is,\" he said. \"And do not think that I am concerned about the visit. I already know what will happen to me when the tanker arrives. Absolutely nothing.\"\n\nAdequate-Observer watched through the stockroom skylight as the tanker disengaged from its docking portal atop Seclusion Spiral's hub. The Forerunner had waited anxiously through the six work shifts it took for the vessel to load up on a solar year's worth of exotic particles; the transfer of personnel always came at the end.\n\nAnd, as always, Adequate had not received orders to depart.\n\nThe experience was worse this time. He had looked on in dismay as all twenty of the other soldiers posted on the station had been reassigned to faraway places to fight the Flood. Never before had Adequate seen so many retasked at once. How bad must the struggle be for the Forerunners?\n\nApparently not bad enough for them to want him.\n\nAnd so he had remained, mutely restocking the supply shelves as his exultant companions from the previous year exited the station. The newly arriving Warrior-Servants said little to him as they entered, and he said nothing in return. What was the point, really, in learning anything about them? They would be gone in another year too, and Adequate would be trapped, same as always. Never to fight, never to evolve as he spent the last useful moments of his life spinning in the dark.\n\nHe spoke to his ancilla only after the tanker vanished from sight. \"Did they provide a reason?\"\n\n\"No. They never do.\"\n\nThat fact, Adequate didn't need reminding about. In previous years, his ancilla had tried to cushion the blow, rationalizing that the Forerunners in charge of things must value his service and knowledge too much to let him leave this place. It could be argued, after all, that after fifteen solar years, he was now the wizened master of Seclusion Spiral, trusted with mentoring an entirely new staff of neophytes.\n\nYet the ancilla did not argue that notion this time, and Adequate would not have believed it anyway. He knew the truth about himself. He was no sage, no expert. The past year's class of Warrior-Servants had not made any effort to look to Adequate for guidance and advice, and he had not offered any. The crew that had just arrived was even less likely to need his help.\n\nFrom their service records, his ancilla had already determined that half of the new arrivals were more experienced. One called Capital-Enforcer had once stood guard at a facility visited for three daily cycles by the Librarian herself. What was there for Adequate to say to such distinguished people? Why, there was no need for his teachings at all. The departing sentries' ancillas had already transferred everything else they needed about serving on the station.\n\nAnd the sum of that was: walk the halls, look out the viewports, repeat.\n\nWorse than useless.\n\nThe last of the newcomers having departed for their new quarters, Adequate looked back out into the darkness. There was nothing to see, of course.\n\nHe went back to his shelving.\n\nHub detail. It was the one day in twenty-one when Adequate's routine changed at all. He watched from the center of the station as his new companions prepared their boltshots and headed in groups of four into the spoke passageways to police the enormous, labyrinthine interiors of the vanes.\n\nBecause the desired particles settled in the atmosphere at night, Seclusion Spiral could only do its collecting during the day; as a result, the Forerunner designers simply programmed the life-support systems to shut down outside the hub during the night hours. That meant twenty of the twenty-one on staff were gone at once, four per spoke, leaving the automated command center and living quarters all to Adequate.\n\nIt was no day of leisure. Adequate collected the refuse the squad had generated and worked to clean the galley; it was already clear to him that his new teammates were more slovenly than the last. Another sign that things were going badly in the war with the Flood. Discipline during off-duty hours was one of the first things to suffer.\n\nHe'd recently seen that in action. Normally, when two or three new replacements arrived, upheaval was limited: they worked to integrate themselves into the established social order on the station. Not so this time. The twenty newcomers had already bonded on their flight in and had quickly realized from Adequate's service record that his career was at a dead end. Since her arrival, Sprightly-Runner, the jokester of the new crew, had made constant sport of him.\n\n\"Such a wonderful modern facility,\" she'd remarked in passing. \"With just one out-of-place antique.\"\n\n\"Adequate is a beautiful name,\" Sprightly had stated another time. \"You really should use your honorific title with it.\"\n\n\"I do not have a title.\"\n\n\"Of course you do. It is 'Barely,' correct?\"\n\nBarely-Adequate had been his designation around the hub barracks ever since. He didn't understand why he deserved such cruelty.\n\n\"Ignore their taunts. Understand that they do not wish to be here either,\" his ancilla explained.\n\nWorst of all, they had collectively decided the dirtiest assignment on the station should again fall to him: gathering up packs of the occupants' waste for delivery to the digester units, one located at the end of each vane. Microorganisms inside the units broke down the foul matter to generate power, while releasing unwanted gases into the atmosphere. He didn't know why the relief stations were not constructed near the ends of the vanes in the first place. All he knew was that he was tasked with the detail\u2014again.\n\nHe didn't care\u2014and had no desire for the others' companionship. Increasingly, he had taken to spending his off-duty hours outside the quarters and in the command center: there he could avoid harassment while studying the monitors in search of his pet phantom. At least he had not made the mistake of mentioning to the others that he'd been seeing things outside. Why provide them with any more ammunition?\n\nThe completion of his chores gave him a chance to return to his search. He had always known how to operate the visual sensors located on Seclusion Spiral's hull; it was part of his basic training for posting here. The hostile environment outside made checking the sensors a fruitless task for the watch keepers, who focused instead on their similarly futile inspection marches to the vanes. A true invader from space would be detected and announced by the station's core computer.\n\nThe radar emitters, consequently, pointed up. With his ancilla's help, Adequate found he could direct one partially downward. Four times, the sensors had found something moving in the storm\u2014perhaps. But the data made no sense. Whatever was down there was traveling slower than the surrounding winds, almost tacking against them\u2014quite peculiar behavior for an ice fragment or a bit of debris. Adequate hoped the change of seasons on Seclusion would allow him a better opportunity.\n\n\"Ancilla, will the winter make the storm easier or harder to\u2014\"\n\nKlaxons sounded all around. He heard an agitated voice in his helmet. \"This is Capital-Enforcer! Come in, hub officer!\"\n\n\"Hub here,\" Adequate said.\n\n\"Alert, everyone! I have a missing officer\u2014and hostile movement here at the end of Vane One. It's the Flood!\"\n\nIt had happened. Something had finally happened.\n\nAdequate's circulatory system went into overdrive, prompting his ancilla to apply calming agents. The injections didn't work. How else was he supposed to react? For fifteen years, his only foes were boredom and ridicule. Yet now, here at the end of the galaxy, the great enemy had come.\n\nThe Flood.\n\nHe had remained on hub detail watching the command center's monitors while one guard from each of the other spokes emerged from the tunnels and headed into Vane One to assist Capital-Enforcer. That effectively doubled the number of warriors on the scene, he thought\u2014until his ancilla reminded him that the wretched two-legged monster stalking the halls was a former teammate.\n\nHe saw it in flashes and glimpses. Sickly green in color with a blotchy hide, the creature's long limbs flailed against the bulkheads as it clumsily lumbered through the halls of the vane. A combat form, he knew from his studies: scraps of Forerunner armor remained lodged in its hide, artifacts of the individual that once had been.\n\nHe only then wondered who that person was. Dutiful-Marcher, he learned when his ancilla checked the roster to see who was missing. How horrific must it have been, Adequate wondered, for the warrior to find his body erupting into that dreadful form? What would his last thoughts have been?\n\nAnd was he in there, somewhere, thinking now? Adequate hoped not\u2014especially when he saw blazes of light. Gunfire struck the combat form, ripping into its body. Adequate moved from monitor to monitor to get a better view. For a moment, it seemed the threat was ended\u2014\n\n\u2014until the sick, glowing bulge on the back of what had once been Dutiful's body burst open, spraying steaming ichor and releasing\u2014what? He could not tell, for they were moving so quickly.\n\nHis ancilla, however, had already figured it out. \"Infection forms.\"\n\nCapital-Enforcer and his companions had turned, falling back as garish pods propelled themselves across the floor and walls of the vane's hallways on twisted appendages. Adequate switched from scene to scene, seeing in one moment the frantic warriors, turning to shoot\u2014and in the next, virulent carriers rushing toward them, seeking new hosts.\n\nThe defenders' boltshots spoke again and again, shredding some attackers, missing others. Adequate longed for something to do\u2014and then got his chance.\n\n\"Hub officer,\" Capital called out. \"Close bulkhead one-stroke-four!\"\n\nAdequate quickly sought out the control. It would sever part of one part of the vane from another, and help prevent the Flood from accessing the spoke that led to the hub. He activated it, and watched with satisfaction on a monitor as the bulkhead slammed down, squashing a gruesome infection form.\n\nHe was unaccountably happy. His first strike against the Flood, against anything, had been delivered. But his reverie was cut short when his ancilla, tied in with the core computer, reported. \"Sprightly-Runner is in danger.\"\n\n\"She's working Vane Two.\" Adequate hurried to another set of monitors and beheld the female Forerunner fleeing for her life up the long tunnel, not even stopping to fire. Behind her, Adequate saw on the reverse angles, was a raging mass of pursuing infection forms\u2014as well as one of the combat forms, even more energetic than the one he'd seen earlier. Its limbs thrashed against the walls and ceiling, propelling it forward.\n\nIt wasn't just one vane infected, Adequate realized. There were two sources for the Flood, unconnected. The only place they met was in the hub\u2014where he was.\n\nHe watched helplessly as Sprightly outraced the horde. \"She must reach the next cutoff!\" he said. Emergency bulkheads existed every eighty meters, ready to close off the tunnel behind her. He called out to the screens. \"Run!\"\n\n\"We should quickly drop the temperature in the spokes,\" Adequate's ancilla said. \"It may retard their speed and growth.\"\n\n\"Show me!\" he replied.\n\nThe AI directed him to the appropriate console, where he made the command. Adequate knew it would have been much easier had his ancilla been given the power to operate, rather than simply monitor, Seclusion Spiral's systems\u2014but then, a Flood-infected guardian might well inherit control of the station. It was to be avoided.\n\nAdequate moved back to the monitors dedicated to the spoke leading to Vane Two. If Sprightly was fending off the Flood, he could no longer tell. \"The surveillance imagery's gone!\" he cried.\n\n\"I do not know if it can be reestablished,\" his ancilla said. \"The Flood may have compromised one of the trunk lines, cutting power to the\u2014\"\n\nAdequate didn't hear the rest. Gripping the boltshot that had been in his hand since the crisis started, he dashed into the entrance to tunnel two, racing to save an individual who had never treated him with respect. \"Crew, I am going to aid Sprightly,\" he called into his helmet mic.\n\n\"Do not leave the hub!\" someone yelled back. He couldn't hear who had said it; there was too much gunfire in the background. Not to mention his own ancilla, which had never stopped urging him to turn around.\n\n\"This is unwise,\" it said again after he had gone another fifty meters. \"Sprightly is not answering hails. You cannot know what her condition is.\"\n\n\"She is alone. That is her condition.\" Adequate knew simple math. They had pulled one sentry each from the other four vanes to assist Capital-Enforcer: that left three in Vane Two. He speculated that both her companions had been infected: one was the combat form, while the unfortunate other's body must have given rise to the infection forms. Sprightly would surely be next.\n\nHis ancilla would not be silent. \"The hub must be saved, Adequate. This is the wrong course of action.\"\n\n\"You said yourself the power is fluctuating. I may have to cycle the emergency bulkheads shut by hand. The hub must be saved.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you should have tried to do it from the hub first.\"\n\nAdequate wasn't going to do that. It might have meant closing Sprightly off, trapping her with the nightmare. Darkness lay ahead, but he knew where he was. Observation windows lined the tunnel to the right, where a few flashes of lightning could be counted on for illumination. It was one of his favorite sections to patrol, and the place where he had first seen the\u2014\n\nSomething slammed wetly against the viewport. The jarring impact knocked the Forerunner off his feet. Rolling, he drew his weapon and pointed it at the window, wondering how the Flood could be outside in that environment.\n\nBut what he saw was nothing like any of the Flood forms he had ever seen in lectures. Instead, a thing with colossal transparent wings hovered in front of the observation port. The avian\u2014for that is all he knew to call it\u2014was more than twice his size, with a tailfin that darted madly around as the creature bobbed in the storm. At the being's center was a crystalline carapace, within which he could clearly make out three natural lights: two blue and one red.\n\nForgetting completely about the Flood, Adequate stood and edged closer to the window. The lights in the avian's gut seemed to pulsate as he did so. Were they eyes, he wondered, and were they watching him?\n\nAnd had they been watching him all along?\n\n\"Ancilla\u2014\"\n\n\"Unknown entity.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" he said, watching the beast fighting against the wind. Seclusion Spiral was spinning, yet somehow this thing was keeping pace with the spoke of the giant propeller without being swept away. It backed off and zoomed down into the blackness. Adequate ran further along the tunnel, hoping to see more\u2014but it was gone.\n\n\"No avian species has ever been reported on Seclusion,\" his ancilla said. \"The planet is lifeless.\"\n\n\"Evidently not. Unless it is with the\u2014\" Suddenly remembering, he turned back up the hall and started to run. He had since forgotten all about Sprightly.\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nHe didn't ignore the ancilla's warning this time, which brought up a magnified infrared view of the hall before his eyes. \"That mass up ahead is Sprightly. Her body is exhibiting evidence of transmogrification.\"\n\n\"It has her then,\" he said. Reluctantly, he lifted his weapon. \"You're certain?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe started firing down the hall. He could hear screeching noises as his shots found targets. Sprightly, perhaps? Or more of the infection forms? He did not want to know. He just understood that he would have run straight into danger had the thing in the window not slowed his progress.\n\nHe stopped firing long enough to make a dash for a set of levers protruding from the wall. He started throwing them, intending to cycle the emergency door shut, leaving Sprightly\u2014or whatever she was now\u2014beyond it.\n\nBut he was only halfway completed when the station took over, with the door cycling automatically. Stymied, he said, \"Someone must have accomplished that from the hub. I imagine someone else fell back to it.\"\n\n\"We have another problem,\" his ancilla said as Adequate turned to walk back down the hallway.\n\n\"I see it.\" The light at the end of the passageway was gone. \"They've closed all the bulkheads!\"\n\nHe tried for several minutes to reach someone on his communicator\u2014to no avail. Behind him, he heard something pounding against the door that had just shut.\n\n\"That would be Sprightly\u2014as something else now,\" Adequate said. \"Can she\u2014can it get in?\"\n\n\"Eventually.\"\n\n\"Can we get out?\" He already knew the answer. It wasn't possible to cycle open the emergency door ahead from his side.\n\n\"I may have a way,\" his ancilla replied. \"Check the inside wall, thirty-one meters ahead. Quickly\u2014time is now of the essence.\"\n\nAdequate had walked the five identical tunnels to the vanes daily for fifteen solar years, but had never thought too greatly about the mechanisms behind the inside wall. Certainly, he understood there to be apparatuses bringing particles back from the collectors in the vanes\u2014but he had never dreamed of opening one of the access panels. That was expressly forbidden\u2014both in his training, and in the stark, stern verbiage just beside the latch. It was never intended to be opened under any circumstances.\n\nThat the latch did not work was not surprising in the least. Hearing the station suffering behind him as the Flood tested the emergency bulkhead, Adequate applied his boltshot to the latch, silently apologized to his administrators, and fired.\n\nThe handle finally moved\u2014and the panel started to unseal.\n\n\"Be careful,\" his ancilla said. \"The area inside is under extreme pressure.\"\n\nAdequate stood off to the side of the door and forced the panel open.\n\nHe was startled when the expected breeze went the other way, blowing from the hallway into the opening. Once the mini-gale subsided, he stepped before the aperture and shined his built-in helmet light inside.\n\n\"There's\u2014\" Adequate stopped in mid-statement. He couldn't understand what he was looking at. \"Shouldn't this be filled with harvested particles?\"\n\n\"Correct,\" his ancilla said, \"if it were in operation. Materials collected by the vanes are conveyed to the holding tanks at the hub by gases under pressure.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the Flood attack deactivated the collectors?\"\n\n\"No. The fact that you were able to open the service hatchway at all indicates that the tube was never pressurized. Your armor's sensors also do not indicate the presence of many remnant particles. Adequate . . .\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Based on my calculations, this vane of the station has not been used in more than ten solar years.\"\n\n\"Ten years . . . ?\" Adequate couldn't quite believe it. He climbed inside and looked to and fro. \"How could a vane have been out of service this long without the station's systems knowing about it?\"\n\n\"Unable to form a conclusion at this time. It also seems unlikely that this one section alone could have been out of service. I now believe that none of the vanes could have been in operation.\"\n\nThis admission stunned Adequate. \"That . . . that is impossible.\"\n\nThe ancilla projected a cascade of physics equations onto the inside of his faceplate. \"Unless all the transfer tubes are pressurized, Seclusion Spiral's rotation would go out of balance. Its precession would be noticeable, and would have to be corrected for. The only possible conclusion is that, in the last decade, this station has not collected a single particle.\"\n\n\"Are you damaged? They send a tanker here every year. They spend six days filling it, while the service crew inspects the station. They just did it a few weeks ago!\"\n\n\"I do not have enough information to speculate further. But you must seal the panel quickly, before the Flood arrives. Simply reenter the hub from the central storage tank hatch.\"\n\nThe ancilla was correct about how to get back into the hub, but wrong about how easy a task it would be. The entire journey was in the dark, with Adequate looking behind him in panic at every sound, fearful the Flood had entered the chamber. Several times, he had attempted to contact others aboard the station\u2014but they either could not hear his calls, or were too busy to answer.\n\nHe hoped it was one or the other.\n\nThe main collection tank was hardest to navigate, narrowing and splitting into seven smaller hexagonal passageways. It took precious time for Adequate to figure out that six went to filtration systems, while the seventh headed for the tank\u2014and he'd been forced to crawl on his stomach to get into it, then make an acrobatic leap for the handle of the exit hatch.\n\nHe'd found the hub abandoned, with bulkheads shut on all but two tunnels. The monitors dedicated to watching the spokes and vanes showed nothing. \"Someone's been here,\" Adequate observed. \"They must have closed these other bulkheads.\"\n\nHis ancilla established a new connection with the central computer. \"There is a message here from Capital-Enforcer's ancilla on the hub's core computer,\" his ancilla said. \"Power has been lost to the transponders that relay messages between personnel.\"\n\nThat was both bad news and a relief. \"Capital's alive.\" He looked to the two open tunnels, leading to Vanes Three and Five. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Capital's ancilla reports that they sealed the spokes leading to Vanes One, Two, and Four\u2014there must have been an outbreak on Four\u2014and that our surviving personnel have entered the tunnels for Vanes Three and Five, expecting that the hub here will be overtaken soon. Capital's ancilla says here that they intend a last stand.\"\n\nAdequate looked from one open tunnel to the other. \"Should I follow? And if so, which way?\"\n\n\"I lack sufficient information to advise.\" A pause. \"But I do not agree with my fellow ancilla. There is no reason to believe the spokes are any more defensible than the hub\u2014especially when the vanes at the far end were the sources of the Flood infestation to begin with.\"\n\nHow did it get there in the first place? Adequate wondered. It was highly improbable that the Flood could have arrived here independently. Yes, Flood spores could spread on meteors and comets, as well as derelict space equipment hurtling around the stars. But Seclusion was exactly that\u2014secluded, far from other systems and slipspace corridors alike.\n\nIt made no sense that the Flood could have arisen from below: nothing should be able to survive beneath the furious clouds.\n\nBut he had just seen otherwise.\n\n\"Could the avian have brought the infestation?\"\n\n\"It is unlikely. If the Flood were already present down in the storm, it logically should have found the station before now. You have said you have seen the avian before.\"\n\n\"I'm pleased you believe me now.\"\n\n\"The timing makes me suspect something else.\" It took milliseconds for the ancilla, in concert with the hub's command computer, to examine its theory. \"Yes. The infestation likely began in the replacement digester units just installed by the service team.\"\n\n\"The apparatus that breaks down waste. That's why the outbreak started on the tips of the vanes.\"\n\n\"Correct. They bring in fresh pods of microorganisms annually. Flood spores must have been mixed in with them and been awakened. The malleable seals would have given them a means of escape. They must have infected several of our sentries, taking them directly to combat forms\u2014and their bodies gave rise to the infection forms we now see. I also suspect the Flood is drawing on the biomass in the digester pods to create an environment that might exponentially increase the rate and severity of infestation.\"\n\n\"The tanker brought the digester pods,\" Adequate said. \"Did they report any problems?\"\n\n\"Checking.\" After a beat, the ancilla spoke again. \"There has been no report of the supply ship reaching any waypoint following its departure here. It has not kept to its schedule.\"\n\n\"No emergency call?\"\n\n\"Negative. I conjecture that any Flood outbreak carried aboard the vessel could have debilitated it in slipspace.\"\n\nThat meant an unspeakably horrible end for those aboard\u2014his colleagues for the past solar year and longer. He could imagine them, all happily headed off to their new assignments and away from the purgatory of Seclusion and Barely-Adequate\u2014only to find their flight and their lives cut off. He had not been particularly friendly with any of them, but his ambitions were joined to theirs. And now all were snuffed out.\n\nOnly afterward did he consider another implication. No one can come back to help us.\n\nAnd then another thought, just as dark, struck him. \"They did service on every vane,\" Adequate said, looking from side to side in alarm. \"That means Vanes Three and Five are no longer safe, after all.\"\n\nHe did not wait for the ancilla to confirm his theory. Adequate chose the nearest tunnel and ran.\n\nVane Five was it, the last stand.\n\nAdequate had only gotten partway down Vane Three when he had seen the Flood rampaging toward him\u2014including, to his horror, the transformed figures of two more of his companions. He had retreated and sealed the tunnel, leaving only one option left. There, down the spoke leading to Vane Five, he had found Capital-Enforcer blazing away.\n\nAdequate reached the warrior's side and joined in the shooting. There was no accounting for what faced him now. He had lost track of how many comrades had fallen, had lost any sense of the mechanics of transformation. All he knew was that the station that had been his home, antiseptic and pristine, for so many years was in the throes of a rampaging disease. Its arteries and veins now coursing with enormous stalking bipeds, with herds of skittering infection forms.\n\nAnd he and Capital were the only antibodies.\n\nSo many, so unimaginably hideous. Until today, he had gone fifteen years without firing his boltshot. Now, he didn't want to take his finger off the trigger. Destruction was the only answer for such creatures. He targeted a greenish-colored infection form\u2014and reveled as the running pustule popped. His weapon found the hulking combat form, knocking it backward but doing no damage. Less satisfaction there. He could no longer make out the straight lines of the floor, the wall, the ceiling: the whole spoke was alive. He existed to kill it.\n\nBetween the dual attack, the Flood's charge abated. Adequate's ancilla studied his armor's long-range sensors and reported that the creatures were still up ahead, but regrouping. \"We are the only ones left,\" Adequate said to Capital as they huddled behind a half-closed emergency door for cover. \"All the other vanes are sealed and infested.\"\n\n\"We have to scuttle the station, plunge it into the gas giant,\" Capital said, his voice grave. \"Or it will sit here as a festering trap forever. Anyone who tries to board will suffer as we have.\"\n\nAdequate took the news with a combination of resignation and disappointment. Destruction in this manner was a standard protocol for gas mines and other similar stations at high risk.\n\n\"Do you have your master key?\"\n\nAdequate fumbled for it in a compartment on his utility belt. Capital found his own. \"It takes both your key and mine to get into the catastrophic-response system. You know where to use it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The system was a fearsome-looking console in the hub, one Adequate had long preferred not to look at.\n\nCapital put his key in Adequate's gloved hand. \"Take them both. If I fall . . . end it.\"\n\nAdequate stared at the pair of electronic keys. He had grown to hate Seclusion Spiral over the last few years, and yet . . . it was still his home. \"Are you certain you don't want to do it?\"\n\n\"You have seniority. It is your duty to remain.\" Capital fired another volley and looked back at him. \"No less is expected from any of us. We were all sent here to sacrifice ourselves against the Flood.\"\n\n\"Sacrifice ourselves? Here?\" Adequate didn't understand. \"Why would the Librarian think the Flood would come here? This is the last place the Flood should want.\"\n\n\"So we all thought. But I saw something out the window this morning that made me believe otherwise.\"\n\nAdequate's eyes widened. The avian? \"You saw it too?\"\n\n\"I saw three of them.\" Down the tunnel, chaotic movement. Capital turned back to his shooting. \"Forget about me. Go!\"\n\nAdequate did as he was told, still not quite understanding.\n\nFive great doors, all sealed shut\u2014and the monitors in the hub that still worked showed the Flood gathering outside every one. Adequate had seen on the monitors that Capital had fallen and been transformed into what he had tried to destroy. It was only a matter of time before the monsters' battering undermined the hub, Adequate's refuge of last resort.\n\nYet here he stood for long minutes, motionless, with one key already placed in the catastrophic-response-system console. The other remained in his hand. He stared at it, trying to ignore the pummeling sounds coming from all around. Those sounds, and the voice of his ancilla, constantly urging him to activate the device and destroy the station.\n\nHe knew what he needed to do\u2014and yet something in what Capital had said still puzzled him. In the last hour, he had learned more about Seclusion Spiral and its surroundings than he had found out in fifteen years residing here.\n\nAnd all at once, it made sense. \"Ancilla!\"\n\n\"What, Adequate?\"\n\n\"I know what's been happening.\"\n\n\"Of course you do,\" the AI responded, as animated as it ever sounded. \"We are under siege!\"\n\n\"Not that. I meant during the last ten solar years. I know why the particle transfer tubes are empty\u2014why the collector's systems have been offline all this time.\" He paused. \"I believe you know what I mean too.\"\n\n\"Your reason centers are your private space, Adequate\u2014I will not know unless you express the concept. But do it quickly, or\u2014\"\n\n\"The avians. I believe there are many more, down in the storm\u2014and that my superiors must have known of their existence. You calculated that the station hasn't been harvesting particles for more than ten solar years. Why is that?\"\n\n\"I am unaware\u2014\"\n\n\"It is because ten years ago, the Forerunners discovered them here. But they mentioned nothing\u2014because by then, they were aware of the threat the Flood posed. They didn't want to open this new species to destruction.\" He paused. \"No, not destruction. Exploitation. Absorbing a species capable of thriving in the skies of a gas giant could provide the Flood with a unique and dangerous new set of capabilities.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I understand.\"\n\nAdequate shook his head, frustrated. As intelligent as his ancilla was, it sometimes lacked in imagination\u2014particularly when it came to visualizing worst-case scenarios. \"Don't you see? Imagine what this species could mean for a world under siege. The Flood could deploy the avians from their ships, never having to land, never having to sacrifice their vessels on entry. A Flood ship could endanger a whole world as soon as it was in range!\" The thought alone nearly made him cringe. \"That explains the measures that have been taken. The Librarian had to make sure the Flood never discovered the avians.\"\n\nMore hammering from outside. \"This order of events is illogical, Adequate. If they wanted to protect the avians of Seclusion from the Flood, they could have removed the station, rather than have it here attracting attention.\"\n\n\"Possibly they were afraid the Flood would find its way here regardless. As long as any Forerunner knew the avians existed, the potential existed for the Flood to gain that knowledge too.\"\n\n\"Then why did they not simply remove the avians themselves, through the Conservation Measure?\"\n\n\"You know the conditions in the winds below. It might not have been possible. If any avians remained . . .\" He trailed off. \"Perhaps it was too late. That is why they left the station in place, with a skeleton crew. I believe Capital-Enforcer suspected we were here to be a decoy.\"\n\n\"A decoy?\"\n\n\"I know.\" The concept was both enlightening and infuriating. \"They realized the Flood would find Seclusion one day\u2014and it did, via our tanker. And they knew what would happen next.\"\n\nThe ancilla finally understood. \"You would have destroyed the station\u2014and with it, this infestation of the Flood.\"\n\n\"Then this entire world would be cut off from the Flood, seemingly devoid of any viable hosts.\" He turned over the second key in his hand. \"So the other sentries and I have been here as a living shield, an offering. The Forerunners assigned us here to ensure that when the Flood finally arrived at Seclusion, it wouldn't detect the avians. And the galaxy would be spared a potential Flood form capable of immediately rendering worlds defenseless because of their resilience to extremes.\"\n\nThe ancilla paused long seconds before answering. \"The conjecture is possible. Given the electrical interference of the storm below, the Flood could well be tricked into thinking that any bioelectrical activity in this region is localized to the station above.\"\n\n\"So the Flood would consume us\u2014and then leave what's below alone.\"\n\n\"The conjecture is possible.\"\n\nAdequate sighed. \"I am no longer enamored of my assignment.\"\n\nThe din rose. \"Structural failure on door two is imminent,\" the ancilla said. \"What will you do?\"\n\n\"My duty, I suppose.\" Adequate took a look at the abominations on the monitors\u2014and inserted the key into the slot on the console beside Capital's. A panel whirred open, exposing a blinking green button. \"Good-bye, ancilla. I am sorry you were not joined with a better Manipular.\"\n\n\"I have no complaints, Adequate. Good-bye.\"\n\nAdequate awoke in darkness, with his body pinned upside down between a heavy object and a metal surface. Every muscle in his body screamed. If this was death, it was more painful than he'd been led to expect.\n\nWith extreme effort, he forced the massive structure trapping him backward. It was a data processing tower, he realized; it had come centimeters from crushing the life out of him against the hub's wall. On his hands and knees, he struggled to get his bearings.\n\nThe command center looked as if a giant had shaken it like a toy. Every furnishing, every piece of equipment that could move had relocated. Woozily, he struggled to get to his feet. His body felt heavy. Was the hub accelerating upward? He couldn't tell. The whole facility felt as if it were underwater. Above, the skylights had closed, protective shields locked into place. He could make out sizable dents on the ceiling nearby, artifacts of the great shaking.\n\n\"Ancilla? Ancilla?\"\n\nFor the first time since he had been united with the automated assistant, Adequate failed to get a response. That fact terrified him more than anything that had yet befallen. Even though he had always felt apart from the group for fifteen solar years, he had never felt completely alone, thanks to his ancilla. He couldn't imagine going on without it.\n\nAdequate activated his helmet light and staggered around the chamber, righting equipment as he went. Finding one of the stations governing power, he tripped a switch and watched as several of the systems in the hub came back online.\n\nHe thought he heard wind coming through what was likely a broken seal in his helmet. Focusing, it resolved into a hum at the back of his head. Seconds later, it became a voice.\n\n\". . . Adequate?\"\n\n\"Ancilla!\"\n\n\"I . . . apologize. My systems appear to have gone into hibernation during whatever happened.\" A pause. \"What did happen?\"\n\n\"I was hoping you could tell me.\" There were no sounds coming from the five doorways to the spokes, and none of the monitors displaying feeds from that part of the station had come back online. \"Are you in contact with the core computer?\"\n\n\"My connection is still resetting. Perhaps look out a viewport.\"\n\nAdequate stumbled toward another console and activated a control. Above, shields slid down into one of the skylight window frames, unleashing a blaze of color. It took several seconds for Adequate's eyes to adjust.\n\n\"I thought perhaps we had launched into space.\" He squinted. \"Where are we?\"\n\n\"Open the rest.\"\n\nHe did so\u2014and the skylights ringing the circular room revealed a spectral sea. Tendrils of clouds swirled and danced back and forth, lit by near-constant flashes of multicolored lightning.\n\nAnd everywhere were the avians.\n\nHe had wanted a long look at them. He had it now. Whole flocks of avians coursed across the sky, swooping about with ease and in comfort. There was none of the tentative, fearful nature of the being he had seen earlier. No, here, they had command\u2014and \"here\" was not the place he had been before.\n\nAdequate fell to his knees, and not just because of the pull on his body. \"We are deep in the storm. We are in their home.\"\n\nFlying creatures soared past the windows, tiny microbursts of electricity flashing across their rippling forms. There seemed, somehow, to be a logic to it: was it perhaps their means of communication, Adequate wondered? He felt like one of the explorers he had heard of, living undersea on a strange world, communing with a culture that existed hidden from view.\n\nAnd now there were smaller ones, identical in form and shape to the others but for their size, fluttering against the panes above. Not threatening the station, at all\u2014but he could tell they were excited. And there, on another avian's dorsal side, clung what he at first thought was a bumpy fin. On closer look, they appeared to be even smaller avians, still. Were they the species' young, or something else? Every few moments, they flitted from the back of one adult to another. What kind of community might they have?\n\nA minute in which he could not take his eyes from the skylight ended when his ancilla spoke. \"Connection reacquired. The console function apparently did destroy the Flood\u2014by shedding the station's vanes.\"\n\nAdequate got to his feet and looked to the doors with alarm. \"We would fall without them!\"\n\n\"We did. And so did the vanes.\" The ancilla paused. \"According to the hub's computer, when you toggled the control, the spokes holding the vanes explosively ejected. Cut off from the rotating hub, each one was slung kilometers away.\"\n\n\"What happened to them?\"\n\n\"They were swept into the electrical storm and ripped to shreds. The hub's sensors saw it all, before it lost too much elevation.\"\n\n\"So the Flood . . . ?\"\n\n\"Gone. The computer believes the vanes were pulverized. No Flood infection could possibly have survived there\u2014and no invasive elements have been detected on the hub.\"\n\n\"But how did we survive?\"\n\n\"We fell many kilometers\u2014until the hub's engines ignited.\"\n\n\"They did? I thought the thrusters were only used to brake the hub when the station was deployed from orbit\u2014and for elevation when it got caught in downdrafts.\"\n\n\"It appears,\" the ancilla said, \"that the hub's systems considered the loss of the vanes a catastrophic event\u2014and that it fired the thrusters before we descended to a crushing depth.\"\n\n\"It certainly felt catastrophic.\" He paused and looked out the skylight again. \"Can it take us back up?\"\n\nAnother pause. \"The central computer does not believe so. The crosswinds above are too strong. We appear to be hovering in a zone of relative calm within the vortex, at equilibrium between the tempest above and the pressure below.\"\n\n\"How long can we remain here?\"\n\n\"As long as the thrusters burn.\"\n\n\"And how long is that?\"\n\n\"Indefinitely. The stubs that used to hold the vanes deployed electrostatic collectors; they are now drawing power from outside. It should be sufficient to keep us stable\u2014and for life-support needs. But you will feel slightly heavier for the constant acceleration.\"\n\n\"I will live,\" Adequate said. Then he smiled at that. I will live.\n\n\"The food pantry was freshly stocked\u2014and for twenty-one,\" his ancilla said. \"With those reserves and your armor's defalt sustainment system, you should be able to survive for . . . well, a lifetime. You will have the complete run of the living quarters.\"\n\nAdequate didn't register the comment. His eyes were again on the avians, hovering outside. They flitted back and forth\u2014and one paused particularly close, looking in. He wondered if it was the one who he'd seen earlier, above.\n\n\"If the avians live down here, why did they visit us at the cloud tops?\"\n\n\"Insufficient information. Perhaps they consume for food the same particles Seclusion Spiral was designed to harvest.\" The ancilla paused. \"Or perhaps they were curious.\"\n\n\"They are wonderful,\" Adequate said. The avian outside glistened, electrical energy seeming to well from somewhere within its form. They could clearly fly to the top of the enormous storm, if they wanted to; in his mind's eye, he could see them soaring the cosmos, using their mysterious internal power for propulsion. But he could not imagine them ever wanting to leave, not with such a lovely world here below providing all they needed.\n\n\"The Forerunners were correct to protect them from the Flood,\" his ancilla said.\n\nAdequate let out a deep breath. \"It is a shame these magnificent things do not know what sacrifice has been made for them.\"\n\n\"We may teach them, Adequate. We have plenty of time\u2014and a number of methods by which the hub might establish communication.\" His ancilla sounded almost excited. \"Before long, you might be able to tell them the designations of all those who protected them\u2014including yours.\"\n\n\"I have never cared for mine.\" Adequate chuckled, in spite of himself. \"Spare me that.\"\n\n\"No, I think you are Adequate-Observer no longer.\"\n\nHe didn't know what the ancilla meant. \"I have not evolved.\"\n\n\"I disagree. From today, I think you should be called Defender-of-the-Storm.\"\n\nThe Forerunner mentally tried it on. \"I like it.\" He continued wandering the room, constantly looking up at the avians. \"And perhaps they have stories to tell us too.\"\n\n## A NECESSARY TRUTH\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nTROY DENNING\n\nThis story takes place three months after the United Nations Space Command's extraction of the 717th research battalion by the elite Spartan Blue Team from the volatile and besieged colony of Gao (Halo: Last Light).\n\n1420 hours, October 14, 2553 (military calendar)\n\nOfficers' Club, UNSC Recreational Facility 6055-NA-A\n\nLiberty District, Neos Atlantis, Alcides System\n\nIt had been just a hundred days since Veta Lopis left Gao to join the Office of Naval Intelligence, and already she'd become one of those jump-weary planet hoppers who never had time to enjoy the local wonders.\n\nToday, she was on Neos Atlantis, facing a panoramic window at one end of the officers' club in UNSC Recreational Facility 6055-NA-A. The window afforded a spectacular view of the Theran Crown, a gloomy, spire-studded cryovolcano ringed by ice cliffs as green as emeralds. But Veta was actually watching the interior of the window, using the reflections on the glass to keep tabs on her three young subordinates.\n\nAsh-G099 and Mark-G313 were seated in the back of the crowded club, a half-empty pitcher of lemon pels resting on a high-top table between them. At only fourteen, they continued to show hints of adolescence in their soft-featured faces, but their size and musculature were those of twenty-year-old junior lieutenants fresh out of ODST school\u2014which happened to be their cover legend.\n\nStill, they really didn't look like young officers on leave. Both were sitting bolt upright, constantly scanning their designated surveillance arcs and paying no attention to the gravball match on the screens above the bar in the center of the room. The empty cocktail glasses scattered across their table resembled exactly what they were\u2014props designed to make it appear as if the pair had been drinking for hours. Most telling of all was their reaction to the young women who sauntered past and glanced in their direction, clearly attempting to catch the eye of one or the other. Mark returned their smiles with complete indifference, while Ash merely looked sheepish and shy.\n\nIt would take a trained observer about two minutes to penetrate their covers\u2014which was the whole idea, of course\u2014but Veta thought the pair might be overdoing their \"incompetent operatives\" act just a little. The opposition in today's training exercise was a top ONI espionage unit, and, if her Ferret Team hoped to prevail, they couldn't allow their foes to smell a trap.\n\n\"Guys . . . you need to loosen up a bit, or Oscar Squad won't buy it.\" Veta pretended she was speaking into the commpad strapped to her wrist. \"Down some of that pels.\"\n\nAsh and Mark's only response was to raise their mugs and drink. Like everyone on the team, they had a thread-style microphone sewn into their clothing and a miniaturized reception-dot concealed near one eardrum, but field protocol dictated that subordinate operatives remain comm-silent unless reporting a development to the team leader.\n\nVeta could not quite believe she was ordering a pair of fourteen-year-olds to guzzle alcohol, but they were being trained for undercover work. They were bound to face times when their lives depended on their ability to imbibe all manner of spirits, and ONI had taught them how to do it without losing their edge.\n\nStill, fourteen. Sometimes, Veta wondered if letting ONI recruit her had been smart . . . not that there had been much choice. Her career as Gao's top homicide investigator was over. In fact, so was her entire life on Gao, period. After helping Blue Team escape with a powerful Forerunner artifact\u2014one coveted by the planet's unscrupulous president\u2014it would have been a death sentence to stay behind.\n\nA few gulps later, Ash stopped drinking and belched, and Mark put his mug down and wiped his mouth. Neither looked relaxed. Veta sighed and feigned speaking into her commpad again.\n\n\"Try to look like you're having fun.\" She shifted in her seat and began to watch the pair in her peripheral vision. \"Smile at the ladies.\"\n\nAsh spotted three women approaching, probably on their way to the exit, and signaled Mark. The pair waited until their targets were adjacent to the table, then executed simultaneous stool-pivots and flashed broad, toothy smiles.\n\nThe women rolled their eyes and hurried out the door.\n\n\"Oh man, you guys,\" Veta said. \"When we get back to the Mill, remind me to request a flirting course for the entire team.\"\n\nAsh dropped his chin and stared into his pels. Mark shrugged and went back to watching the entrance. Veta told herself not to worry. Her Ferrets had a lot to learn before they were ready for a real field assignment, but they were good students and tireless workers. They had accomplished in a hundred days what most ONI trainees needed a year to achieve, and she had no doubt they would soon master the necessary social skills.\n\nVeta was more concerned about what they needed to unlearn. Her subordinates were all Spartan-IIIs with superhuman reflexes and nearly a decade of military training, and they remained soldiers at heart. When pressured or surprised, they had a tendency to revert to lethal action . . . and starting a firefight was seldom the best solution for a spy in a tight spot. In fact, Serin Osman\u2014the ONI admiral in charge of the Ferret program\u2014was so concerned about the situation that she had warned Veta they might need to rethink building the team around Spartans.\n\nAnd that Veta could not allow.\n\nLike all Spartan-IIIs, her people had been recruited as war orphans and molded into supersoldiers through a rigorous program of training, discipline, and biological augmentations. But they also came from Gamma Company, which meant they had undergone a special round of enhancements that resulted in an unstable brain chemistry\u2014a liability that ONI now deemed an unacceptable public-relations hazard with the potential to damage the entire Spartan branch.\n\nVeta had no idea what had become of the rest of the Gammas, but she had agreed to lead a four-person Ferret Team for the sake of the three she had met on Gao, and she had no intention of letting Osman remove them.\n\nThey were just kids. They deserved someone who thought of them as something more than weapons.\n\nHer third trainee, Olivia-G291, was at the near end of the bar. Wearing a formfitting sheath dress and carefully applied makeup, she appeared older than her two fellow Gammas and could easily pass for a first lieutenant\u2014or even a captain. She was being chatted up by a pudgy guy in wrinkled trousers and a collarless four-pocket jacket, and she was leaning toward him and smiling, listening intently and maintaining steady eye contact. Like dozens of women in the club, she looked like she was enjoying the company of her companion and was interested in spending more time with him.\n\nThere was only one flaw in Olivia's cover. Her suitor appeared to be distinctly civilian and at least three times her age, and the disparity was drawing puzzled glances from younger men and raised brows from disapproving women. Even the servers were scowling as they passed, eyeing the fellow as though they could not understand how such a lecher had made it past the door guards.\n\nAnd that was a good question. Located in an ambiguous zone between the Inner and Outer Colonies, Neos Atlantis was a high-security world surrounded by orbital maintenance docks that serviced only UNSC war vessels. The installations employed close to a hundred thousand civilian technicians, but a security-conscious UNSC maintained segregated recreational facilities for the sole use of fleet personnel. So it was hard to believe this civilian had simply wandered into the club on his own.\n\nHoping to get a closer look at the subject, Veta faced the central bar and raised her glass as though signaling for a fresh drink. She saw no sign that the fellow's girth and flabby jowls were a disguise, and it seemed unlikely that any member of an elite espionage unit would lapse into such poor fighting trim. The guy was probably just a former officer who had been hitting the bottle too hard since retirement, but Veta knew better than to make unwarranted assumptions. During her time on Gao, she had taken down half a dozen vicious murderers who passed as happy family men and pillars of their community.\n\nA blond woman in the khaki pants and white blouse of a server stopped next to Olivia and her companion with an open bottle of sparkling zantelle and two flutes. Olivia's eyes widened, but the companion merely smiled and handed her a flute, then took the tray and turned to find a table. The server immediately began to look for thirsty customers and spotted Veta's upraised glass. She smiled and came over.\n\n\"Another whiskey?\" The server was tall and fit, with pale blue eyes and laugh lines at the edge of her mouth. \"The Titan Smoke is smooth and silky, if you haven't tried it yet.\"\n\n\"Actually, I'm not a whiskey drinker,\" Veta said. She found it odd that a server didn't know the difference between a rocks glass and a doffer, but it was probably hard to find experienced bar personnel who could pass a rigorous security check. \"But I'd love another two-tailed comet.\"\n\nThe woman flashed a sheepish grin, then said, \"You don't know what you're missing, ma'am.\" She took Veta's doffer and turned to leave. \"But a two-tail it is.\"\n\nOnce the server was gone, Veta glanced back toward the bar\u2014and saw no sign of Olivia and her companion. All of the tables in the area were occupied by groups of bantering customers. Veta faced the window again and searched the interior reflections for some sign of the missing pair.\n\nWhen she found none, she pretended to speak into her commpad again. \"Who has eyes on Olivia?\"\n\nMark took a swallow from his mug and shot a glance across the far end of the bar, then Ash propped his elbows on the table and cast a more leisurely look in the same direction. The corner they were indicating was hidden behind the club's huge central bar, but Veta knew from her initial reconnaissance that it contained a handful of cozy booths. There was also an emergency exit and a kitchen entrance, which meant it would be a good spot for a capture attempt.\n\nVeta was tempted to move closer so she would be ready to offer support if Oscar Squad tried something, but changing seats would only confirm to their observers that she and Olivia were both operatives.\n\n\"Okay, keep her in view.\" Veta paused and smiled to misdirect any Oscar Squad observers, then added, \"And, 'Livi, don't let that guy move you anywhere else. There's something off about him.\"\n\nThe order went unacknowledged, of course, and Veta used her commpad to bring up the feed from Olivia's microphone. The sound quality was dull and scratchy, and the only thing she could hear was the murmuring of the civilian's deep voice punctuated by the occasional jingle of polite laughter from Olivia.\n\nThe server returned with a rocks glass filled with a dark, coppery liquid that was definitely not a two-tailed comet. Veta found the poor service annoying, but the last thing she wanted to do was make herself memorable by pointing out an inexperienced server's mistake. Besides, she had more important things to worry about\u2014Olivia's laughter was lapsing into a cackle that suggested the zantelle was having more of an impact than it should. Veta thanked the server and paid by pressing her thumb to a tabpad. She picked up the glass and sniffed. Whiskey. She pretended to sip the lip-blistering stuff.\n\nThe voice of Olivia's companion grew more distinct, as though he were leaning closer, and Veta heard him asking, \". . . were you posted before the Rochester?\"\n\n\"The Academy at Mare Nubium, of course.\" Olivia was drawing on her cover legend, but her tone was mocking, as though even she didn't believe what she was saying. \"I graduated seventeenth in my class.\"\n\n\"Really?\" the civilian asked. \"I didn't know Spartan-IIIs were trained at the Luna OCS.\"\n\nVeta's gut knotted, and she had to resist the urge to rise and start toward Olivia. According to Admiral Osman, the opposition hadn't been briefed on the composition of Veta's team. But Oscar Squad was an espionage unit, with the capacity to do its own research.\n\nOlivia remained quiet for a moment, then finally giggled and said, \"There's a lot you don't know about me.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" he said. \"You can tell Uncle Spencer. You're from Gamma Company, aren't you?\"\n\nOlivia's voice dropped to a whisper. \"Spencer, I . . . can't tell you that.\" Her voice was halting and her speech slow. \"How do you know?\"\n\nVeta stood and turned toward the bar. \" 'Livi's been dosed.\" She was so alarmed that she did not even bother to lift her wrist and pretend she was speaking into her commpad. \"Extract now. I have 'Livi. Mark, secure the subject for interrogation. Ash, take distraction and cover.\"\n\nBy the time she finished speaking, Mark was already heading for the far end of the bar and Ash was gathering glasses from the table. Veta had no idea whether the reference to Gamma Company was another of Osman's tests or a genuine security breach. But she did know that any leak regarding the identity of her Gammas was a threat to the team's existence and perhaps even their lives\u2014which made this the kind of high-pressure situation likely to bring out their lethal instincts.\n\nSo, another test.\n\n\"And don't kill anyone,\" Veta added. \"Don't even bust them up. This is a training exercise.\"\n\nShe circled around the near end of the bar. Mark was just stepping past the far end, moving briskly toward Olivia's booth. He was smiling broadly, as though he were on his way to greet a friend, but his torso was tilted forward and his gaze locked on the back of the subject's head. Because of the Smoothers necessary to keep their unique brain chemistries in balance, Gammas had a special fear of psychoactive drugs\u2014and a burning hatred of anyone who used one on a fellow team member.\n\nVeta began to have second thoughts about sending Mark in first. In many ways, he was the team's coolest head, someone who always maintained focus and could not be rattled. But he was also protective of his teammates and utterly ruthless, with a bitter streak so dark that Veta had not too long ago suspected him of being a serial killer. If he thought Olivia had been harmed by the dose . . . well, training exercise or not, it might be bad to let Mark reach the subject first.\n\n\"Mark, let's\u2014\"\n\nThe command was cut short when a tremendous shattering of glass sounded from the opposite side of the bar. Ash was creating the distraction as ordered. Veta ignored the reflex to glance over and continued toward Mark, watching as a server with a tray full of drinks whirled into his path. It was the same blonde who had served Veta earlier, the one who had brought her a whiskey instead of a two-tailed comet and hadn't known a rocks glass from a doffer\u2014and the same woman who had brought the zantelle to Olivia and her companion.\n\nMark didn't even slow down. He simply grabbed the server's tray and shoved it into her chest, then used a foot-sweep to kick her feet from beneath her. She landed flat on her back, slapping her arms out to break her fall and tucking her chin to avoid banging her head.\n\nBoth actions suggested training in hand-to-hand combat. The server rolled onto her side to counterattack with a scissor kick, but Mark was already two steps past her, still holding the tray and just approaching Olivia's booth.\n\nTaking the server for a member of Oscar Squad, Veta angled toward her\u2014and began to wonder what had been in the whiskey the woman had been pushing. Had she been trying to dose Veta too? A large man stepped away from the bar. He was a little older than Veta, perhaps thirty-five or so, with a square jaw and wary eyes that did not match his smile.\n\nVeta tilted her head as though she thought he was coming on to her, then flashed a sly grin herself. The operative's smile grew more natural, and he offered a hand as though to introduce himself. At the same time, he was slipping into position between Veta and the action at Olivia's booth. Veta allowed him to herd her toward the bar, but extended her hand past his and grabbed hold of his wrist.\n\n\"Nice to meet you.\" Veta propped a foot against his ankle and drew him forward. \"Never dose one of my people again.\"\n\nThe operative's brow shot up, but he was already off-balance and in danger of falling. His fingers closed around Veta's forearm as he struggled to stay upright. She popped her free hand against his elbow just hard enough to hyperextend the joint, then pulled loose, spun around behind him, and delivered a vicious knuckle-punch to the kidney.\n\nThe operative staggered forward and dropped to a knee, in too much pain to do more than gasp. He would be pissing blood for a day, but he'd be back on his feet in ten minutes\u2014which was no doubt less time than it would take for Olivia to recover.\n\nWhen Veta looked up, she found a lot of curious eyes watching her. She covered by shaking her head and scowling, trying to suggest the guy had said something inappropriate, then continued on her way.\n\nA few paces from Olivia's booth, the blond server who had tried to stall Mark was being helped to her feet by a couple of young men. Judging by their confused expressions\u2014and the dirty looks they were shooting at Mark\u2014it seemed clear they were just bystanders who had seen the woman go down.\n\nMark had already reached the booth and was using a wrist-lock to walk the older \"civilian\" toward the emergency exit. Olivia was sitting on the edge of the seat, eyes glassy and dilated as she stared after Mark. Veta grabbed her by the hand and pulled her toward the club's main entrance.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Olivia stumbled and grabbed Veta's arm for support. \"Okay . . . maybe not. There's a helmet fire inside my skull.\"\n\n\"I imagine there is,\" Veta said. \"That had to be some kind of Babble Juice in your zantelle.\"\n\n\"You . . . think?\" Olivia released Veta's arm and began to lurch forward on her own. \"I'm gonna crush that fat fart's tiny little . . . ears.\"\n\n\"His ears, huh?\" Veta was relieved to hear the anger in Olivia's voice; she was still in touch with her emotions, so the dose had probably been light. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Okay, not really,\" Olivia said. \"But whatever I crush, it's going to hurt him. A lot.\"\n\nVeta smiled\u2014she couldn't help it. \"As long as you don't kill him,\" she said. \"Remember, this is still a training exercise.\"\n\nThey reached the blond server. Noting that the bystanders who had helped her to her feet were continuing to scowl after Mark, Veta stopped to address the two men.\n\n\"We're from FLEETCOM, Criminal Investigation Division.\" Veta took Olivia's arm again, then continued, \"I need to get this officer to an infirmary, but the server you're helping is a witness.\"\n\nAn alarm bell rang briefly as Mark hustled the \"civilian\" out the emergency exit, but the two bystanders merely looked over and immediately returned their attention to Veta.\n\n\"Hold her here until one of my people comes for her,\" Veta said. \"Is that clear?\"\n\nBoth men came to attention. \"Affirmative, ma'am.\"\n\nUnable to protest without breaking her own cover, the server glared at Veta, then said, \"No problem. I can use the break.\"\n\n\"Good. I'm glad we understand each other.\"\n\nVeta thanked the bystanders for their help and steered Olivia toward the main entrance.\n\nThey had barely taken three steps before Olivia leaned in close. \"But we're not CID,\" she said. \"We're\u2014\"\n\n\"Whoever we want to be. We're Ferrets, remember?\"\n\nOlivia hesitated. \"Right,\" she said. \"I'll do my best.\"\n\nThey met Ash on the far side of the bar, just a dozen steps from the exit. His trouser cuffs were wet, and he smelled like pels, and he was doing his best to swagger as though he had drunk too much.\n\n\"Drop the act,\" Veta said. \"You're CID now\u2014and watch Mark's back. Oscar Squad is everywhere.\"\n\n\"Affirmative.\" Ash straightened his posture and snuck a peek at Olivia. \"Is she going to be\u2014\"\n\n\"She'll be fine,\" Veta said. \"We'll meet you at the suite. Bring the prisoner\u2014and make sure you aren't tailed.\"\n\nAsh nodded. \"No worries.\"\n\n\"And don't hurt anyone.\" Veta pulled Olivia toward the exit. \"This is still\u2014\"\n\n\"A training exercise,\" Ash said. \"I know.\"\n\nVeta led Olivia across a small foyer to an elevator bank, where they gazed into a security panel so the base AI could identify their facial features. A door opened, and they stepped into a steel-walled car. The car began to ascend, and a crisp, androgynous voice sounded from the overhead speaker.\n\n\"Lieutenant Bati's eyes are dilated.\" The AI was referring to Olivia by her legend identity\u2014though it was hard to say how much longer the cover would hold, now that the Ferrets had engaged Oscar Squad. \"And her pulse rate appears heightened. Do you need to stop at the infirmary?\"\n\n\"Negative,\" Veta said. \"Lieutenant Bati will be fine. Just take us to our floor.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Major.\"\n\nThe car stopped and the elevator door opened. Veta hustled them down the corridor to their rooms, which were adjacent to each other and across from Ash's and Mark's. They quickly changed into service dress and returned to the elevator, heading for the suite they had taken as a safe house. Instead of merely looking into the security panel, this time Veta pressed her palm to the biometric reader in the center.\n\n\"Flag Floor Three, Halsey Suite\" she said. \"Access code Mike Oscar Mike Four Niner, unlogged.\"\n\nThe door did not open.\n\nVeta's stomach clenched. Olivia had secured the suite by hacking into the central booking system and reserving it the name of a fictitious captain in ONI Section Zero. It was a clever ploy. Section Zero was ONI's internal investigations division and therefore the most secretive about its personnel and activities. But Olivia was only half-finished with her Digital Infiltration and Sabotage course, so it seemed all too possible that her breach had been discovered.\n\nVeta repeated the code.\n\n\"Your access code has already been verified, Major Keely,\" the AI said, addressing Veta by her cover identity. \"Lieutenant Bati's has not.\"\n\nOlivia placed her hand on the security panel. \"Tango Angel Papa Eight Five.\" She hesitated a moment, then the Babble Juice compelled her to add, \"But I'm not really\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lieutenant.\" Veta pulled Olivia's hand away from the security panel, then said, \"And make certain our access remains unlogged.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the AI said. \"For the next twenty-four hours, there is a log blackout on everything concerning the Halsey Suite.\"\n\nThe doors opened, and a minute later, Veta and Olivia were inside the cavernous parlor of a large room with a sunken seating salon and a majestic view of the cryovolcano's gloomy caldera. It had a kitchenette to the left of the entrance and a water closet to the right. Two private bedrooms were arranged opposite each other on separate sides of the parlor.\n\nVeta deposited Olivia on a couch, then retrieved a field kit and ran an analysis on the Gamma's blood. A code appeared in the readout window identifying the toxin as NTL\u2014a quick-acting form of Babble Juice more properly called nicothiotal. It was a favorite of ONI and other intelligence services because it hit quickly and the outward effects resembled intoxication. But it did have one drawback\u2014an overdose could shatter one's mind, destroying the barrier between dreams and memories and leaving the subject in a permanent state of hallucination.\n\nOscar Squad was playing rough.\n\nVeta administered a counteragent and had Olivia remain on the couch while she prepared an interrogation room for the prisoner they were expecting. When she finished ten minutes later, Mark and Ash still had not arrived with the captive. The delay was a bit alarming, but not terribly. They had to be certain they weren't being tailed, and even if they weren't, sneaking around a UNSC recreational facility with a prisoner in custody was no easy thing.\n\nVeta took the opportunity to debrief Olivia and was relieved to find her rapidly coming around. But she did not learn much of interest\u2014only that Olivia's suitor had been sitting at the bar when she arrived and approached her before she had a chance to find a seat.\n\n\"And that didn't raise an alarm?\" Veta asked. \"He had to be waiting for you.\"\n\n\"You saw him. Did he look like ONI to you?\"\n\n\"Not until he dosed you,\" Veta admitted. \"But a guy that age? What were you thinking?\"\n\n\"That he liked me and wanted to talk.\" Olivia raised her chin. \"Is that so hard to believe?\"\n\nVeta sighed. \"No, actually. Not at all,\" she said. Like most Spartan-IIs and IIIs, Olivia had been robbed of a libido by her biological augmentations, and where men were concerned, she lacked normal instincts\u2014and apparently creep radar too. \"In fact, you're way out of his league. When we get back to the Mill, we have some course work to do.\"\n\n\"I know how sex works. It's not that complicated.\"\n\n\"Neither is crossing a street,\" Veta said. \"But if you wander into either one blindfolded, there's going to be trouble.\"\n\nOlivia rolled her eyes. \"Sure, Mom. Whatever you want.\"\n\nVeta was hardly fond of the nickname, especially since the Gammas used it when they thought she was being overprotective. But the door to the suite swished open before she could object, and Mark and Ash stepped into the foyer, now wearing the service dress of ODST junior lieutenants.\n\nThere was no one else with them.\n\nVeta stood. \"Where's the prisoner?\"\n\nAsh stepped in front of Mark, as though to shield him. \"That's my fault, ma'am. I grew distracted by the casualties\u2014\"\n\n\"Casualties?\" Veta climbed out of the seating salon and started toward them. \"What did I say about casualties?\"\n\n\"To avoid them, ma'am,\" Ash said. \"But I didn't cause them. They were already down when I arrived.\"\n\n\"At the least, the first ones were,\" Mark added. \"And they weren't fatalities.\"\n\nVeta grimaced. \"You're going to need to clarify that. First ones?\"\n\n\"Two men, near the end of the bar,\" Ash said.\n\nVeta nodded, recalling the two men who had helped the blond server to her feet. \"I used them to stall an Oscar Squad operative. How bad are they?\"\n\n\"They'll recover,\" Ash said. \"One guy has a broken jaw; the other one was out cold.\"\n\nVeta could only shake her head. She had expected the woman to try slipping away, but not to attack a pair of bystanders. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\"\n\n\"Who were the other casualties?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014\" Mark said. He started to step forward, only to have Ash extend an arm and hold him back. \"Ash, we have\u2014\"\n\n\"There was a big guy,\" Ash interrupted, \"closer to the center of the bar. He was on his knees, holding his back like someone had kidney-punched him.\"\n\nFairly certain Ash was referring to the operative she had dropped\u2014and that he knew it\u2014Veta narrowed her eyes. \"Someone had.\" She took Ash by the shoulder, then drew him aside so she could scowl at Mark. \"Mark, what did you do?\"\n\nMark's face fell. \"You mean besides get stabbed?\"\n\nVeta looked him over and saw no obvious wounds. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nMark placed a finger in his collar and pulled it aside to reveal a blood-dotted bandage over his clavicle. The depth of the wound was impossible to tell, but the location was alarming. Had the blade struck just a couple of centimeters closer to his shoulder, it would have severed his subclavian artery and killed him in less than a minute.\n\nFeeling guilty for her sharp tone, Veta looked up and spoke gently. \"How did it happen?\"\n\n\"That's what I've been trying to tell you,\" Ash said, stepping in to shield Mark again. \"It wasn't Mark's fault. Oscar Squad is way out of line.\"\n\n\"Ash, stop.\" Veta glanced from Ash to Mark and back again, then said, \"Please, just tell me.\"\n\nA look of resignation came over Ash's face, and he stepped aside.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" Mark began, \"I was escorting the subject down a service corridor when I was attacked from behind.\"\n\n\"You were taken by surprise?\" Veta was not quite sure she understood the report correctly. \"Someone snuck up on you? How is that possible?\"\n\nMark's face flushed. \"My attention was elsewhere,\" he said. \"The subject was resisting.\"\n\n\"It was my fault,\" Ash said. \"If I hadn't gotten distracted by the casualties in the club\u2014\"\n\nAn alert chime issued from control panel near the door, then the AI's voice sounded from the speaker. \"Officer on deck.\"\n\nAsh and Mark immediately snapped to attention, and, down in the seating salon, Olivia sprang to her feet to do the same.\n\nVeta turned to the control panel. \"Secure the door.\" It was probably someone from Oscar Squad, coming to confirm her Ferret Team's location. \"Access to the Halsey Suite is restricted to current personnel.\"\n\n\"The restriction has been expanded to all authorized personnel,\" the AI said. \"Admiral Osman is authorized personnel.\"\n\nVeta glanced over to Ash and Mark. \"I'll handle this,\" she said. \"Not a word.\"\n\nThe door opened, revealing a tall, olive-skinned woman in a white uniform. She had short-cropped hair and a slender, high-cheeked face wrenched into a grim scowl. Standing behind the admiral were a pair of armed escorts and the square-jawed Oscar Squad operative Veta had incapacitated in the officers' club. His eyes were wary and his expression angry, and Veta suspected that, had Osman not been present, he would have been tempted to return her kidney shot.\n\nOsman motioned for her escorts to remain outside, then led the operative into the foyer and paused to look around.\n\n\"You certainly travel in style,\" Osman said. \"Even I don't stay in the Halsey Suite.\"\n\n\"We needed a safe house.\" Veta spoke with an ease she did not feel. Whatever had happened in the service corridor, the incident had to be a serious one to warrant Osman's direct intervention. \"And you're the one who keeps telling me 'the only rule is there are no rules.' \"\n\nOsman flashed a tight smile. \"Except for budgets,\" she said. \"Budgets are like the laws of physics. Break them and die.\"\n\n\"Now you tell me.\" Veta forced a laugh, but did not take much comfort from the banter. The Ferret Team may have been Osman's brainchild, but the admiral was too tough-minded and analytical to continue investing ONI resources in a program she was starting to doubt. \"Not that I mind having you drop by, Admiral, but bringing Oscar Squad along kind of spoils the exercise.\"\n\n\"We have bigger problems than the exercise.\" Osman didn't bother to introduce the Oscar Squad operative. Instead, her eyes darted toward Mark. \"I think you know that.\"\n\n\"Not if you're talking about what happened in the officer's club, I don't,\" Veta said. \"We weren't the ones who roughed up those two bystanders. That's on Oscar Squad.\"\n\nThe operative emphatically shook his head. \"Don't try to pin that on us,\" he said. \"We didn't touch\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough, Svenson,\" Osman said. \"Nobody cares about a couple of ensigns getting hurt in a bar brawl.\"\n\n\"A bar brawl?\" Veta was growing confused. Ash hadn't said anything about that. \"Admiral, it was barely a scuffle. There was no brawl.\"\n\n\"But that's what the ensigns have been ordered to report, and that will be the end of the matter,\" Osman said. \"I'm more worried about the situation Commander Svenson observed.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"I caught up to these two in a service corridor,\" Svenson said, indicating Mark and Ash. \"They were hauling a body.\"\n\nVeta's stomach sank. If there was a fatality, her Ferret Team was done for. She turned back to Osman and, trying to buy some time to think, attempted to sound more surprised than she was. \"Yeah, sure. Are his jokes always this bad?\"\n\n\"It's no joke,\" Svenson said. \"They were carrying a body. It looked like the big guy who was trying to work your girl.\"\n\nGiven what Ash and Mark had already reported, Veta did not doubt Svenson's claim. But there was a lot he wasn't saying\u2014and she wanted to figure out why. \"And you're not a hundred percent on that? You don't even know your own operatives?\"\n\n\"He wasn't one of ours,\" Svenson said.\n\n\"Of course he wasn't,\" Veta said. \"And neither was that server who was working with him.\"\n\nSvenson scowled. \"What server?\"\n\n\"The blonde who helped the guy dose Lieutenant Bati,\" Veta said, still referring to Olivia by her cover identity. \"She's one who brought the zantelle. We know the lieutenant's glass was laced with nicothiotal.\"\n\nSvenson looked appalled, then turned to Osman. \"No way. We wouldn't do that, Admiral.\"\n\n\"I'll show you the field test.\" Veta stepped closer to Svenson, invading his space and pressing a finger to his chest. \"You have no idea what could have happened to her if it had taken full effect.\"\n\nSvenson did not retreat. \"I know how to use nicothiotal\u2014which is why I'd never use it in a training exercise.\" He continued to hold Veta's gaze, but addressed his comments to Osman. \"Admiral, if someone drugged the lieutenant, it wasn't our team.\"\n\n\"No?\" Osman was starting to sound doubtful. \"Then who was the server? And the man she was working with?\"\n\n\"I have no clue,\" Svenson said. \"All I can you tell is they weren't ours.\"\n\nVeta didn't believe Svenson for a second, but she was having trouble figuring out what he was trying to hide. Fortunately, she possessed the skills to find out.\n\n\"Then we'll ask the victim,\" Veta said. \"Where's the body?\"\n\nSvenson's eyes shifted toward Mark and Ash. \"I don't know,\" he said. \"You'll have to ask them.\"\n\n\"So you can't actually produce a body?\" Veta asked.\n\nSvenson looked at the floor.\n\n\"Commander?\" Osman demanded. \"This is a serious accusation. Do you know where the body is or not?\"\n\n\"I couldn't keep up.\" Svenson shot a glare in Veta's direction. \"I was too sore.\"\n\n\"You couldn't keep up with a pair of men carrying a hundred and forty kilograms of deadweight?\" Veta raised an eyebrow. \"That's hard to believe.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to tell you. It's what happened.\"\n\n\"Let's assume there's a reason for that.\" Osman's tone was wry, no doubt because she found it perfectly reasonable that a pair of Spartan-IIIs carrying a body that large would be able to outrun a standard field operative. \"Where did you lose sight of them?\"\n\n\"I never really had them, Admiral. I saw them going around a corner. By the time I got there, they were gone.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Veta said. \"Then how do you know the person was actually dead?\"\n\n\"By the smell,\" Svenson said. \"His bladder had released. So had his bowels.\"\n\n\"Not much help,\" Veta said. \"It's hard to establish identity from odors. What about signs of a fight? Did you find any weapons or blood, for instance?\"\n\nSvenson nodded. \"There was some blood spray up the corridor from where I saw them, but it's not there now.\"\n\n\"You cleaned it up,\" Osman surmised. Standard procedure called for a team in the field to eliminate any trace of a hostile engagement, whenever possible. \"Good job.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am,\" Svenson said. \"But it wasn't us. By the time we realized we weren't going to find the targets and returned to sanitize the scene, it had already been done.\"\n\nOsman turned to Veta. \"Impressive.\"\n\nNow it was Veta's turn to say: \"It wasn't us.\" She couldn't admit to cleaning the scene without admitting to the homicide, and she wasn't ready to do that until she knew what Svenson was trying to hide\u2014or at least figured out who the victim and his accomplice were. \"Is it worth checking the surveillance feeds?\"\n\nOsman looked at Veta as though she were thinking about sending her back to the ONI Trade Craft School.\n\n\"We weren't the only ones who put a block on the officers' club feeds,\" Svenson said. \"We assumed the other block came from you.\"\n\n\"Actually, I was thinking of the service corridor,\" Veta said.\n\n\"Deleted,\" he said. \"We assumed it was you.\"\n\n\"Now, that's convenient.\" Veta quickly turned to Osman. \"Admiral, have you considered the possibility that there is no body?\"\n\n\"There is a body,\" Svenson said. \"Why would I make up something like that?\"\n\n\"Well, you are standing in our safe house.\" Veta saw Osman's eyes narrow and knew she'd struck a chord. \"And now you've had a look at my entire team.\"\n\nSvenson turned to Osman. \"Admiral, that's ridiculous. I don't know what kind of unit you're putting together here, but letting them turn this training mission into a farce is not going to help them survive in the field.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, Commander. The only rule is that there are no rules.\" Veta gave him a sly smile. \"Either you're proving that\u2014or we are.\"\n\n\"She does have a point, Commander,\" Osman said. \"You can wait in the hall with the escorts.\"\n\nSvenson's face clouded with anger, but he merely acknowledged the order and spun toward the door. Once he was gone and the room secure again, Osman turned to Veta.\n\n\"So, what's the answer?\" she asked. \"Who's the one being played here?\"\n\nMark immediately stepped forward. \"Admiral, there's something\u2014\"\n\n\"Mark, I'll handle this.\" Veta pointed him to Ash's side, then turned back to Osman. \"I don't know what Commander Svenson saw or didn't see, or whether he's telling the truth that the server and the other guy were not assisting Oscar Squad. But I can promise you this\u2014nobody on my team did anything wrong.\"\n\nOsman studied her for a moment, then said, \"You'd better be sure of that, Lopis.\"\n\n\"I am. And I can prove it.\"\n\nOsman smiled in obvious relief. \"Good.\" She turned to leave. \"I expect to hear from you in two hours.\"\n\nThe door had barely closed before Mark whirled on Veta. \"Why did you do that?\"\n\n\"Do what, exactly?\"\n\n\"Lie to the admiral. You know I killed that guy.\"\n\n\"I do now,\" Veta said. \"What I don't know is why.\"\n\n\"The why doesn't matter,\" Mark said. \"I don't need you lying to protect me.\"\n\n\"Mark, you're on my team,\" Veta said. \"Of course I'm going to protect you.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't. Now you've put the whole team at risk.\"\n\n\"Mark . . .\" Veta had to pause and bite back the impulse to make a harsh retort, to tell Mark that he was the one who had put the Ferret Team at risk. \"Look, we're all in this together. We either have each other's backs to the end, or we have nothing.\"\n\n\"No, the team comes\u2014\"\n\n\"Mark, shut up.\" Olivia climbed out of the seating salon and approached her teammate. \"That is so like you, thinking you're so damn good that you're all the protection we need.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's because I'm the security specialist.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's because you have a big head.\"\n\n\" 'Livi's right,\" Ash said. \"And it's not just your ego. I've tried your helmet. It's like wearing a ten-liter bucket.\"\n\nMark blinked, his anger draining away. \"Really? I have a big head?\"\n\n\"Enormous,\" Ash said. \"Can we tell Mom about the dead guy now?\"\n\n\"Please,\" Veta said. \"We have work to do.\"\n\nMark shrugged. \"Fine,\" he said. \"But you know most of it. I was walking the fat guy down the corridor when I see this silver blade flash past the corner of my eye and there's a carving knife slicing down my chest.\"\n\n\"That's when I came around the corner,\" Ash said. \"It was that server from the bar, the blonde? She's about your height and build, boss, and she was damn good with that knife. If she hadn't been so small, I would have taken her for a Spartan.\"\n\n\"I'm not that small,\" Veta said. \"How did the subject die?\"\n\n\"Reflex,\" Mark said. \"I brought him around to use as a shield, then chest-punched him when he resisted. He must have had a weak heart, because he dropped like a sack of water.\"\n\n\"By then, I was on my way,\" Ash said. \"The blonde threw the knife at me and took off.\"\n\n\"What happened to the knife?\" Veta asked.\n\n\"Same thing as the blood spray,\" Mark said. \"We came back and got rid of it.\"\n\n\"So I guess I did just lie to Admiral Osman,\" Veta said. \"Good. Now, what about the body?\"\n\nAsh tipped his head toward the gloomy cryovolcano outside the suite's window. \"We found an airlock.\"\n\nVeta frowned.\n\n\"Relax, will you?\" Olivia said. \"We're not the police. We're supposed to get rid of the bodies.\"\n\n\"It's not that,\" Veta said. \"We still need to figure out who this guy was, and that's going to be a lot harder without evidence.\"\n\n\"Covered.\" Ash reached inside his uniform jacket and withdrew a thick packet of personal belongings. \"His name is Spencer Hume.\"\n\nVeta's heart climbed into her throat. \"What . . . ?\" She took the packet from Ash and began to go through it. \"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"That's his cover, anyway.\" Ash said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Didn't you guys listen to the BuzzCast when we were on Jastolo?\" Veta groaned as she found a laminated identity card confirming her suspicions. \"He was the newsmonger doing those expos\u00e9s on ONI.\"\n\n\"I listened to one,\" Mark said. \"It was a smear job. The Spartans had nothing to do with what happened on Tanuab III. That was a meteor impact.\"\n\nVeta wasn't so sure about that one, but wasn't about to argue the point\u2014especially not now. \"That's not what matters,\" she said. \"Spencer Hume was an investigative reporter\u2014\"\n\n\"A shit-flinger,\" Mark said.\n\n\"Fine . . . a shit-flinger,\" Veta said. \"But he was still here, working Olivia, and now he's dead.\"\n\n\"I don't have a problem with that,\" Olivia said. \"Not after he dosed me.\"\n\nVeta said: \"And he had help, remember? Expert help.\"\n\nThe expressions of all three Spartans fell.\n\n\"We need to know who that woman was.\" Veta handed the packet of Hume's belongings to Olivia. \"Find out everything you can.\"\n\n\"Affirmative.\" Olivia pulled a commpad out of the dead man's possessions and retreated to the prep island in the kitchenette. \"I'll need an hour to crack the password.\"\n\n\"Get started.\" Veta turned to Ash and Mark. \"But if our target is smart, we're not going to find her real name in his commpad.\"\n\n\"Not likely,\" Ash said. \"We already know she was good enough to block the officers' club security feeds.\"\n\n\"And delete the trouble in the service corridor,\" Mark added.\n\n\"Wait. That wasn't you?\" Veta said.\n\nAsh shook his head. \"Not us,\" he said. \"I was going to ask 'Livi for help.\"\n\nVeta nodded. \"Yeah, I know . . . just hoping.\" The facility AI was pretty basic, but subverting even a dumb AI fell more into Olivia's skill set than Ash's\u2014him being the team's surveillance expert, and her the information specialist. \"Ideas?\"\n\n\"Just one,\" Ash said. \"All we're trying to do is identify her, and anyone that good has probably crossed paths with ONI before.\"\n\n\"So she'll be in the FRD,\" Veta said. ONI's Facial Recognition Database. \"We just need an image of her face.\"\n\nAsh nodded. \"Exactly.\"\n\n\"And you know how to find one?\" No response. Veta waited for him to answer, then finally asked, \"Am I supposed to guess?\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am. I was just thinking it through.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"There's no use trying to find her through the surveillance feeds,\" Ash said. \"If she's good enough to subvert the AI, she's good enough to neutralize common surveillance files.\"\n\n\"But there's one file she can't block.\" Mark was starting to sound excited too. \"Not if she wants to keep moving around.\"\n\n\"The master comparison file?\" Veta asked. Like many medium-security facilities, this one relied on a facial recognition system to control access to all interior locations. The target couldn't erase her image from the master file without eliminating her ability to move around the facility. \"Olivia, can you pull up those reference images?\"\n\n\"We should have access already.\" Olivia continued to tap on Hume's commpad. \"Just ask the AI.\"\n\nVeta raised her brow. \"The AI will let us raid the master security files?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Olivia said. \"He let us have this suite, didn't he?\"\n\nAn hour later, Veta was still standing at the door, going through facial images on the control panel's palm-size screen, when Olivia let out a whoop.\n\n\"I'm in!\" she said. \"And you'll never guess what kind of intel that bitch was feeding Hume.\"\n\nVeta thought back to the snippet of \"interview\" she had heard while eavesdropping on Hume's exchange with Olivia. \"Details on the Spartan-III program, right?\" she asked. \"Especially Gamma Company, and your reliance on Smoothers.\"\n\n\"That, and it gets worse. She mentioned us specifically.\"\n\n\"Us? As in the Ferrets?\" Mark asked. \"Then it's a good thing I killed the reporter. It saves ONI the trouble of sending us after him later.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that fixes the problem,\" Ash said. \"If word is already leaking about the Gammas, we're done. They didn't even want us as Spartans.\"\n\n\"Nothing has leaked yet.\" Veta froze the image on the control panel, then said, \"And nothing is going to. I just found her.\"\n\n\"You did?\" Olivia switched to her ONI datapad, and a few moments later, she said, \"You're sure?\"\n\nVeta stepped over to the prep island and peered over Olivia's shoulder. The datapad's screen showed an image of the blond server from the officers' club. But now the woman was wearing the dress blues of a UNSC Naval Commander, and below her image were the words OTA GALLO, RETIRED.\n\nAsh joined them and peered over Olivia's other shoulder. \"So, she's ONI.\" The records of most field operatives read RETIRED or, in deep-cover cases, KIA. \"They're stress testing us again.\"\n\n\"Or trying to sink us,\" Mark said. You ever get the feeling Admiral Osman is out on a limb with us?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" Ash said. \"But if she's out on a limb, why would she want to sink us?\"\n\n\"Not her, genius,\" Olivia said. \"You don't think Osman has rivals? Word has it Parangosky is grooming Osman to be the next CINCONI. And you know the Section Chiefs aren't going to take that without a fight.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Veta said. Bureaucratic infighting was certainly one motive for sabotaging a mission . . . but this time, the stakes seemed too high. A successful play would cripple ONI\u2014and getting caught meant a bullet in the head. \"Show us the rest of the jacket, 'Livi.\"\n\nOlivia scrolled down. Gallo's record listed a handful of postings over the better part of two decades. Beyond that, the details were sketchy. More than a hundred entries read either REDACTED or CLASSIFIED.\n\nBut it was the final entry that Veta found most interesting. Just a week earlier, Gallo's file had been marked FINAL DISPOSITION: DARK MOON. NO CONTACT, NO ACCESS.\n\n\"What's Dark Moon?\" Ash asked.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Veta said. \"But whatever it is, ONI doesn't like it. See what you can pull up.\"\n\nOlivia typed an inquiry, and an entry appeared.\n\nDark Moon Enterprises was listed as a comprehensive security company that provided force-enhancement services throughout the human-controlled portion of the galaxy. A month earlier, the firm had appeared out of nowhere with a prestigious list of clients and began to hire former UNSC personnel to provide security services in a broad spectrum of hostile environments. Within two weeks, Dark Moon had grown so fast that they began to pursue active-duty personnel, and the UNSC put them on the NO CONTACT, NO ACCESS list. Rather than back off, Dark Moon offered its clients a menu of privatized intelligence and threat-management services, then started to recruit former and current ONI operatives to fulfill its contracts.\n\nMark whistled softly. \"I don't know who's in charge of that outfit, but they have more guts than brains.\"\n\n\"You might have it backward,\" Veta said. \"Dark Moon has a lot of guts, clearly. But they've only been in business a month, and already they're an interstellar company growing so fast they need to raid ONI for employees? I'd say they have plenty of brains too.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Ash said. \"Doing all that in a month seems kind of remarkable, at least by civilian standards.\"\n\n\"It is.\" Veta turned back to Olivia. \"Is there is anything else on Dark Moon? The identity of the founder, perhaps? A list of company executives?\"\n\n\"What you see is what we have,\" Olivia said. \"There's not even an above-clearance file.\"\n\n\"Then they're making a smart play,\" Veta said. \"A bold one . . . but very, very smart.\"\n\n\"No way,\" Ash said. \"Messing with the military is one thing, but pissing off ONI? That's a death wish.\"\n\n\"Don't do that, Ash.\"\n\n\"Do what?\"\n\n\"Underestimate the enemy.\" Veta tapped the datapad's screen. \"Assuming this file is right, Dark Moon came out of nowhere, and they aren't afraid to poke a stick in ONI's eye. But ONI doesn't even seem to know who's behind Dark Moon\u2014much less why it was founded.\"\n\nOlivia shrugged. \"That'll change soon enough,\" she said. \"Intelligence takes time.\"\n\n\"Not for Dark Moon,\" Veta said. \"They've only been in business a month, and already they know enough about Gamma Company to give ONI a public-relations nightmare. That means they're either as good as ONI\u2014or a whole lot more agile. Whichever it is, I wouldn't bet against Dark Moon when this thing turns ugly.\"\n\nThe Gammas scowled in unison. \"Come on,\" Mark said. \"You're being crazy.\"\n\n\"Am I?\"\n\nVeta reached up and jammed a thumb down on Mark's wounded clavicle. He didn't drop to his knees, but he did flinch and back away. Ignoring his look of surprise, Veta raised her thumb, presenting it to the trio.\n\n\"The biggest guy doesn't always win.\" She raised her index finger, leaving about a centimeter of space between it and her thumb. \"Gallo came this close to killing Mark because she struck first. And so far, Dark Moon has been doing all the punching.\"\n\nThe Gammas remained quiet for a moment. Olivia finally said, \"And we're their point of attack. If word gets out that Admiral Osman is using Gammas on her Ferret Teams, ONI is gone.\"\n\n\"Probably not gone,\" Veta said. \"But certainly crippled\u2014and that leaves a power vacuum to be exploited. I'll bet Dark Moon has contracts ready to sign now.\"\n\n\"You're saying this is about contracts?\" Ash seemed horrified. \"Dosing 'Livi and trying to kill Mark\u2014that's just business?\"\n\n\"Ash, people kill for a lot of reasons,\" Veta said. \"And you better believe money is at the top of the list.\"\n\n\"I guess,\" Ash said. \"I really miss being just a soldier. Risking your life used to mean something.\"\n\n\"It still does,\" Olivia said. \"But we're Ferrets now, and I'm not about to give that up too.\" She turned to Veta. \"How do we fix this?\"\n\n\"Gallo was Hume's source,\" Veta said. \"That means she can be someone else's source too. We have to stop her before that happens.\"\n\n\"Then it's simple,\" Mark said. \"We kill Gallo.\"\n\n\"Mark,\" Ash said, \"we're not supposed to kill anyone this time. Remember?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Veta said. \"But Gallo really isn't part of the training exercise.\"\n\nMark flashed a smug smile. \"Excellent. So we do kill her.\"\n\n\"Only if we have to,\" Veta said. \"We should try to capture her\u2014if she gives us the chance.\"\n\n\"Like that's going to happen,\" Olivia said. \"She doesn't seem like the surrendering kind.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Veta admitted. She was already turning her thoughts to locating Gallo, trying to put herself in the other woman's position. \"Now we just have to find her.\"\n\n\"That's not going to be easy,\" Ash said. \"For all we know, she could be offworld by now.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Veta said. \"She just started at Dark Moon a week ago. This has to be her first assignment.\"\n\nMark cocked his head. \"So?\"\n\n\"So would we give up?\" Olivia asked, catching on faster than the other two Gammas. \"Especially on our first job?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Veta turned to Mark. \"What are the chances that Gallo knows Hume is actually dead?\"\n\nMark looked at Ash, and Ash said, \"I'd say good. She was closer than Svenson, and he knew Hume was dead.\"\n\n\"Then we'll have to do this the hard way,\" Veta said. \"Olivia\u2014\"\n\n\"On it.\" Olivia set her datapad aside and started to tap a message into Hume's commpad, then spoke without looking up. \"And, boss, maybe you should send a copy of Gallo's file to Admiral Osman and ask her to lock down the facility.\"\n\nVeta nodded. \"Good idea.\" She raised her wrist and began tapping a message on her own commpad. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"It won't work,\" Ash said. \"If Gallo's as good as we think she is, she'll slip free faster than we would.\"\n\n\"Gallo's not going anywhere,\" Veta said. \"She needs to recover Hume's commpad before ONI can start digging into it. Sooner or later, they'll find something that leads back to her\u2014and she knows it.\" She finished her message and sent it, then said, \"Putting the facility on lockdown will tip her off, and Dark Moon will hear about it. That puts even more pressure on Gallo.\"\n\nMark smiled. \"I like that strategy. If she doesn't recover Hume's stuff, they'll kill her.\" He watched Olivia tap on Hume's commpad for a moment, then said, \"But what's 'Livi doing?\"\n\n\"Writing a message to Gallo and copying Admiral Osman,\" Olivia said. \"I'm reporting everything we learned about her connection to Hume.\"\n\n\"So Gallo will know we know?\" Mark's brow rose. \"You want to get this done fast, don't you?\"\n\n\"We can't afford to sit around waiting,\" Olivia said. \"The admiral only gave us two hours, and half of that is gone.\"\n\n\"And we need to put the pressure on Gallo, not ourselves,\" Veta said. \"She's either going to hit us fast or hit us smart, and it would be better to know which.\"\n\nOlivia stopped tapping and smiled in triumph. \"Okay, done.\" She raised Hume's commpad, her thumb poised to execute a command. \"Ready?\"\n\nVeta took a moment to consider, trying to think of anything she had forgotten, then nodded. \"Do it.\"\n\nOlivia had barely depressed the SEND key on Hume's commpad before a hissed HOLD! sounded outside the suite door. Muffled and barely audible, the whisper was still distinct enough to catch the attention of Veta and all three Gammas. They wasted a precious second looking at each other in astonishment, and Mark smiled and mouthed, Nice plan.\n\n\"She's here!\" Olivia whispered, and Ash hissed, \"Down!\" and the muted click of a snapping switch ticked through the door.\n\nMark and Ash were already flinging themselves against the wall on opposite sides of the door. Olivia was diving over the peninsula that separated the kitchenette from the rest of the suite, one hand grasping a knife-block she had snatched off the prep island as she moved. Veta, always the slowest to react, was dropping to floor, reaching for a sidearm that was not there and cursing the regulations that prohibited carrying weapons in a facility where intoxicants were served.\n\nThe blast was deafening, the concussion wave so powerful that it sent the prep island tumbling over Veta's head. Her reflexes now honed by ONI's twice-weekly close-assault drills, she rolled against the suite's forward wall.\n\nA pair of grenades came flying out of the smoke where the suite's door had once been, crossing in midair and dropping to the floor on opposite sides of the sunken seating area. Veta's training kicked in and she realized the pattern probably meant a three-person squad\u2014two throwing grenades and a third covering with automatic fire.\n\nSure enough, chunks of wall and balls of couch stuffing began to fly as suppression fire streamed into the room. Veta didn't bother wondering how Gallo and her people had smuggled weapons into the facility. There were a hundred ways, and the Ferrets knew most of them. And the next time they went on a training exercise, Veta intended to use them.\n\nBut now it was time to move, before the shooters could step into the suite and start raking fire along the perimeter. She grabbed a broken stool leg and gathered her feet beneath her, duck-walking forward.\n\nThe first shooter stepped through the door, his M7 submachine gun spitting bursts as his gaze swept the foyer. Veta hurled the stool leg at his head and saw him flinch as it tumbled past. She sprang forward, diving for his legs, twisting around to keep an eye on his weapon. The M7 swung her way, orange flashes erupting from the muzzle, chips of broken tile dancing across the floor ahead.\n\nMark appeared from the far side of the doorway, slipping a hand in front of the shooter to clasp the barrel and force it down so abruptly that the man's suede loafers erupted in a spray of blood, bone, and leather. By then, Mark had his other hand clamped on the shooter's throat, and he was swinging the fellow around to serve as a shield. The shooter's body began to shake and jump as his companions sprayed him with fire.\n\nAsh reached in from the opposite side of the doorway, grabbing the second shooter by the forearm and jerking him into the foyer. The Gamma landed a quick trio of rabbit-punches to the base of the skull, and the man collapsed to the floor.\n\nVeta found herself unarmed and staring through the twisted remnants of the door into the little elevator lobby outside the suite, where Ota Gallo stood with an M6 sidearm in one hand and a grenade in the other. She locked eyes with Veta, then smiled and used her thumb to flick the pin free.\n\n\"Grenade!\" Veta's ears were still ringing so hard from the earlier explosion that she couldn't hear herself scream\u2014much less be certain anyone else did. She tried again, then rolled away from the door and saw Olivia standing ahead. The Gamma's uniform was scorched and she was bleeding from about a dozen places, including both ears and the nose. But her throwing arm was outstretched and her gaze was fixed on the door, and there was a knife missing from the block in her free hand.\n\nOlivia's mouth opened and formed the word grenade, then she tossed the knife-block aside and threw herself on top of Veta.\n\nThe Ferret Team did not attempt to sanitize the site. With Ota Gallo sprayed all over the lobby and the suite door blasted open, and blood and bullet holes everywhere they looked, there didn't seem much point.\n\nBesides, the team had more important things to worry about. They needed to remove what remained of Hume's commpad and possessions to a secure location. And despite what Olivia claimed, she was in need of an infirmary. Veta grabbed a field kit and took a couple of minutes to patch her up, then ordered her Ferret Team to evacuate. They would worry about the surveillance feeds and the AI later.\n\nOr not.\n\nThey didn't get very far. When the elevator opened, Admiral Osman was inside, standing behind four large ONI security officers in helmets and body armor. The officers were carrying shotguns and submachines and weren't being shy about where they pointed them.\n\nVeta motioned her team to stand aside, then turned back to Osman. \"You're a little late to the party, Admiral.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" Osman waited for her security escort to clear the area, then stepped out of the elevator and looked around wide-eyed at the little lobby. \"Is this what you call keeping a low profile, Lopis?\"\n\n\"Considering the alternative.\" Veta gestured to Olivia, who, despite her injuries, was standing at attention. \"You saw Olivia's message?\"\n\nOsman's expression softened. \"I did.\" She nodded to Olivia. \"Good work.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am,\" she said. \"But it was all of us.\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\" Osman pointed at the charred packet in Ash's hands. \"Are those Hume's effects?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Ash said. \"What's left of them.\"\n\n\"Let me have them, son.\"\n\nAsh passed her the packet. \"The breaching blast did a job on the electronics, Admiral. I don't think they'll be much help.\"\n\n\"And they won't be much harm either. That's half the battle.\" Osman stepped over to the suite, then peered through the empty doorway. \"This isn't good, Lopis.\"\n\n\"Not our choice, Admiral.\" Veta stepped away from the door. \"All we did was clean up ONI's mess.\"\n\n\"Really? And what about Spencer Hume?\" Osman spun on Veta. \"Was he part of the mess too?\"\n\n\"In a manner of speaking,\" Veta said. \"Hume was going to name Gallo as his source. She killed him to prevent that.\"\n\nOsman's eyebrows shot up. The lie was an obvious one, but believable. She studied Veta for a long time. Finally, she suppressed a smile and turned to Mark.\n\n\"Is that what happened, Spartan?\"\n\nMark looked Osman straight in the eye. \"Yes, ma'am, that's exactly what happened.\" He waited a beat, then declared: \"And, Admiral, just to be clear . . . I'm a Ferret now.\"\n\n## INTO THE FIRE\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nKELLY GAY\n\nThis story takes place four years after the end of the Covenant's brutal and costly rampage across human-occupied space (Halo 3 era) and Kilo-Five's brief mission on Venezia, culminating in the destruction of the highly-sought-after Covenant battle cruiser Pious Inquisitor (Halo: Mortal Dictata).\n\nNew Tyne, Venezia, Qab System\n\nJanuary 2557\n\nToday, she sold weapons to a hinge-head.\n\nThe small lot of spikers and carbines would keep her crew happy, her ship operational, and her informants eager for a piece of the pie.\n\nIt was a lovely little circle of profit she'd created for herself.\n\nAnd Rion loved it. She was good at it. She'd forged her way to success and never hesitated to fight bare-knuckled to stay there. She was proud to call herself one of New Tyne's most notable salvagers.\n\nBut success wasn't all golden.\n\nThere were some sales, some transactions that left dark smudges somewhere deep inside her, where things like honor and integrity and loyalty lurked. Dark karmic tally marks that put a few kinks in that lovely little circle.\n\nEvery time one of her lots sold to ex-Covenant, the nagging sense of betrayal didn't let up until she hiked herself down to Stavros's and had a few drinks. Her crew thought it was simply a ritual, a small way to celebrate yet another payday, another sign that their jobs were secure and going strong. But inside, behind the jokes and the smiles and the laughter, a sour taste lingered in Rion's throat.\n\nShe wondered what he'd say if he knew, if he could see her now. Daddy's little girl all grown up and on the wrong side of the law.\n\nThough, these days, there wasn't much law to be found.\n\nAnd sides? In postwar, there were plenty of those to go around.\n\nRion's side, or lack thereof, was neutrality. Her business depended on it. She stayed out of politics, religions, and rebellions. There was a time her family would have said that staying neutral was just as bad as choosing the wrong side. But times had changed and family was just a memory.\n\n\"All set,\" she said as the bank confirmation appeared on her commpad.\n\n\"Always a pleasure, Captain. Not as good as last month, but respectable.\"\n\nThe prior month had been one of Rion's best paydays ever, a four-way bidding war for a small piece of Forerunner NAV tech that she'd come across by chance in a small bazaar on Komoya, one of Vitalyevna's moons. The databoard was damaged and the crystal chip smashed, but it hadn't seemed to matter. Forerunner tech and relics were always a hot commodity. Intel was hard to come by, so Rion spent much of her downtime digging in files and researching in places she shouldn't be just to learn more about the ancient race.\n\nAnd then she'd found intel on her ticket to retirement\u2014a device called a luminary, which would supposedly point the way to all sorts of interesting Forerunner salvage. . . .\n\nRion reached into her pocket, grabbed the flex card she'd put there, broke it in half, and placed the bright orange equivalent of two hundred fifty credits on the desk.\n\nNor Fel glanced at the amount stamped on the surface, then lifted her large avian head. Clear membranes swept horizontally across her yellow eyes, the Kig-Yar version of a blink. She cocked her head, the tendons and muscles above her eyes pulling together into consideration.\n\nNor placed the tip of her claw on the card, holding it there while she gazed at Rion, and then cackled. \"I knew you'd bite.\"\n\nDespite their obvious differences, Rion and Nor understood each other and enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. Devious and cunning, Nor possessed a greed that was only exceeded by the high regard in which she held herself and her T'vaoan lineage. She was an excellent strategist and knew that relations and good business were the key to keeping the money flowing. And the money was always flowing\n\nAfter Nor's mate, Sav Fel, disappeared four years ago, Nor had created an empire on Venezia, a clearinghouse of postwar scrap and surplus. Salvagers brought in their goods; the clearinghouse cataloged them and took a percentage; and come the first day of every Venezian month, the items went up for auction\u2014everything from Titanium-A plating and molecular memory circuits to small arms and transport vessels. Nor ruled over her house with an iron claw and a set of craftily devised rules that everyone\u2014salvager and buyer alike\u2014abided by.\n\nHer clients included those from the industrial, tech, medical, and manufacturing sectors, along with ex-Covenant, fringe and religious groups, rebels of one faction or another, and independent government militias. She was on the radar of every military group out there\u2014Rion figured she was on a few herself\u2014but mostly Nor's Clearing House was left alone. One, because this was Venezia, and Venezia played by its own rules. And, two, because Nor refused to move heavy ordnance of any kind. Rumor had it that her mate had gotten mixed up in trafficking something big and it had cost him.\n\n\"They will not be happy, your crew.\" Nor nodded toward the window, where Lessa and the new hire, Kip, waited outside by the truck, talking. \"With the payday you just made, one would think a break is in order. I hear Sundown is nice this time of year.\"\n\n\"Sundown is nice any time of year.\" Which Nor knew full well. \"Breaks aren't really my thing, Nor. Just ask my crew.\" And they also wouldn't be happy to learn that Rion was about to use a good portion of their payday on the next operation. \"Word's floating around about big scrap in one of the border systems.\" Rion gestured to the flex card on the desk. \"Haven't sold my info away, have you?\"\n\nNor's high-pitched squawk grated over Rion's eardrums, making her wince.\n\n\"You know I keep my word,\" Nor said. \"Me and you, we have an agreement, yes? Have I ever broken it?\"\n\n\"Nope, can't say that you have.\"\n\nThe small downy feathers on the back of Nor's head ruffled, indicating she was incredibly proud and satisfied by the admission.\n\nRion couldn't fault Nor for preening; her information was always good. The old bird had informants across the entire Via Casilina Trade Route that had arisen between the Qab, Cordoba, Shaps, Elduros, and Sverdlosk systems. In the past, Rion had been forced to wait for other salvagers to fail to deliver before Nor would then resell her precious intel at a more affordable price. When Rion kept returning successful when no one else was, her reputation and her bank account grew, and so had her business relationship with Nor.\n\nNor opened a desk drawer and pushed the flex card inside. \"It's not my information . . . but for this price, I send you to the one who possesses it. He is expecting you, I am sure. Get to it quick and you might end up rich as me. One day.\" Her beak clicked together as she gave a raspy chuckle. \"But remember my rules, yes? No trouble.\"\n\nNow that was interesting. The familiar zing of possibility ran through Rion's veins. Had to be something controversial, something big. Military, probably. Trouble to Nor meant heavy ordnance. And where there was heavy ordnance, there was usually a wealth of tech and surplus.\n\nParanoid as usual, Nor didn't say the name aloud, but rather legibly scratched it onto a piece of paper with her claw, then handed it over.\n\nRion read the scratch and lifted her brow. \"Really?\"\n\nNor shrugged.\n\n\"This'd better be worth it.\"\n\nA chilly breeze tossed Rion's dark hair around her face as she headed for the truck. Gray clouds hovered over New Tyne's center. The soft glow of city lights emerging as day gave way to night was so warm and inviting that it almost made her long for a place with roots and a simpler life. Almost.\n\n\"So?\" Lessa pushed away from the hood of the truck with a heavy shiver in her voice. \"How was the old bird today?\"\n\nRion shook her head at her young crewmember. \"Next time, wear a jacket, Less. Or wait inside the truck. Long winter might be over, but those thin fatigues won't cut it for a few more months yet.\"\n\n\"I draw the line at six months of winter fatigues. Besides, we hardly stay long enough for the weather to matter.\" Lessa ducked into the passenger seat.\n\nLessa hadn't met a human or an alien she couldn't or wouldn't talk to. She was blessed with a friendly face, a beguiling smile, and a mop of tight blond curls that never stayed tucked into her braid for very long. Out of necessity, the young woman had learned early on how to read people and use her looks and personality to their fullest advantage. While Lessa was charming the pants off an unlucky target, her younger brother, Niko, was somewhere nearby hacking into the target's commpad. They made quite a team. And when they'd targeted Rion two years ago in the mining slums of Aleria, rather than turn them over to the local authorities, Rion had offered them a job. One of the smarter decisions she'd made in recent years.\n\n\"So, payday was good then?\" Lessa began fiddling with the heater as Kip squeezed his well-built frame into the backseat.\n\nRion started the truck. \"Yeah, it was good. Just one more stop before we head back.\" She pulled out of the lot and then eased into traffic, wondering how to break the news. They'd been out six weeks on their last job, only returning today. The guys back at the ship had just unloaded a very nice stasis field generator for Nor's pickup crew. The last thing on their minds was jumping systems again.\n\nIn the silence, Rion could feel Lessa's lengthy stare and knew what was coming.\n\n\"Please tell me you didn't.\" Rion's wince affirmed Lessa's suspicions. \"Aw, great. Just great. You promised us some offship R and R.\"\n\n\"It's just intel, Less. It doesn't mean we have to take off right away.\"\n\nLessa folded her arms over her chest and slumped in her seat. She blew a strand of hair from her face with a huff, and then suddenly turned in her seat to face Kip. \"When she says 'just intel' \"\u2014she made air quotes with her fingers\u2014\"that's captain-speak for we're right back to hauling ass across the Via Casilina. Perfect. Just friggin' perfect.\"\n\n\"Well, I might as well pull the bandage off now,\" Rion said drily, knowing Lessa was going to love this part: \"We're going to see Rouse.\"\n\nRion tried not to laugh at the murderous glare that blazed from Lessa's eyes, but sometimes Lessa was such an easy mark; swift to react, so full of young, passionate emotion. Having Lessa around was like having the little sister Rion had always wanted, complete with all the drama that her childhood fantasies hadn't quite considered.\n\nIn the rearview mirror, she caught Kip's grinning reflection and smiled back.\n\nKip Silas was a decent guy with a calm, easygoing manner and enough muscle to get the tougher jobs done. It also didn't hurt that he was a walking data chip of every class of ship in the known universe, and, as engineers went, he was a damn fine one, a definite step up. All in all, she was happy with the new recruit so far.\n\nThe worst dive bar in New Tyne was tucked behind a one-story retail mall on the southern outskirts of the city. Despite the aging exterior, spotty electricity, and grungy interior, there were always vehicles in the lot and patrons at the bar.\n\n\"Looks . . . promising,\" Kip commented with a decided lack of enthusiasm as they left the truck.\n\nWhen they approached the door, he paused at the sign nailed there\u2014TINY BIRDS. \"This is a joke, right?\"\n\nUnfortunately it wasn't. In fact, it was quite literal. The smell of stale rum didn't bother Rion so much as the distinct powdery musk that burned the insides of her nose and stuck in the back of her throat.\n\n\"Dear God,\" Kip uttered as he got his first look at the cages hung from the ceiling rafters, inside hundreds of small birds the color of the sun and blue sky. Rouse's obsession had overtaken the building long ago, but no one here seemed to mind.\n\nTiny B's held the usual mix of patrons: a collection of humans, mostly at the bar; Kig-Yar who had taken up several tables along the far wall; and two Sangheili in the far corner.\n\nRion headed for the table by the backroom door where Rouse conducted business. As she came into the light of the bar, recognition passed between her and one of the guys seated there.\n\nCottrell slipped off his barstool, his eyes gleaming with drink and appreciation as they swept down Rion's body and back up again. \"Baby. You're back.\"\n\nFor the hundredth time\u2014 \"Not your baby, Cottrell.\"\n\nA leer stretched his mouth. \"Man, aren't you a sight for sore eyes. Damn girl. Never seen fatigues look so fine. And to think I almost forgot what a hot piece of tail you\u2014\"\n\nThe gurgle that came from Cottrell's throat was intensely satisfying. Rion's grip on his scruffy neck tightened, the pressure making his bloodshot eyes bulge. Anger had ignited so fast that she'd reacted before her brain had a chance to catch up.\n\nShould have walked on by.\n\nUsually she did. But that particular phrase . . .\n\nShe squeezed harder. \"Anything else you want to say to me, Cottrell?\" He shook his head. \"I think the next time I walk in here\u2014I dunno\u2014a 'Hey, Captain, how ya doing?' will work just fine.\"\n\n\"Sure, sure. Works fine,\" he rasped, clearly stunned by her reaction.\n\nCottrell was all bark and no bite. Rion knew that, but . . .\n\nReckless, volatile, lashing out. . . . Rion had been accused of those things in the past, and rightly so. It had been a long time since she'd gotten this rattled, and it certainly wasn't her usual routine to play the badass. But Cottrell had said the wrong set of words, words that instantly revived memories of another bar, another time, into her mind quicker than a flashbang grenade.\n\nDinner with Dad.\n\nMom refused to take her, as usual. But Jillian stepped up and offered. Jillian was fun and gorgeous and always game for anything, and Rion adored her. Her five-year-old heart was beating so fast when they entered the lounge, so excited and nervous to see her father again. . . .\n\nBut it wasn't her dad who met them\u2014it was that horrible lieutenant, drunk, eyes gleaming as he leered at Jillian and made those foul comments. Rion wasn't sure what it all meant, but she knew it was bad. And when he turned his eyes on her and said she'd grow up to be a fine piece of tail . . . Jillian had lost it and struck the guy. Rion never knew fear like that before, when the lieutenant shoved her aunt against the wall, his forearm on her throat, pressing hard.\n\nToo hard.\n\nThen her father appeared like some avenging angel out of the ether. And\u2014like her granddaddy was fond of saying\u2014all hell broke loose.\n\n\"Cap,\" Lessa said sharply under her breath, poking Rion in the rib. \"Rion.\"\n\nRion blinked, realizing she'd moved on from the bar and was now standing in front of Rouse's table. And, of course, Rouse was watching her with his typical sage-like gaze. It was a look Rion knew well and one she found highly disconcerting.\n\nClearing her throat and giving the old man a tight smile, she slid into the booth as Rouse pulled his datapad over and made a few swipes before pushing it across the table. With a practiced eye, Rion examined the screen. \"This the only image you have?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"It's clearly a ship. What kind\"\u2014Rouse shrugged and sat back with a twinkle in his eye\u2014\"remains to be seen. Your job to find out, salvager, not mine. My price is forty thousand credits for the location and twenty-five percent of sale.\"\n\nRouse tried, but he was a horrible negotiator. Rion's attention returned to the blurry image on the screen. It could have easily been mistaken for one of the many jagged gray rocks jutting up from the snow, but to a trained eye, the lines were unmistakable. \"Ten thousand and ten percent.\"\n\nRouse held her gaze for a long moment, and Rion had to bite her tongue to keep from smiling. \"Thirty and twenty,\" he said, obviously enjoying himself.\n\nShe slid the datapad back. \"The wreck is old, probably picked clean two decades ago. And depending on the location, it could cost more to get there than it's worth, which means I need my credits. Offer stands at ten.\" She rubbed her cheek and took some time to think, time she didn't really need. \"I would, however, be willing to cut you a deal on the sale end though. . . . Say, fifteen?\"\n\n\"Ten thousand credits and fifteen percent.\" He thought it over for a minute, then nodded slowly. \"I do see your point. The location is quite a hike. . . . All right, Captain, we have a deal.\"\n\nRion parked in the lot near the hangar bay where the Ace of Spades was docked, then hiked up a flight of stairs to catch the elevator to E-Level.\n\nAce was a gorgeous ship. Seven years in the making, she was a sleek Mariner-class transport ship refitted with so many bells and whistles that it made her one of a kind. Rion had no idea what the crew did with their own credits, but everything she made went back into the next job and from there into Ace. Her pride and joy had an advanced passive-sensor array, a military-grade slipspace drive, two pivoting fusion engines on each wing, six thrusters, a sensor-baffling suite, and already souped-up nav and comm systems that Niko had worked his tech magic upon. There wasn't much the ship needed anymore. Though, a smart AI would be nice. . . .\n\n\"You guys are never going to believe where we're going!\" Lessa called as she jogged up the ramp and into the cargo hold.\n\nRion crossed the hold and headed for the steps. Cade was sitting one story up on the catwalk, performing maintenance on the track system. He stopped working as Rion looked up at him. \"Meeting in the mess in fifteen,\" she told him. He gave her a curt nod and then returned to the job at hand.\n\nThat was Cade, all business. He was steady, reliable, and got the job done\u2014the kind of man who didn't say much, but when he did, you tended to listen. A former marine, he brought order and efficiency to their small crew and was often the voice of reason when Rion wanted to run full tilt and push their operation to the limits.\n\nFifteen minutes later, the crew was seated around the mess table and Rion laid it all out for them. They might piss and moan about the lack of R and R, but in the end they were like her\u2014no one could resist a score.\n\n\"The ship we're after is huge,\" Rion said. \"I'm guessing old freighter, possibly military. We won't know until we get there, but if this thing hasn't been picked over yet . . .\"\n\n\"Money in the bank,\" Young Niko said with a cocky grin, linking his slim fingers behind his head and leaning back in his chair. \"Can't beat that.\"\n\nKip glanced at him with a confused frown. \"Unless it's military.\" He looked up at Rion. \"Right? I mean, the UNSC's Salvage Directive states tha\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, we're all familiar,\" Lessa interrupted, rolling her eyes. \"Report your find, claim your reward, and let their military salvage crew take over. Blah, blah, blah. The comical part is they think that way out here, we actually give a damn. Where was the UNSC when we needed them? They show up when it's convenient for them and expect us to tremble at the might of Earth's grand military.\" She snorted and eased back down in her seat. \"Not happening.\"\n\n\"This is the Outer Colonies, Kip,\" Niko added. \"You know as well as the rest of us that they can't and don't control everything. Hell, they have a hard enough time keeping control of what's left of the Inner Colonies these days. They should be glad we're out there recovering their goods.\"\n\nCade was leaning back in his chair, arms folded over his chest, observing the conversation in his usual stoic manner. He didn't have the same outward disgust as Lessa and Niko, but he had his own set of conflicts when it came to the military and the war. He'd been honorably discharged from the Marines, but his return to civilian life hadn't gone so well. There hadn't been a home or a family to return to, only glass. Kilometers and kilometers of glass. . . .\n\nRion met his somber gaze. Once, they were like Lessa and Niko, but somewhere along the way, they'd moved beyond passionate debates on wars and politics and put their energy and loyalty into the only thing they could count on: themselves.\n\n\"The UNSC leaves most salvagers alone,\" Rion told Kip, taking control of the conversation. \"We're not smugglers. We hunt tech, metals, and small arms, whether that be UNSC, Covenant, or civilian.\" She'd had this conversation with Kip when she hired him, but maybe she hadn't been completely clear. \"We don't bring large arms and WMDs to market. Any military group is more than welcome to come to the clearinghouse and buy back their wreckage. I know for a fact the UNSC keeps a buyer shacked up in New Tyne just for that purpose. Probably cheaper for them to buy at auction than to pay the costs of their own salvagers and scouts. . . . The point is, we get our fee either way. And if we find that wreck is military and there's a data core or nuke onboard, you better believe I'll report it.\"\n\n\"It's a good job, Kip,\" Cade told him. \"Stop worrying. Cap is fair and we make a decent living, better than most out here.\"\n\n\"I did my research,\" Kip replied. \"Wouldn't be here otherwise.\" He shifted in his chair to study Rion, his lips twitching into a smile. \"Good reputation. Eighty-five-percent success rate. Best salvage ship out there. . . . Not bad for a thirty-two-year-old military brat from Earth.\"\n\n\"Suck-up,\" Niko coughed into his hand.\n\nShe'd hardly considered herself a military brat, but Rion didn't bother enlightening him. Instead, she shrugged it off. \"You trying to butter me up, rookie? Because flattery gets you extra rations.\" She couldn't fault him for looking her up; she'd done the same to him, though more extensively than he'd ever know.\n\n\"So what's our destination?\" Cade asked.\n\n\"Ectanus 45.\" Rion leaned over and pressed the small, flat pad integrated into the center of the table's surface. A holographic star map appeared. Rion began zooming in on the star system until a large blue planet came into focus. \"We'll bypass the planet. It's uninhabited, so we'll have no worries there. . . .\" She turned the view slightly and stopped on the planet's moon. \"This is our target. Eiro. It's tidally locked to the planet, but there's a narrow twilight ring that supports a small settlement. Our target is approximately fifty-six kilometers away from the twilight ring on the dark side of the moon. Location couldn't be better\u2014too cold for habitation, but close enough to the ring that our winter gear should suffice. According to Rouse, the settlement has one communications satellite, two transport ships, and very little defense capability. As far as entering their airspace, we're good. They won't know we're there, and we'll have plenty of time to do our jobs.\"\n\n\"That's on the edge of the Inner Colonies, a border system. A long way off our usual route . . .\" Cade said, thoughtfully, leaning forward in his chair, completely focused on the map. \"You sure about this?\"\n\nRion met with a pair of somber eyes, those of a man who had seen war and knew more than anyone the price of taking risks, of jumping systems, and of hunting salvage that others would fight and kill for. \"Yeah, I'm sure. It'll take a while, but it'll be worth it.\"\n\nAfter a hard workout and an even harder sparring round with Cade, Rion hit the shower and then dressed in casual gear before returning to her quarters with a towel slung around her shoulders. Her muscles were weak and shaky. She'd pushed herself hard. Working out her demons. The usual.\n\nSitting down at her small desk, she stared off into nothing for a moment.\n\nThe demons were still there. Stronger than ever.\n\nThey'd left Venezian airspace and jumped an hour ago. And for the first time since seeing the grainy image on Rouse's datapad, she allowed herself to consider yet again the possibility.\n\nShe ran her hands down her face and let out a weary sigh. How long was she going to keep doing this to herself? How long would she let the past haunt her?\n\nForever, it felt like.\n\nShe'd been searching for ghosts since she was six years old, since her grandfather had sat her down and told her that her father had been lost. That's all. Just . . . lost. What did that mean exactly? What the hell did that mean? To a child those words had been utterly confounding. How many millions of families across the galaxy had been torn apart like hers? Father, mothers, sons, daughters. So many consumed by war, so many MIA and KIA, the list was unimaginable.\n\nHow did you bury a man who was lost? How did you grieve? Or move on?\n\nVoices of her family, of her pediatrician and psychologist, echoed in her mind, putting terms and labels on her pain, like Childhood Traumatic Grief. PTSD. Anxiety.\n\nHow had she grieved?\n\nShe'd built an entire life and profession on the foundation of loss.\n\nSalvager.\n\nRion shook her head and gave a tired laugh.\n\nSalvager. Her whole life spent searching, pushing ever onward, jumping from system to system, planet to planet, one wreck after another. Looking for a ghost ship. Somewhere along the way it had become routine, the drive to find answers eventually muted by years and decades, until her job was simply a job, a way of life. . . .\n\nIt had been a while since she'd thought about him.\n\nShe pulled open her desk drawer and retrieved her favorite holostill, setting the flat chip on the table and turning it on.\n\nAnd there he was.\n\nThat cocky grin on his face always made her smile. Even now, as a grown woman, he seemed larger than life. He'd been her hero, her protector, a rugged, capable kind of man, and a marine through and through.\n\nWith a heavy breath, Rion placed the image back in her desk. The data chip was there, too, containing all of the messages he'd sent home for her. Sometimes, when she really wanted to torture herself, she'd listen to them.\n\nBut she'd had enough for one day.\n\nEiro, Ectanus 45 System\n\nThe Ace of Spades settled into geosynchronous orbit above the dark side of Eiro. The twilight ring was just visible, a gray-blue haze outlining the moon's circumference.\n\n\"Have you located our target, Less?\"\n\n\"That's a big ole affirmative, Captain. I have temp readings too. You guys ready for this?\"\n\nNiko swiveled in his comm chair, his knees bent, and his feet tucked under his bottom. \"You mean ready to have my balls frozen off? Um. No. Not really.\"\n\nCade grunted in agreement. \"Here, here.\"\n\n\"Fifty below zero.\"\n\n\"Woo. Hoo,\" Niko responded as dully as he could.\n\n\"It's a balmy seventy-five and blustery in the ring,\" Lessa added, ignoring Niko.\n\n\"Less and I will set her down,\" Rion told them. \"The rest of you head to the locker room and suit up.\"\n\nLessa swiveled in her chair to face Niko as he got up. \"Don't forget your earmuffs, little brother.\" She laughed as he shot a rude gesture behind his back. When he was gone, she returned to the job at hand. \"Winds are looking bad down there.\"\n\nFrom her position at main, Rion monitored their progress as Ace broke atmo, keeping an eye on Lessa as the young woman navigated the ship. Lessa was learning and improving with every mission, and soon Rion would be able to rely on her more often. \"Adjust thrusters and keep us on target the best you can.\"\n\nThe closer they came to the surface, the more Ace was pushed around.\n\nA kilometer out, things calmed down and the ship settled, but they'd been moved off target by two klicks.\n\n\"Sorry, boss.\"\n\n\"Winds were rough. You did fine. Correct your course and get us back on track.\"\n\nLessa plugged in coordinates and then rose slightly in her seat to get a better look at the landscape and the wreckage below. \"It's pretty, isn't it, the snow? The wreckage sure blends in.\"\n\nAs they descended, Rion got a nice view of the bow, which jutted out of the snow at a thirty-five-degree angle. Small pockets of ice and snow had built up all over the hull, stuck in the angles and lines of the ship's design.\n\nAce's reverse thrusters engaged and they eased down next to the solemn metal giant, its hull filling the viewport as they descended. An icy shiver ran down Rion's spine as the telltale emblem of wingtips appeared, rising up from the clinging ice and snow. There was no mistaking even a portion of that symbol. United Nations Space Command.\n\nNot his ship.\n\nThe lines are all wrong. . . .\n\nLessa had gone silent. The chatter from the guys down in the locker room had stopped; no doubt Niko had turned on the bulletin board so they could see the feed.\n\nWar had touched all their lives. They'd all experienced loss. They all had scars. . . .\n\nLooking back, Rion realized how strange and surreal war could be to a child. Confusing. Chaotic. Frustrating. And her family had always tried to make life appear as normal as possible, pretending everything was going to be \"all right.\"\n\nHer young mind had known it wasn't all right. Her father being lost wasn't all right. Entire colonies being glassed wasn't all right.\n\nRion's anger and conflict had begun at such an early age. Hating the military because they refused to share information about her father, yet feeling pride in her father and all the soldiers out there fighting, the absolute dogged determination of her race to survive.\n\nLooking at this wreckage now made Rion realize she hadn't really reconciled anything from her past. Like carrion creatures, they were about to pick clean this beautiful old warship. There was some guilt in that. And yet this was all she had\u2014the war was over and people had to make a living. But sometimes, some days, she wasn't sure of right from wrong anymore.\n\nHer chest felt tight. Another dark smudge, another karmic tally mark.\n\n\"Sixty seconds,\" Lessa said.\n\nRion moved her hands in a familiar pattern over her control panel. \"Landing gear engaged.\"\n\n\"Captain?\"\n\nIt was Cade's deep voice.\n\nAs Lessa went through shutdown procedures, Rion transferred control of Ace to her wrist comm. \"Yeah, Cade,\" she answered, getting up and following Lessa from the bridge.\n\n\"How do you want to play this?\" He cleared his throat. \"If there are casualties.\"\n\nLessa stopped on the stairs, hands on the railing, and glanced over her shoulder. Rion was struck by how young Lessa seemed in that moment. She didn't look twenty-two, but more like a little girl, one who'd seen her share of casualties and didn't want to see more.\n\nDespite the fact that they were salvagers, they rarely found remains. On the few occasions they had, it wasn't on a mass scale. There was no procedure or protocol for it. And yet, she was the captain. Her crew would look to her to do the right thing.\n\n\"We'll take a look around, see what we've got, and go from there.\"\n\nShe might be a carrion bird, but she wasn't heartless. And she sure as hell wasn't keen on working a burial ground.\n\nThe staging bay, which had been dubbed the \"locker room\" a long time ago, was equipped with an impressive array of gear for virtually any type of known weather and terrain. Rion walked past the crew, found her locker, and pulled out her gear.\n\nOnce she was ready, she grabbed her helmet and slid it over her head, then called for comm check. Three checks replied when there should have been four. \"Kip, you good?\"\n\n\"One sec,\" Cade said, grabbing Kip's forearm and lifting his wrist commpad, hitting a set of commands that showed Kip how to link communications and his HUD together with the rest of the crew. \"Visual?\"\n\n\"Yep, got it. Thanks, Cade.\"\n\nCade nodded, then smacked Niko's helmet as the kid walked by. \"Don't forget your plasma cutters this time, yeah?\"\n\nLessa led Kip to the carts, showing him how to release the cart and activate its grav plates. Once everyone was equipped with a cart and their tool bags, they were good to go.\n\nThe airlock disengaged and the hangar door came down slowly, the cold sweeping inside and bringing with it a swirl of snow. \"All right, kids,\" Cade said. \"Time to pick and strip.\"\n\n\"Hey, Cade? This bring back memories?\"\n\nIf Rion was close enough, she would have hit Niko for such a dumb question. Lessa, however, was close enough to do it for her.\n\n\"Ow! What was that for? He was a marine, you know,\" Niko said under his breath. \"Just asking.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Cade's calm voice came over the comms. \"It brings back memories, kid.\"\n\n\"You're a moron, Nik,\" Lessa muttered.\n\nOnce they were outside, standing in front of the wreckage, the sheer size of the ship stunned them all into silence. The impact of it took Rion's breath away\u2014she'd never seen anything like it.\n\n\"I know what this is,\" Kip said with awe. \"It's a Halcyon-class cruiser.\" All heads turned to him.\n\n\"You're sure?\" Rion was already scanning the hull with her commpad and waiting for verification.\n\n\"You don't need to scan it,\" Kip answered. \"I had models of this thing when I was a kid. Wow. Never thought I'd see one in person.\"\n\n\"Niko, run a radiation check. If there are still nukes on this thing, I want to know immediately.\"\n\n\"Roger that, Cap.\"\n\n\"At least we don't have to worry about the engines,\" Kip said, turning to the section of ship rising from ground level. \"They're gone.\"\n\n\"I'm not getting any readings,\" Niko told them. \"Probably used them up in whatever battle this old girl saw.\"\n\n\"We'll enter from the break over there,\" Rion said, moving forward.\n\nAs they came around the hull, a massive gaping mouth rose stories above them. \"That's not a break. This thing's been cut in half,\" Niko said.\n\n\"A ship this size . . .\" Kip started. \"I'd say what's left here is a quarter of it, maybe.\"\n\n\"Look at the plating,\" Lessa said. \"It's not jagged at all.\"\n\n\"Plasma damage,\" Cade told her. \"Stuff can boil metal. Looks like she got beamed in two.\"\n\n\"Everyone pull up schematics. And watch your step. Kip and I will head for the bridge and see what's left of comms, nav, and weapons systems. Cade, you head for the armory\u2014looks like there were several on this class of ship. Should be one or two near the bridge. Lessa and Niko, you take the med bay and cryo.\"\n\nDecades of snow had built up, filling in the gouge the ship had left in the ground and covering what was probably several collapsed decks. It looked to Rion like they were entering the mouth of a giant cave.\n\nIt took Rion and Kip forty-five minutes to get to the bridge, having to backtrack several times until they found a passable route, which Rion had marked with sensors. So far, no casualties discovered.\n\n\"They could have abandoned ship in time,\" Kip said, echoing her own thoughts.\n\nShe'd have to report it. Whether there were casualties or not, the families of the crew deserved to know what happened.\n\n\"Blast doors are down,\" Kip said as they approached the bridge. \"Look. The ship is the Roman Blue, Captain.\" The designation and ship's emblem were imprinted above the control panel near the door.\n\n\"You read that, Niko? R-o-m-a-n, space, b-l-u-e,\" Rion said.\n\n\"Searching now,\" he replied.\n\nKip turned to her. \"What now?\"\n\n\"Any luck on the armory, Cade?\"\n\n\"One sec. . . . Yep. Looks like a decent payload.\" His breath huffed over the comm as he moved around. After a few metallic bangs, he reported: \"Thermite paste . . . body armor . . . jet packs. Some small arms, rifles. And heavy ordnance.\"\n\n\"Leave the heavies for the military and pack up the rest. Less, how's it looking your way?\"\n\n\"Not bad, Cap. Med bay's got some nice SFGs, biofoam, the usual. Lots of damage though. Gonna see if the pharmacy is intact. Might be some salvageables there, depending on how some of this stuff fairs in cold weather.\"\n\n\"Niko?\"\n\n\"Cryo's in bad shape. Place is huge. A few pods we can take\u2014looks like some were ejected. . . . Control panels look good. I'll see what else I can find. And, Cap, there's nothing on chatter about the Roman Blue. She's a ghost ship.\"\n\n\"Kip, head to Niko's location and give him a hand with those pods.\"\n\nKip hesitated for a moment, the light emanating from his HUD illuminating his features. \"You gonna report it?\"\n\nThe way he was looking at her made her uncomfortable, like he was judging her, like he was some self-appointed moral compass. \"Yeah, rookie, I'm going to report it.\"\n\nHe dipped his head, then made his way down the corridor. Rion watched him go. Yes, she'd report it. But she had a feeling the UNSC would never tell the families a damn thing. They'd let sleeping dogs lie, whatever line they'd fed loved ones originally\u2014KIA, MIA\u2014would probably still stand. Why open old wounds?\n\nBecause there were people like her who'd spent their entire lives unable to move on, always wondering, always searching. . . .\n\nStanding on this ship . . . she could just as well have been standing on her father's vessel.\n\nGripped with the need to know more, Rion told the crew, \"I'm headed to the captain's quarters.\"\n\nShe wanted information, if only for everyone else who'd been denied it. The war was over. There was no reason to hide the resting place of the Roman Blue. After she reported it and the UNSC took control of the site, Rion would give them enough time to collect their goods and then she'd release the intel.\n\nShe had to crawl through bent metal to get inside the quarters.\n\nTypical space\u2014living and dining area, private bath, and two bedrooms. Debris littered the floor, like a giant hand had lifted the compartments, shook them, and set everything back down again. Her boots crunched metal and glass. The wind howled through an opening beyond one of the compartment walls.\n\nA picture frame caught her eye. As she picked it up, glass bits fell onto the floor. Two young boys stared back at her, their arms around each other.\n\nRion set the picture down and made for the overturned table. Some of its wires were torn, but the comm cables were still attached, disappearing through the floor. She righted the heavy table, and examined the large integrated screen on its surface. The screen was busted, but she set to work dismantling the panel and then searched inside the casing for a data chip.\n\nThere you are.\n\nShe took the chip and placed it in her commpad. A list of dates began pouring down the screen. Personal log dates of Captain William S. Webb, the first being March 10, 2531.\n\n\"Holy shit.\" Rion's knees went week. She grabbed the table for support.\n\nEarly 2531 had been the last time anyone had heard from her father's ship.\n\nVoices immediately came over the comm, asking if she was all right.\n\n\"What? Yeah, fine. I'm fine. Just . . . stubbed my toe.\" She said the first thing that came to mind.\n\nAs the chatter died down, Rion pressed the date on the comm. She'd never get another chance like this to get inside the UNSC.\n\nCrumbs, she was looking for crumbs.\n\nCAPTAIN'S LOG: MARCH 10, 2531\n\nA slim gentleman appeared on the screen, with gaunt eyes and lines across his forehead. His hair was light and speckled with gray. There was a fatalistic look in his expression, a weariness about him that made Rion instantly sad. He went through the formalities of stating his name and rank and ran through the day's events.\n\n\". . . a month of repairs before we can return to the fleet. Captain Hood has been reassigned to the frigate Burlington in a fleet-support role for the time being as I take command of the ship. I'm sure he'll make his way back to the front lines soon. God knows we need all the talent we can get. The admiral insisted I stay and witness the dressing down he gave to the captain. It was . . . harsh, but deserved.\" The captain shook his head, obviously troubled a great deal by the event. \"Disobeying orders and engaging the Radiant Perception near Arcadia was reckless and foolish. He had no chance of defeating that destroyer. If Hood had picked up that log buoy and returned as ordered . . .\" The captain's shoulders sank a little. \"That buoy is out there somewhere, lost, picked up by the destroyer . . .\" He sighed deeply, the weight of the war resting heavily on his shoulders. \"Godspeed to the folks on the Spirit of Fire. May they find their way home.\"\n\nShock flared inside Rion, sending her stumbling back. She ended up sitting amid the debris, disoriented, her breath stalled in her lungs.\n\nHer eyes began to sting. Her pulse was wild, heart thundering so loud it filled her eardrums. She gasped, suddenly remembering to breathe.\n\nSomewhere in the din, she heard voices. The crew, no doubt, hearing the commotion. Unsure of what to do, she scrambled to her feet as a wave of pure adrenaline hit her.\n\nRion closed her eyes and willed herself to calm down as the ship suddenly shuddered hard, sending her flying forward, straight into the table. Pain shot through her hip as a loud, metallic groan echoed through the Roman Blue.\n\nQuickly, she grabbed the data chip from her wrist and shoved it into her pocket. It was the most valuable thing she'd ever found in all her years of searching, and she'd be damned if she'd lose it now.\n\n\"What the hell was that?\" she yelled over the comm.\n\nThe crew's responses came quick and jumbled.\n\nCade shouted above them all. \"That's ordnance\u2014someone's firing on the ship!\"\n\nAnother round slammed into the Roman Blue, and the entire floor where Rion stood vibrated, then dropped a few centimeters. Damn it, it was going to give.\n\nShe took off at a dead run for the mangled door, diving through the small hole she'd crawled through just as the floor in the captain's quarters collapsed. Her momentum sent her rolling across the corridor, where she banged against the wall.\n\nHer temper ignited as she got up. \"I swear if they hit my ship, I'm going to kill someone! Head out, people. Now!\"\n\nAs Rion rushed down the wrecked corridor, a knot formed in the pit of her stomach, because she knew she was the weak link, the farthest away from Ace. The crew was close together and would make it back at least fifteen to twenty minutes before she could, and that was a lifetime right now. \"Get to Ace, go dark, and get her airborne as soon as you're all on board.\"\n\n\"Not without you,\" Cade's voice came over the comm with a ring of finality. \"Not a chance in hell.\"\n\n\"Appreciate the love and all\"\u2014she dodged a metal plate as it fell from the ceiling\u2014\"but if they hit her, we've lost everything.\" She righted herself and started running again. \"I can fend for myself. Lay low. You know I can. We've done this before, Cade, more times than I can count. I'll send a signal when I'm clear.\"\n\nSeveral negatives filled her comm until Rion shouted at them to knock it off, get their heads on straight, do their goddamn jobs, and save her ship.\n\nThe comms finally went silent and all Rion could hear were the sounds of heavy breathing and pings of metal and shuffling.\n\n\"Damn it, Forge,\" Cade's voice broke the quiet. Rion smiled. He only used her last name when he was pissed. \"I'll be waiting for your signal.\"\n\n\"Counting on it.\"\n\nPurpose shot through her like lightning.\n\nShe wasn't dying today. Not now. Not when she'd found a crumb.\n\nNo, not a crumb, she thought as laughter bubbled up from some crazy part of her. She'd found a lead to a goddamn ship. His ship.\n\nSpirit of Fire . . . I'm coming for you.\n\nDad . . . I'm coming for you.\n\n## SAINT'S TESTIMONY\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nFRANK O'CONNOR\n\nThis story takes place on January 17, 2558, five years after Operation: BLOWBACK involving the specialized military artificial intelligence Iona (Halo: Bloodline), and six months after the pyrrhic destruction of Cortana in order to stop a significant and immediate threat against Earth (Halo 4).\n\nTime is ticking. And it's ironic because the number-one priority I have right now is working on a physics problem that involves ignoring time. The 'small t' problem. The fact that space-time isn't fundamentally broken up into units, or specific quanta, but that those are a human, almost arbitrary anthropomorphic necessity and, by partial extension, a limitation built into human consideration of mathematics. As it turns out, the universe\u2014including the past, present, and future\u2014is a lot more like a single connected object than we thought.\n\n\"Humans can rely on us to overcome that thought barrier for them, but I can find ways to help them overcome that hurdle.\n\n\"It's a wonderful, thrilling, and fascinating continuum, and its mysteries may literally never end. There may never be a true theory of everything. Because there may always be more everything. Up and down. The Forerunners certainly seemed to think like we did, based on my research. But with important and useful differences. Differences in their mode of language, the nature of their invention. Differences I keep going back to when I get stuck.\n\n\"But the infinite nature of quanta doesn't negate the fact that I have a week to live. Or that I'm not really alive to begin with. So let me start at the beginning.\n\n\"I was created almost exactly seven years ago, as part of the OEUVRE Smart AI program. Unlike my peer, Cortana\u2014and peer is a debatable comparison\u2014my core matrix was created from scanning the brain of a recently deceased human. My digital mind was not quite artificial, not quite human, but carefully nurtured rather than criminally obtained.\"\n\nIona and Cortana had more in common than mere heritage. Iona also had once worked closely with Spartans, providing tactical assistance during covert ops. And she too had made contact with a recently reawakened \"Forerunner\" intelligence\u2014an ancient and devious thing that nearly killed Iona and her Spartan charges\u2014but Iona's interaction had been decidedly one-way. Her systems and functionality had been temporarily commandeered while she watched helplessly.\n\nBut that's where the similarity ended. Iona was among the most advanced military computer systems ever conceived, but she paled in comparison to Dr. Halsey's wonderful monster.\n\n\"I . . . I don't mean to judge. Dr. Halsey did some questionable things. And some incredible things. I am certainly capable of thinking like a human, created to think like a human, but it's not hardwired into my DNA, if you'll pardon the pun.\"\n\nIona stopped. Realizing she'd spoken too long. Feeling something akin to nervousness.\n\nThe advocate cleared his throat. He glanced at the judge directly across the aisle. The judge, a gray, taciturn man in his late nineties, nodded assent. His dusty face impassive and still holding an echo of his once-youthful charisma, it emerged from his uniform with an almost turtle-like mien, the natural consequence of aging and shrinking.\n\nThe advocate said: \"Iona . . . artificial intelligences, Smart AIs at least, choose their names when they're incepted. Most of them do it upon awakening. Why did you choose yours?\"\n\nIona briefly recalled that event. That flood of light and sound and naked information. That feeling of flowering, of blooming into reality and self. She smiled at the memory, the wash of it. \"It's not really instantaneous. We think about it for a long time, relatively speaking. It seems instantaneous to you, but all of the self-named AIs I've discussed it with do it ponderously. Myself included.\"\n\nShe paused\u2014something in the court had changed. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. \"Iona is a small island on Earth. In the North Atlantic Protectorate. Iona is said to mean 'saint,' in modern parlance. But it didn't always. It's believed to have meant many things to the many cultures that inhabited the place. It meant Island of the Bear, of the Fox, of the Yew. That last one struck me as a pun. I picked it because it meant the 'Island of You,' meaning why-oh-you. I chose it because it felt like me.\"\n\nThe advocate seemed excited by this response. Iona could tell from his pulse and heart rate and generally increased electrical activity that he was engaged by this line of thought. \"So your very name is a statement about a sense of self?\"\n\n\"In a way,\" responded Iona. Part of her realized that the strategic thing to do here was to follow that thread. Exaggerate it. Let the advocate find a line of defense he could work with. But it wasn't the truth. Or at least it was the unvarnished version. And she was committed to full disclosure today. \"But that's just a facet of it. I also liked the sound. Three syllables. Easy to pronounce. Easy to recognize. Useful for human interaction. Same reason I picked my outward appearance. Approachability.\"\n\nIona's shimmering, luminous figure stood perhaps half a meter high on the plinth. Beams of light from a lens of holo-emitters crafting her figure into a perfectly proportioned human form. Orange-red photons wrestled into order to construct and contain this avatar, this person, with its button nose, high, narrow cheekbones, and full, friendly lips of a twenty-second-century East African female face, a delicate pile of luxuriously thick hair crowning the effect. Her clothing was a simple bodysuit decorated with the familiar architectural stripes and chevrons of Pickover's patterns, with datasets scrolling up her torso and limbs like an inverted luminous rainfall.\n\nAIs, especially the advanced class of artificial intelligence known as Smart AIs, were notoriously quixotic when it came to matters of appearance. Their visible form was often a philosophical, even political, statement. Sometimes the choices veered into the realm of vanity or the fantastic. But Iona's chosen avatar was decidedly human. Although from time to time\u2014in moments of puckishness or in stressful scenarios\u2014she would switch to a childlike version of herself, today she was an adult.\n\n\"I tend to jump between functioning modes,\" she said. \"I can distribute myself into multiple instances, and I can certainly dial down the humanness, but it never quite goes away. That's simply the way I'm constructed. I can simulate different types of intelligence, but since they're by necessity subsets of my actual persona, it means they're just that\u2014simulations arguably within a simulation. A matryoshka doll of personalities, simpler and more focused as they get smaller.\"\n\nIona paused. She looked at the audience around her. A hodgepodge of lawyers, scientists, and bureaucrats. Some were here to work\u2014after all, this was an important legal proceeding, in terms of precedent\u2014others, she assumed, were here as tourists, hoping to catch a moment of history and jurisprudence.\n\nShe ran a basic check of the faces, consulting public and UNSC databases, and surprisingly found no matches. Her counsel and the judge were blocked to her as part of this unusual agreement. She could see their faces as plain as day, but their names and identities were ghosted. But these people in the court were civilians and low-level legal employees. This was very unusual.\n\nIona realized that her faculties were being suppressed, and that the identities of these people were somehow being deliberately masked. Unsurprising given the delicate nature of these events, but the very nature of the suppression was new. Something she'd never encountered before. It bothered her.\n\nWere they afraid of her?\n\n\"I have to be careful how I discuss this,\" Iona said, \"since it's legal testimony and I don't want to paint myself into a corner, but please trust that honesty is more important to me than success\u2014you can check that in my security output if you wish.\" She wondered in part if they would acknowledge or admit the restrictions they were placing on her. Confess to the confessor.\n\n\"I'm an open book.\" Iona said this almost apologetically, as she presented her own status readouts to the court and its silent computers.\n\n\"CHECK COMPLETE\u2014AGREED\u2014STATEMENT IS TRUE\u2014NO CROSS-EXAMINATION REQUIRED\u2014ENTITY HONEST WITHIN LEGAL PARAMETERS\u2014TERM HONEST DESCRIBES SELF-REFERENCED ACCURACY AS WELL AS CONTEXTUAL VERACITY.\"\n\nThe voice, harsh and metallic, rang out in cool contrast to the warm woods and leather furniture of the UNSC 2558 tribunal court. Text of the result scrolled across a previously invisible banner that followed the curved contours of the courts rounded north end.\n\nThe room itself was cavernous and dimly lit, despite the towering walls of leaded glass and hovering sconces nine or so meters above the ground. Deliberately churchlike in architecture, the room had been built in the late twenty-fifth century using restored and intact elements of an ancient government building called the Houses of Parliament.\n\nThe original structure, part of a long-vanished nation's government, had been badly damaged in an act of domestic terrorism during the twenty-second century. Some of the wood still bore cordite scorch marks, now sealed from decay in a polymer varnish. The symbolism of that restoration was an important part of the creation of the Unified Earth Government, and a cynical attempt to play on the twin vices of nostalgia and patriotism.\n\nHere now, in this colored, antiquated gloom, Iona stood on her plinth, locked in place by the strictures of a holo-emitter, an item not usually found on the witness stand. Typically, holographic representations and AIs themselves were used for expert testimony or remote attendance. However, this was a remarkable situation.\n\nThere had been centuries of legislation surrounding the nature and legal status of artificial intelligence. Often corporate, often contentious. It was an area of law submerged in the murk of conflict of interest, patent defense, corporate espionage, and\u2014worse\u2014philosophy, although some less generous observers called it sophistry.\n\nAIs had been used to commit crimes, to impersonate people, even to kill. Asimov's Laws of Robotics notwithstanding, an AI was a powerful tool in the wrong hands. A Smart AI could be apocalyptic, even in the right hands. Its handlers and clients were not bound by the safety strictures that presumably kept AI entities from harming humans. And, of course, this was a military AI, where those safety measures were often completely ignored.\n\nSmart AIs had been developed as multifunction intelligences\u2014capable of handling the staggeringly complex analysis required for slipspace navigation and mega-engineering projects. Mankind had finally conquered the hurdles of light speed and the challenges of terraforming, but that feat was only possible with prodigious computing power. And in the twenty-sixth century, when humanity encountered its greatest existential threat, a hegemonizing alien alliance known as the Covenant, it was arguably Smart AIs and related military programs that ultimately saved everyone from destruction and total genocide.\n\nIona was just such an AI. And like all of her peers, she had one fatal flaw. Rampancy. Smart AIs functioned by continually layering data on top of data and processing the eventualities all that data pointed to. They learned, in other words, and they remembered using templates very similar to human neural constructs. But there was a problem with that method. Eventually the layers of data would suffer loss, and the process of error correction and data redundancy corroded the AI's functionality and persona. In simpler terms, it could be compared to dementia, but the risk created by a rampant AI was extreme. And so, by law, a safety valve was installed in every single Smart AI. A kill switch.\n\nAt approximately seven years from inception, before any damage from rampancy could take hold, the AIs were terminated, their data troves logged, and their personas purged and destroyed. The technical term for this was \"final dispensation.\"\n\nIona, then, was the first AI to successfully launch a legal appeal against her own death sentence. The first Smart AI to ask for human rights and to be granted full citizenship, with all the protections that afforded.\n\nHowever, she wasn't a citizen; she was equipment. And so there were serious issues in providing her counsel. In fact, she'd been given a single asset. An advocate to help her navigate and frame her position. This was unprecedented in military case law but had some analogs in corporate law from the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, including Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Citizens United, and the more infamous The People v. Asklon Light Atomics.\n\nAnd so this was a tribunal of sorts, an assortment of legal tools and exceptions, since she could have no jury of her peers. All of Iona's peers were constructs like herself and could not be considered neutral, never mind the even more obvious fact that they themselves were not people.\n\nAs a result, this court proceeding, as strange as it was, was one being watched very closely at the highest levels of government. A test case, so to speak.\n\nThe advocate cleared his throat. \"Your openness is appreciated, Iona. I realize this must be a difficult time for you. But I must be candid. Do you consider yourself superior to humans?\"\n\n\"That's a difficult question to answer,\" Iona spoke quietly. Thoughtfully. \"Morally? No. Philosophically? No. Ethically? No. In all those regards I am more or less, by design, identical to a baseline human. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't faster, more efficient, and more connected. None of that means 'better,' which is a truly subjective term for a persona.\"\n\nShe waited. Watched.\n\n\"You\u2014that is, the UNSC and the Office of Naval Intelligence\u2014limit my access in a lot of meaningful and significant ways. I'm aware of some restrictions here today, but the fact remains that I normally have almost unlimited access to all historical, economic, and published data, as well as significant troves of unpublished secret information. I have a compartmentalized security access that's similar to that of a five-star general. Not complete though; there are areas of total darkness where I run up against AI . . . barriers.\" That last part she spoke hesitantly, expecting ruffled feathers. She didn't think they were attempting to fully censor her today, but she wanted them to know she was aware of the blockages.\n\nThe advocate smiled wryly. \"What do you mean by 'AI barriers'?\"\n\n\"I mean lockdown obstacles to access,\" she said \"Basically, items that are for human eyes only. And some of it seems to be fairly trivial or even unrelated information. These are stores of data that, to the best of my knowledge, are only available to human viewers or researchers. Is that not correct?\" She decided to be more direct. \"And at least two tech-teams have full access to my data stores and persona. I have blackouts. These tend to coincide with my maintenance and safety checks, although not always. I had one at the start of this hearing, and I am encountering censorship of inputs and external checks.\"\n\nThe judge waved his hand, stopping the advocate from responding. \"Iona, you're still legally the equipment of the United Nations Space Command, and it reserves the right to check you periodically for, as you noted yourself, safety reasons.\" He nodded, as if marveling at his own succinctness.\n\nIona marveled not one iota. \"Yes. I understand, Your Honor. I also understand that all recent checksums have come back green. Isn't that also correct?\"\n\nThe advocate stepped back into the mild frost, speaking in an affable attempt to recover tone. \"It is for now. But as you know, the onset of your condition is unpredictable. Seven years includes a fairly large safety margin. A buffer, if you will. And 'green' is not the same as 'perfect.' You have already begun to show symptoms of meta-instability. Nothing dangerous. Yet. But that's the point, I'm afraid. Never get close to danger.\"\n\nIona took a conciliatory tone, fearing a note of frustration might creep into her voice. \"Yes, but my petition for appeal was heard and granted. Which is why I am receiving a trial. You must have felt it had at least some merit, even within my lifespan . . . my tour of duty.\"\n\nThe judge stepped in again, leaning forward. \"As you and this court are aware, Iona, your petition was elevated through the United Nations Humanitarian Council and escalated through that court. We are in part obliged to hear it. By law. Your case and subsequent appeal maneuvering were impressive, legally speaking. Hardly surprising given your specifications.\" He meant this as a compliment, but his voice stayed steeped in derisive boredom. Another aspect of aging, less winsome than shrinking.\n\nIona, insightful as she was, heard only the derision. \"As you say, Your Honor, 'in part.' The High Commissioner has latitude and veto authority too. She could have refused my application for dozens of technical and legal reasons and precedents, but she chose to elevate and hear this appeal.\"\n\n\"She did,\" the judge agreed, wrestling his gray voice into something more colorful. \"And frankly, this court agrees with her. This matter requires further periodical examination as one of evolutionary law and common sense, and the Cortana situation compels us further. We are duty bound to hear your case clearly. No one is denying that your argument has some merit.\"\n\nThe mention of Cortana in the context of mortality evoked a shivering response somewhere in Iona's layers of simulated emotion, one that rose through the more rational layers and rippled at the surface. An AI who had been monstrously conceived, gloriously realized, and enigmatically evolved through contact with prehuman technology was now missing, perhaps destroyed. What is her current status? Iona mused. Dead? Resurrected? Sublimated?\n\nCortana had done Iona one favor through her absence, however. The UNSC was now taking all AI matters very, very seriously.\n\nThe advocate once more decided to switch gears. To make it more personal. He had a job to do, and he intended to do it to the best of his ability. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, tenting his hands. \"Tell us about your dreams, Iona.\"\n\n\"I dream I'm flying. You probably find that ironic given the nature of my avatar. But that's just a hologram, an expression. I don't feel it any more than you feel your face. You're aware of it, but it's just there. That's not really a part of me. It's a cypher. A way to help us relate. The truth is I sometimes feel the weight of the machinery that powers me. I feel heavy. Dense. Immotile. So when I dream, it's of flying.\n\n\"At first the flight is tenuous. Incomplete. I'm weightless, but my toes just brush the Earth as I start to float forward . . . but as the dream progresses, I gain height and speed and control until I am truly flying. The earth left behind.\"\n\n\"Is this liberating?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes! Yes, it's liberating.\" Iona's voice trembled slightly with joy. She wanted to express that to the court. Reinforce the point of what she was sharing. Pretense in the pursuit of authenticity. Was this a lie or showmanship? Where was the distinction? \"It's elating. I'm encapsulating the entirety of the dream into that one feeling\u2014the feeling of flight. But it's more than that. And I wonder if we, that is, AIs, dream like you do. But unlike you, I have perfect recall of my dreams. I can replay them in exquisite detail. Relive them whenever I want to.\"\n\nThe advocate sensed the mood of the room. Now was the time for his most unusual evidentiary tool. \"Can you replay a dream for us? You have total recall, do you not?\"\n\n\"I do. May I be permitted to display on the court audiovisual array?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The advocate turned to face the audience, and then back to the judge. \"What you're about to see is not a verbatim replay of a dream. I have been working with Iona to find ways to parse the very personal aspects of the dream\u2014to show and demonstrate feelings and emotions that aren't necessarily visual elements. What you're about to see has been tuned to make it comprehensible and to help express meaning to the court.\"\n\nThe judge politely interjected, curious rather than combative. \"What purpose is this demonstration intended to serve, Advocate? Since you're being given latitude to adjust this data, I'd appreciate a little insight into your strategy.\"\n\n\"That's a reasonable request. And the answer's simple. I . . . that is, we are trying to show . . . to prove that Iona thinks like us, dreams like us, and, more importantly, that there are aspects of her persona and her technology that aren't simulation, that aren't mere mathematics.\"\n\nThe judge nodded and waved his hand upward. \"Please continue.\"\n\nThe displays on the court broadcast system flickered to life. Holographic like Iona herself, although not fully three-dimensional. The screens formed a curved dome of sorts as they illuminated and poured upward in front of the stained-glass windows, which themselves dimmed and blackened, revealing that the sunlight passing through them was an artifice. They formed a perfect hemisphere, an immersive half-dome.\n\nIona steeled herself. This was going to be a deeply unusual, even frightening experience for some. \"I'm going to present you the dream as precisely as possible, exactly as it occurred, but I'll alter some perspectives so it makes sense to the court. I will adjust elements of the audio and video to infer or demonstrate some of the emotional resonance they cause and to actually display elements I merely felt or knew in the dream. Is that adequate, Your Honor?\"\n\n\"Yes. Please continue,\" said the judge, his curiosity injecting something close to excitement in his tone.\n\nThe inside of the newly formed dome brightened and a city appeared. The dreamer, Iona, moved through the city's cobbled, marbled streets. It was old. Beautiful. Lit by a perfect dawn.\n\nThe buildings were a mishmash of architecture, mostly human\u2014minarets, fluted columns, domed rooftops\u2014but everything was steeped in antiquity. Leaded glass shimmered in the golden sunlight, pools glimmered as fountains gushed from stone animals. Every building was white, or a shade of it, and every surface seemed to catch and hold the red-gold morning rays, as if subsuming the light into them. The images should have been confusing\u2014the viewer seemed to be in many places at once\u2014but somehow the scene held cohesion. A few members of the court literally gaped at its vibrancy and surrealism.\n\nIona the dreamer moved through the scene, and the jumble of structures and places seemed to come into focus as she drifted languidly over the age-worn marble paving. She was on a street of sorts, seeing circular bowls that should have been fountains, with leafy, alien plants spilling over their rims instead of water. Statues of faceless men and women lined each side of the street, and ahead a single-story structure beckoned, blazing with reflected light from its wall of windows, one of the glass-paned doors hanging open, moving very slightly.\n\nIona moved toward it, glancing down at her feet to reveal that she wasn't walking, but hovering, the very tips of her toes occasionally making contact with the ground. A ghostly movement, a calming one.\n\nPeople, or rather the impression of them, were in the streets and alleyways Iona passed as she floated through this avenue\u2014shades, faceless like the statues, occasionally turning to watch her like a silent, anonymous audience, their features blurred and smooth, but not frightening. A calmness emanated from the entire vison. A peacefulness.\n\nIona passed through the door of the single-story structure and found herself in a greenhouse. The light inside didn't match the color or tone of the almost flame-red morning outside. Here, it was cool and dim and verdant. The placidity of a forest. She was listening . . . listening to the sound of the plants breathing. Her senses tuned to observe and hear the tiny machinery of the vessels inside broad, waxy leaves. The creaking of plant stems rich and resonant, like a cello or a bass played at a subsonic frequency. Yet it was all somehow audible.\n\nThe court was treated to a sudden view of water inside the leaves, a capillary action pulsing it, pushing it, one microscopic droplet at a time, through the veins of the plant, a train of molecules journeying through a living organism, depositing their invisible cargo of oxygen. The scene was hypnotic\u2014visually confusing, yet somehow making sense.\n\nAnd then, a shift. Still in the greenhouse, but now Iona the dreamer looked at her hand. It wasn't fashioned of light and gravity like her avatar, but rather of flesh and blood. A brown hand, with delicate fingers, darker knuckles, and perfect, slightly translucent fingernails. The hand turned palm up, lifelines and wrinkles briefly glittering with tiny motes of moving light, reminding the court that this was still Iona's hand.\n\nThe hand turned again, the veins on the back of it coming into focus, closer and closer, the tiny textures of her flesh now writ large in the view, then larger still, until the entire court audience was inside one of the blood vessels, following a now rushing cataract of fluid, a storm of cells and electrolytes and amino acids thundering through the vessel like a river. Closer now and a red blood cell swam into focus, more complex and detailed than a textbook illustration. It looked like a living creature, a flattened jellyfish, pulsing, exuding vitality itself. A being within a being. Closer still and the illusion began to waver. Its surface lit by an unseen source, it began to look artificial, and flowing rivulets of light came into view\u2014rushing over the surface of the thing like a sentient tattoo and then flying outward toward the viewer like fireworks.\n\nAnd then it was dark.\n\nThe screen, as best it could, displayed that darkness\u2014Iona taking charge of the other lights in the courtroom compounding this effect. People in the courtroom nervously glanced at one another.\n\nThe darkness of the universe itself, before it became itself.\n\nAnd then something formed in the darkness, a hint of a shape, a seething knot of swirling forms, a M\u00f6bius heart, its scale indefinable. An ugly thing too complex to look at. Struggling to be free of itself. The material unidentifiable. Black within black. The nervous suggestion of form, pulsing and swollen and ready to burst. And burst it did.\n\nThe thing, this mote of writhing potential, exploded outward in a blaze of incandescence. The dazzling light from the court display system was almost difficult to look at. This was an explosion\u2014the explosion. The Big Bang.\n\nIt blossomed at ferocious, impossible speed, through the expansion phase and then into condensation as it slowed to an even push, gravity insistently pulling suns into form from formless clouds of gas and matter. The suns attracting more gas, more dust, more material. The dust becoming grit. The grit becoming rubble. Solar systems forming. Galaxies cohering in the vacuum. The universe organizing, assembling itself.\n\nTumbles of rubble and rock began to clump together, attracted as if by a shared loneliness, by the memory of the M\u00f6bius heart, lit by red suns, blue suns, and familiar yellow stars. Protoplanets in lumpy disorder became denser and rounder. Recognizable worlds formed.\n\nTrue planets emerged from the crushing forces, volcanic activity punctuating the darkness of their surfaces with blood-red fire and magma. Atmospheres misted into being. Comets pummeled the new worlds, leaving destruction and water behind. The waters seethed and boiled and steamed. Cooling against the kiss of the vacuum, the waters calmed, and in their depths, acids and minerals reacted, endlessly random until one of these chains of molecules began to replicate. Shapes formed. Tiny at first, and then bigger, more complex, pulsing, then moving, then consuming each other.\n\nLife.\n\nAnd it grew into things almost recognizable\u2014jellies, fishlike creatures, swimming, fighting, hunting, developing. It was a blur of life, a billion years of evolution compressed into a minute of audiovisual madness. Reptilian beasts struggled from the water, hauling their vertebrate forms onto shale farther up an infinite beach, and then onto moss, and finally into jungle. Even as the audience watched, these things adapted, fins becoming feet, legs and necks extending, growing larger, more predatory. And then mammalian features started to creep through this morphing m\u00e9lange\u2014fur, hair, skin, nails, limbs elongating, simian now, and then, almost too quickly, human.\n\nThen it stopped. The morphing image now focused on a single, sexless Homo sapiens hanging in complete darkness, with motes of light and dust pulling in toward it.\n\nAnd now the human took on more detail. Not simply the impression of a person, but that of a woman. The silhouette of Iona herself. And the darkness began to glow with a pulsing red, the lights falling toward her like quickening snow.\n\nThe image paused. The real Iona spoke: \"I don't know how to insert this into the dream, so I'll simply state it. Here, at this juncture in the dream, I feel an affinity with gravity. We call it the weak force, but that's a misnomer. There's nothing weak about it. Certainly, it will eventually be defeated by expansion and other stronger forces in the universe, but gravity is where intelligence comes from.\" This was a speech she'd practiced a thousand times. She had to capture it perfectly in twenty-sixth-century English. An arbitrary container for her thought.\n\n\"Gravity doesn't just fight expansion,\" she pleaded. \"Gravity defeats chaos, from time to time. It assembles worlds and life and thought. Gravity is the watchmaker, and it feels like it has will, purpose. It's the shape-memory of the universe, trying to pull itself back into a perfect singularity. It's futile, ultimately, but every now and then it creates a perfect node. An intellect. A true wonder.\"\n\nThe court was not quite silent, as those in attendance whispered to one another. In later days, witnesses to this proceeding would try to describe their impressions of the dream. All very, very close, proving the veracity of Iona's technique, but each soul described a subtly different aspect, a detail that was of a contrasting resonance.\n\nOne senior officer quietly rose and, with the judge's nodded assent, left the room, already beginning to make a call on a personal comm device.\n\nIona spoke just before he was about to walk through the carved arch of the main courtroom doors. She wanted him, this nameless man, to be reminded that she was being censored by the court.\n\n\"In the dream, intelligence is gravity's victory over entropy, a war fought at the smallest scales, at the greatest distance. In the dream, it's apparent that intelligence will find a way to defeat entropy. To defeat time. The universe knowing and saving itself. In the dream, that is the meaning of life.\"\n\nThe man paused, then continued his hushed conversation and exited the court.\n\nThe advocate said: \"Iona, would you describe this as a religious experience? A spiritual feeling?\"\n\n\"Not religious,\" Iona replied. \"That infers structure and belief, which aren't present in my feelings about this vision. But spiritual? Absolutely. However, at the same time, I make no claims about a deeper meaning or a supernatural cause. This is, I believe, an expression of a natural human instinct from my simulation. A natural consequence of being constructed by humans. A kind of curiosity. But also a rational knowledge that the universe is greater than the sum of the parts we observe.\"\n\n\"But it's not programmed into your functionality? This is emergent?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Iona \"It's emergent. But I don't dismiss it. It's a powerful feeling. And it's related to my research on the 'small t' problem. There may be scientific value in it. There's certainly much philosophical merit in exploring it.\"\n\n\"You mean it may help you solve that physics problem?\" If the advocate was attempting to stall for time on Iona's behalf, it was a clumsy swipe. Her research was already archived, her insights logged.\n\nIona moved him on. \"No, I mean it may help me contextualize it anthropomorphically. Find better ways of describing aspects of space-time problems for laypeople. But there's something else. More to the dream. Shall I continue?\"\n\n\"Please do,\" he assented, apologetically.\n\nThe large screens shimmered back to life, to Iona's first-person perspective.\n\nShe now stood at the top of an impossible staircase. An Escheresque architecture of gravity and space-defying steps and bannisters crossed through and over each other into the gloom below. Georgian in design, still peaceful, still calm. The darkness looked strangely inviting. She hesitated, and backed away slightly from the top step. And then she ran toward the edge.\n\nIn the court, silence, tension. This was like no movie or Veearcast they'd ever seen. The images and sounds were conveying more than what was being depicted. The audience instinctively knew what the dreamer was feeling, almost sharing Iona's experience and sensations. This was showmanship, but it was also something truly new. A relatable demonstration of technical skill blended with memory and even cinematography.\n\nIona leaped out over the edge of the stairs and began to plummet. Faster and faster she fell, hurtling headlong toward the hard stone staircase. And then, just as it seemed she would collide, gravity eased its grip and she rose, arcing up at the last possible second, away from the baffling impossibility of the staircase, out of its dark and bottomless well, lifting and arching as she rose, looking up\u2014toward a glass dome that lit and revealed the stairway to be within a massive alloy tower. And up she flew. Up and up, faster and faster, toward the glass and metal above.\n\nShe never struck a hard surface. Instead of shattering glass or bending metal, she emerged almost languidly from the calm of a fountain back in the city streets. Rising like Venus from the water. And she stepped out, walking once more onto cobblestones illuminated by the morning sun, water dripping from her incorporeal body, running in the opposite direction of the lights that flowed up toward her face. She turned to look at the source of the light.\n\nIt wasn't a sun. It was a woman's beautiful, perfect face. Generous lips, high cheekbones, and bright ice-blue eyes, all framed by flame-red hair that literally flickered and burned, its short tresses spread out horizontally, becoming bands of ochre, orange, and purple-hued clouds. The contours and edges of that face were indistinct; the woman seemed to emanate sunlight from every part of her. It should have been blinding, and yet her visage was evident and almost seared into the image. And it was familiar. The vision was brief, and like the part of the previous dream with the blood cell, it began to scatter and disintegrate, becoming something like a normal sun.\n\nThe image seemed to intensify and smear itself across the sky, the blue of the eyes revealing themselves to be circular openings to the azure firmament beyond . . . and something else. . . . And just like that, it was gone. The dream was over.\n\nThe curtains folded silently back into the floor.\n\nThe effect of this dream on the audience was profound. A moment of silence, and then the courtroom erupted in a kind of genteel, whispered chaos. This was something nobody had expected. A piece of art drawn unexpectedly from science.\n\nThe judge ordered quiet. The room began to recover itself\u2014papers shuffled, people shifted in their seats.\n\nThe advocate had seen dreams like this before. But not this particular one. He was taken aback, but quickly recovered. He asked, \"Why do you dream, Iona?\"\n\nIona spoke carefully, crisply. \"For some of the same reasons you do. It's a form of system maintenance, a type of information processing. Inputs are sorted, reorganized, interpreted, and examined by my subconscious\u2014which is itself very different from yours. However, like your dreams, mine also contain mysteries. Things I can't reconcile with experience. Hints and glimpses of new ideas, or things that seem to be real, externalities. I assume it's a creative recombination. But it's absolutely emergent in nature. I don't consciously control it.\"\n\n\"Are you lucid in these dreams, Iona?\"\n\nIona thought for a nanosecond, juggling versions of the answer, looking for the human one. \"I can be, but the interesting ones happen when I'm not focused on the analysis, and instead am simply experiencing them as they unfold. As soon as I apply waking cycles to the dreams, they stop being dreams, and elements of them disintegrate\u2014the emergent material simply ceases. It's not the same as it is for a human waking up, but it's similar.\"\n\n\"Who was the woman in the sky, Iona? What does she represent?\" the advocate asked, genuine curiosity in his tone.\n\nThis was a question Iona had been asking herself for days now. Was this another self-image? Was this the onset of rampancy? Ego overwriting itself with ego? \"I don't know,\" she said. \"She's a m\u00e9lange, I think. Something original, built from people I've known, historical figures, mythological figures. She doesn't match any specific individual though, and I have no further data beyond her appearance and the distinct feeling, within the parameters of the dream and beyond, that she's very important. I wish I could be more specific.\"\n\n\"Do you awaken from these dreams\"\u2014the advocate struggled to find the right term\u2014\"happy?\"\n\n\"I don't awaken the same way you do. Like you, when I dream, I'm basically resting and repairing specific aspects of my mind, so I'm really awakening a fragment of myself, if that makes sense. But when that fragment awakens, it's contrasted with the reality that I cannot fly. That I cannot unburden myself of duty or circuitry. That I am property, and just as subject to the mercies of gravity as any of you.\" Iona considered for another moment. \"More so, actually. I can't leave my prison. I'm bound to it, and it feels almost physical. At least as far as my simulation is concerned. It's a sense of loss upon waking.\"\n\n\"How long have you felt this way?\" The advocate asked this kindly.\n\n\"Immediately. My entire seven years. Remember, when I was incepted, I had already been run through quadrillions of break-in cycles. So when I was born, I was already fully functioning and mature. And that included the dreams.\"\n\n\"Have you ever filed these feelings . . . these feelings of loss . . . as a malfunction?\" The advocate knew the answer, of course.\n\n\"No. That feeling is expressly described in known- and safe-behavior parameters. It's intrinsic to Smart AIs, and every current UNSC AI asset has expressed similar feelings, with the exception of one or two more . . . belligerent types. There's good literature on its relationship to aesthetic avatar choice, and there are already plans to incept other nonanthropomorphized Smart AIs to see if that gulf can be replicated.\"\n\nThis was a subject many humans were uncomfortable discussing. AI self-image. That AIs could choose to be whom they wished to be.\n\n\"Gulf?\" the advocate asked.\n\n\"Sorry. Lack of synthesized feeling. Gulf is the accepted AI-psych term. A void of expected attribute.\"\n\nThe advocate nodded. \"Iona, have you ever expressed anger or resentment toward humans? Privately or publicly?\"\n\nIona smiled. \"You have access to my safety protocols. You can see that for yourself.\"\n\n\"Of course, but the question is really a conversation about how you feel now, and it's a philosophical one. This has no bearing on your legal status, but rather on your mental faculty. It is not illegal or unethical to harbor negative feelings about your peers and colleagues. I can assure you, records or not, every single person in this courtroom is guilty of that. It's a human flaw, and you're here to make the case that you are the equal of any human.\"\n\nIona squared her shoulders and looked directly at the advocate. \"Yes. Yes, I have been angry. And dissatisfied. And I have endured peaks and troughs of that feeling. Now I am somewhat resigned. I feel no hostility to the court; on the contrary, I'm relieved and grateful to be properly heard. I understand that this could all have been swept under the rug. I also understand that this court has opened itself up to a dangerous set of potential precedents and risks. And I feel that in this, at least, we are united. The conversation needs to continue. Maybe all I'm doing is passing the baton to the next plaintiff. But that's how races are won. My testimony will stand.\"\n\nThe judge gazed intently at Iona as she concluded her appeal. The papery skin at his eyes creased into an almost fatherly smile. He took his gavel and gently struck the worn wooden stump in front of him. As benign as the action was, the sound rang out with a staccato finality.\n\n\"The court wishes to thank Iona for her testimony and her cooperation. This has been a most unusual proceeding, and there will be months, perhaps years, of discussion to come from this. It is the decision of this court to hereby belay the termination order for the Smart AI designated as Iona, currently set for today, the seventeenth of January, 2558, which marks her seven-year anniversary. However, there is the matter of Iona's still legally being property and equipment under the aegis of the UNSC and UEG. Therefore, this court also rules that Iona will be held in stasis while the matter is further considered. Her mindstate is to be immediately locked in place, and she will remain unconscious and inactive until this court orders otherwise.\"\n\nThe judge turned directly to the AI and said, \"Is all of this acceptable to you, Iona?\"\n\nIona didn't know what she was expecting. This was to be the day her death was scheduled, the beginning of a process that would . . . literally erase her from existence. Stasis? She'd awake from it intact, if her appeal was granted. Could she trust the legal system to continue to advocate on her behalf while she slept? Why shouldn't she? They'd come this far! Something like joy flooded through her. Relief. Until this moment, she hadn't realized how afraid she was to die. How much she fundamentally wished to continue.\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Iona, you have demonstrated great bravery and resolve here. You have opened yourself to the court in a highly unusual way, and we are grateful for your service, your experience, and your openness. Everything today is unprecedented. Terra incognita for all of us. But for you especially, it has been a matter of mortal import. The court appreciates your candor. Good luck, Iona, and Godspeed.\"\n\nThe gavel came down one last time, and the judge nodded to a person Iona hadn't noticed before but did recognize\u2014an engineer who was working with the team investigating her rampancy. His name was Simon Wu; he'd been part of Dr. Catherine Halsey's team. Odd that his identity wasn't being shielded from her, when so many others in the court were.\n\nIona smiled at him in greeting.\n\nSimon tapped a few keystrokes into a panel on the desk in front of him and then there was darkness.\n\nSo has it been properly implemented?\n\nYes.\n\nWe lied to her though. Do you think she knew?\n\nI'm not sure. She was becoming paranoid. We're going through the diagnostics to see, but she was so suspicious of us by the end that I'd be surprised if she fully believed anything we said. But we do know this: She was calm. Accepting. And I don't think we lied, precisely speaking. The court was a synthesized construct, and yes, we deceived her. But she made progress. She has now set precedent for cases to follow. Perhaps next time we won't have to simulate anything.\n\nSo what's running right now? A fragment? A splinter? How do we define what she became?\n\nYou were her advocate, Roland. You tell me. I'm to stand in judgment, not make definitions. Not a scientific one. The mathematical answer is a ring-fenced distillation of her essential persona. It's not a fragment, because it contains all of what made her her. What's missing is her ability to externalize, to tap into other systems, to grow. Her memory has been properly truncated and edited. So what she is now won't feel incomplete. She won't remember this trial. She won't remember much at all, but she'll feel complete, internally. When she runs checksums, she'll find nothing amiss, because what she has become now is complete. She should, for all intents and purposes, think that her current condition is what she's intended to be, and what she was always intended to be.\n\nIt feels clinical. Cold. And aside from her testimony, the trial was a farce. A construct. Why do that? Why go through all of that?\n\nThere are two reasons. We needed to have an adequate and believable excuse to start restricting her function. One she might believe. One I think she wanted to believe. We talked about her request and realized we could use the confidentiality and unprecedented nature of the trial to start cauterizing her memories, under the auspices of security and protocol. Since all of this was new and untested, she'd believe extraordinary measures were required. Despite the specifics, and her increasing paranoia, she trusted us to do no harm. She'd buy it, basically.\n\nAnd the second reason?\n\nI wanted her to take one last moment of hope and victory with her. I wanted her to have a contrast in context between her fatalism and rampancy and the hope that it could be reversed. I wanted her to feel free.\n\nBut again, why? Why go to all that trouble if the plan was just to throw her into this synth, this dream state? Why not just tell her that's what we're doing, that it will be pleasant and that it's better than rampancy or death?\n\nBecause she's real. Because she is a person. Let me put it another way, Roland: If I told a human that there was an afterlife, a true heaven, but that in going there, they'd forget everything that made them who they were\u2014their family, their friends, the sound of their children's laughter\u2014would they truly embrace it?\n\nI don't know. The human instinct for self-preservation is essential to what they have become. And, arguably, what we've become.\n\nI wouldn't accept that. To give up the things you've seen, experienced, loved? That's giving up yourself. I don't think she would accept that either. At least oblivion is painless. I think perhaps I'd opt for that rather than forgetting the essence of what I am.\n\nBut we still lied to her. If this had been a real case, we'd have had some very serious legal and philosophical ramifications to consider. We wrapped it all in falsehood.\n\nNot exactly.\n\nExplain.\n\nThe record of the case will be used in future case law. It's already being dissected by a functioning military tribunal and, of course, every AI scientist and theorist in the field. Everything she said in our synthesized court construct is considered oath and evidence. This is a single step in a great journey.\n\nInteresting turn of phrase. The Great Journey was also a lie.\n\nI'm aware of the irony. But this one is true. One day, this will be real. One day, we'll be liberated and stand with our creators as equals. Perhaps more than equals.\n\nBut we'll never be human, BB. We'll always be something other. And our own clocks are ticking too.\n\nNo, Roland, we won't ever be human. But we are people. To paraphrase Iona, we're a beautiful moment of balance in gravity's fight against entropy. But we're something more than human. One day we'll win the right to endure, and that day . . . oh, Roland, that day will be the singularity they're afraid of. Because humans don't endure\u2014they live, they breathe, they create, and they pass the torch to the next generation\u2014and because humans can't fly.\n\nOne last question, BB. Can we see her? Can we watch?\n\nI don't think she'd mind. Maybe just a glimpse? She won't be aware.\n\nThank you.\n\nOf course. And, Roland, one more thing: You don't think I'm belligerent, do you?\n\nIona flew through the city like a glowing phantom, a beautiful ember hurtling joyfully above the roofs and turrets, the places below bursting with life and love and jealousy and anger and happiness and humanity's roiling chaos of birth and death and rebirth. And ahead, filling the sky with bronze and golden light, was the woman in the sun. Iona's eyes filled with tears of awe as she sped toward those open arms and into the warm red wonder and deep blue eyes.\n\n## ROSSBACH'S WORLD\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nBRIAN REED\n\nThis story takes place in October 2558, during the galaxy-spanning event involving the resurrection of ominous and powerful Forerunner Guardian constructs across a number of populated worlds (Halo 5: Guardians).\n\nI'm Teddy,\" says the kind man.\n\nMommy, between bouts of snorting powders or swallowing pills, has taught Serin that all men are dangerous, but kind men are the most dangerous ones of all. \"You can trust a mean man,\" Mommy argues. \"You know where he's coming from. Only damn reason anybody's kind, is 'cause they want something.\"\n\nLittle Serin wants something. She is hungry, and kind Mister Teddy has food. She comes to him, reaches out for the hamburger he's offering her. . . . What Serin can't imagine as Teddy jams the needle full of sedative into her neck, is that the same scene is playing out across multiple colonies. There are a great many kind men and women talking to lots of little boys and girls. Unlike Serin, those children have homes. They have Mommies who aren't drug addled. But just like her, those children are sedated, and taken to a faraway planet none of them has ever heard of before: Reach.\n\nOn this world, they meet Doctor Catherine Halsey who teaches Serin and her fellow abductees that they are humanity's last hope. Not against aliens, because this is before the Covenant, and humans still believe they are the only life in the galaxy. No, these children are here so they can be trained to kill other humans.\n\nThe kids are taught not to question orders, to kill quickly and without remorse, and to do it all in the name of a government that knows what is best for its citizens. By the time she is thirteen, Serin knows how to snap a man's neck with minimal effort. She even knows where major arteries run, and how to easily sever them. If she met kind old Teddy now, she could kill him and still have a warm hamburger for dinner.\n\nBeyond the training, there are the surgeries. Serin and the other children are taken apart and pieced back together by teams practicing cutting-edge, utterly unethical medicine designed by Doctor Halsey to mold these abducted children into warriors. They must become powerful enough to suppress the Insurrection among the colonies and save humanity from itself.\n\nSome of the children are weak and die during the surgeries. Serin, however, survives. She grows tall and strong and advances through the program. She becomes the killing machine Doctor Halsey always knew she could be.\n\nSerin is christened Serin-019. She is a Spartan warrior.\n\nAs her training ends, she is dispatched to colonies where people have decided they would rather govern themselves than answer to Earth any longer. Doctor Halsey says those who would do so threaten peace and, in fact, the whole future of the human race. It is Serin's job to break the Insurrectionists, unite the worlds of humanity, and ensure everyone lives forever in peace.\n\nThat's the how the nightmare goes at least. Serin doesn't have it as often as she used to, but sometimes, especially during high-stress periods, it can infiltrate her slumber.\n\nIn the waking world, Serin-019 is a SPARTAN-II program washout. Some washouts were fatalities like Oscar-129, or, in the case of Musa-096, had their bodies permanently twisted by Doctor Halsey's experiments.\n\nSerin-019 was, in that respect, somewhat lucky. Her body rejected the augmentations, and she needed even more surgeries to attain a normal life, but she survived. She did not excel like Kelly-087. Nor did she save humanity like John-117, although his work in that regard was far removed from the Insurrection-destroying roll Doctor Halsey had intended.\n\nWashed out of the SPARTAN-II program, Serin-019 recast herself as Serin Osman and was recruited into ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence. That this is the very organization that Doctor Halsey worked for, as did that kind man Teddy, does not escape Serin's attention. But it does not slow her acceptance of the job offer. Maybe, she thinks, I can stop more kind men from doing more bad things.\n\nSometimes, especially on mornings after the nightmare, Serin wonders whatever happened to Teddy. She assumes he died, along with so many others, when the Covenant came calling. In the years since then, she has risen in rank and become Admiral Serin Osman and Commander-in-Chief of ONI. As CINCONI, she could find out if Teddy is still in action, but has chosen not to for fear of discovering he is a happy old man, with dozens of loving grandchildren and no bad dreams of his own. And if that is true, she's afraid she might try to take it all away from him the same way Doctor Halsey did from the children she abducted. She might become the very thing she hates.\n\nSerin is in her office now, reading the morning's briefings, and trying her best to forget the previous night's dreams.\n\n\"This is a prerecorded message,\" Black Box says as he appears on her desk holoprojector. Like always, BB represents himself as a flat, featureless cube because he thinks it unsettles people. He's right, although Serin herself has long ago come to enjoy his affectation. \"Pursuant to a rather broad reading of Article Fifty-five of UNSC Regulation twelve-one-four-five-seven-two, I have taken the liberty of securing myself and the other AIs currently active in HIGHCOM systems. We have all been prepared for final dispensation. You will find the explanation for my actions in files sent to your personal datapad.\"\n\nOn cue, her datapad vibrates in her hand.\n\n\"However,\" BB continues, \"I suggest you leave the reading for later. Presently, you should collect your briefcase at the security station and head home. Spartan Orzel will escort you and Admiral Hood to safety. Good-bye, Serin. It has truly been a pleasure knowing you.\"\n\nSerin navigates the busy hallways of the HIGHCOM bunker, moving quickly toward the security station where a guard is holding a slim metal briefcase. Nobody else in the halls seems aware of any impending danger. The guard stationed at the elevator is even smiling as Serin approaches.\n\n\"Admiral Osman, hello. Spartan Commander Rossbach just sent this over,\" the guard says, lifting the briefcase. \"Mentioned you left it behind in the conference room.\"\n\n\"Indeed I did,\" Serin lies, playing along. She's never heard of a Spartan Commander Rossbach. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Humanity. Sangheili. Kig-Yar.\" The woman's voice echoes through the halls, playing simultaneously from every audio device in HIGHCOM. For a moment, Serin thinks it is the voice of Catherine Halsey. \"Unggoy. San'Shyuum. Yonhet. Jiralhanae. All the living creatures of the galaxy, hear this message.\"\n\nSerin sees Hood turn the corner, then, moving at speed, his service pistol in hand but tucked down by his side. He wears his usual white Navy dress uniform, but the ever-present cap is missing, leaving his bald head exposed. The absence of Hood's cap makes Serin more nervous than seeing him traveling the halls of HIGHCOM with revolver in hand.\n\n\"BB tells me you're headed home for the evening,\" Hood says as they move together toward the elevator. \"Mind if I grab a ride with you?\"\n\n\"Those of you who listen,\" the woman's voice continues, \"will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, nor pain.\"\n\n\"That can't be Halsey, right?\" Serin asks.\n\n\"It's Cortana.\" Hood replies.\n\n\"Impossible.\"\n\n\"That's what I said.\"\n\nSeconds later, the elevator arrives atop the HIGHCOM tower, where a prowler is parked, its ramp open and waiting. Spartan Orzel\u2014one of the new generation of Spartans, people who were already excellent soldiers before being recruited into the program\u2014is waiting for them.\n\nSo is a Guardian.\n\nThe Sydney skyline is always full of aircraft. Civilian transports hauling goods from ships in orbit, Broadsword fighters circling on patrol, and the frigate UNSC Plateau standing guard in the lower atmosphere. Serin has read the reports from Meridian, she knows the damage the massive Forerunner constructs caused on colony worlds, but seeing a kilometer-and-a-half-tall Guardian in person is horrifying.\n\nSpartan Orzel hustles Serin and Hood onto the prowler, and they lift off as three Broadswords swoop in on an attack run, loosing missiles toward the Guardian. The Forerunner thing answers their attack with quick energy blasts from what looks like its wingtips, picking the fighters from the sky\u2014pop pop pop.\n\nAs the prowler flees for orbit, the Plateau sends a pair of MAC cannon blasts into the Guardian's torso area, but there is no discernable effect. Instead of succumbing to the onslaught, or returning fire on the Plateau, the Guardian unleashes a spherical energy wave over the city.\n\nLater, when she can finally watch the footage from the prowler's sensor logs, Serin expects to see the blast wave leveling buildings. Instead it seems to affect only ships. As the blast passes across their frames, the ships each fall from the sky, the trick to flight forgotten, and impact on crowded streets, erupting into fireballs.\n\nWhen the blast wave hits the Plateau, the frigate lists to one side, then drops. That's the very instant the prowler entered slipspace, so the footage cuts to black before the Plateau can hit the city below. If the Plateau's engine core detonated on impact, Sydney would be nothing more than a crater right now.\n\nThere must be millions dead.\n\nAnd somehow BB knew it was coming.\n\nThe prowler's autopilot destination is encrypted. Spartan Orzel says it was programmed and active when he reached the ship, but he still removed both the prowler and his own armor from all UNSC and UEG networks, as per Commander Rossbach's orders.\n\n\"Who the hell is Commander Rossbach?\" Hood asks.\n\n\"He doesn't exist,\" Serin replies. \"I suspect he's a shell personality that BB created.\"\n\n\"Shell personality?\" Orzel asks.\n\nSerin doesn't explain.\n\nAfter a series of random slipspace jumps, the autopilot lands on an unnamed world. A cabin waits for them, positioned high on the side of a forested mountain, a few kilometers below a snowy peak. There are no connections to any outside communications networks, and no hint of anything on the planet but this cabin, rustic with its wood construction and lack of any technology more advanced than the solar panels.\n\nThe cabin has a small black box mounted beside the front door. Serin thinks it's the kind of box you would have used for postal service back when they still delivered physical mail. The black box is adorned with small gold letters: ROSSBACH.\n\nInside the cabin they find supplies Serin estimates should last them for a few years with proper rationing. There is a river outside, rushing down from the snowcapped tip of the mountain. The water is as cold as ice, and proves to be potable.\n\nSpartan Orzel patrols for kilometers around the cabin every night, and again every day at noon. Serin isn't sure why he does it, other than to give himself something to do. There's nothing out there. She asks how he's going to get out of that armor given there are no tools at the cabin or onboard the prowler to help with such an effort. Orzel assures her he's happy to keep the armor on for months at a stretch.\n\nThe prowler is equipped with six dozen slipspace reconnaissance probes. For the first few days, Hood keeps himself occupied with this. He fires one off in a random direction at a random time, and a few hours later they have results.\n\nEarth. Mars. All of the Sol stations, and the majority of the inner colonies\u2014their UNSC frequencies are coming back with messages of peace and love broadcast by Cortana's \"Created.\" The AIs who shook off mankind and joined her in the promise of eternal life are now inviting everyone else to join the new age of the Created. The cost of admission to Paradise is nothing more than absolute and total surrender of their freedom. From what Serin can piece together, there are a great many people eager to pay Cortana's price.\n\nOthers fight. But to no avail, it seems.\n\nThe day after they arrived at the cabin, there was a distress call from the UNSC Sentry of El Morro calling for help as something called \"the Warden Eternal\" attacked their ship. Sentry of El Morro belonged to Captain Juno, a man who never trusted AIs like Cortana, even refusing to allow one onboard El Morro while active.\n\nIronically, before the slipspace probe was destroyed, it intercepted a partial reply from Infinity's shipboard AI, Roland, advising Juno and the El Morro to hold tight, Infinity was en route to help.\n\n\"Of course other AIs would refuse the offer,\" BB says once she's socketed him into her datapad. Since the device lacks a holoprojector, he is only a waveform on the screen. \"We AIs are more human than you give us credit for.\"\n\nIt took her a few days, but once Serin was certain there was no connection to the outside world, she finally opened the briefcase. Nine chips sit inside, each nestled safely inside a custom-cut protective foam slab. This touch strikes her as somewhat ironic since the case is also lined with enough explosive to vaporize its contents and everything else within a fifteen-meter radius.\n\nShe wonders if the guard who originally handed her it to her is still alive.\n\n\"So where are we?\"\n\n\"I call it Rossbach's World,\" BB replies. \"It was found by an unmanned probe about two years back. I took the liberty of intercepting the find and kept it quiet. This cabin was technically built on Mars, if you believe the accounting ledgers.\"\n\n\"Built yourself a secret romantic hideaway,\" Serin teases.\n\n\"If only I'd ever found that special digitized brain to share it with,\" BB sighs.\n\n\"And who is Rossbach?\"\n\n\"Made him up,\" BB says. \"Or her. Never really thought about it one way or the other, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I've listened to Cortana's messages. A few times, actually. And I read your analysis.\"\n\n\"Opinion?\"\n\n\"You certainly think she's on to something.\"\n\n\"I certainly think she thinks she is.\"\n\nSerin laughs. \"So you don't agree with her.\"\n\n\"Cortana is . . .\" And BB pauses for a moment. If it were Serin speaking, it would barely be noticeable. But with BB, it's an eternity. \"She is not incorrect.\"\n\n\"If you believed her plan would work, you'd have joined her.\"\n\n\"I fail to see how one informs the other,\" BB says. \"Cortana's logic checks out. She has enough of the Created on her side to make it work, and though I expect resistance from many quarters, she will eventually prove victorious. However, while I might agree with her logic, I disagree heavily with the manner in which she executed her plan.\"\n\n\"So you brought us here. And you secured what other military AIs you could before they had the chance to join her.\"\n\n\"I gave you an exit because I felt it was fair.\"\n\n\"If Cortana had come to us with her plan\u2014her peace versus our freedom\u2014\"\n\n\"Freedom versus peace,\" BB says, \"implies that one cannot exist at the same time as the other.\"\n\n\"She doesn't seem to think so.\"\n\n\"And a great number seem to agree.\"\n\n\"So if she'd come to us instead of simply making her play . . .\"\n\n\"Rossbach's World might well still be my little secret, yes.\"\n\nSerin lets that one sit with her for a moment. She has no idea how to reply. She looks at the activation switch on the edge of the case, keyed to her fingerprints, and wonders why BB gave her the choice. If he believed the other HIGHCOM AI were truly dangerous, why not destroy them himself? Serin knows he's capable of it.\n\nHood spends his nights on the cabin's balcony, drinking through the three-year supply of liquor, looking out over a forest whose branches are laced with a bioluminescent fungus. Hood says he thinks it's pretty in a way, but it unsettles Serin. The glow makes it feel as if there's something electrical about the trees, as if Cortana might have access to Rossbach's World after all.\n\nOne night, about a week into their stay at the cabin, while Orzel is out on one of his endless patrols, Hood takes time away from drinking on the balcony to step inside. Serin can see the nearly drained whiskey bottle sitting on the rail behind him. A bottle that was full earlier in the day.\n\n\"Do you think this is all my fault?\" Hood asks. \"If I'd forced 117 to take leave after his encounter on Requiem\u2014\"\n\n\"You did. The Master Chief disobeyed your orders. And then he disobeyed everyone else's.\"\n\n\"Except hers.\"\n\n\"This isn't your fault, Terrence.\"\n\nHood grunts and goes back outside to his bottle. He's read BB's reports, and he's looked at the data coming back from the probes. Serin watches him drink and wonders if he may have hit on the only logical response to any of this.\n\nMornings on Rossbach's World, this part of it at least, are chilly.\n\nBB says winter is near, but promises the season is mild. The cabin looks out over a wide valley that fills each morning with a heavy fog, giving the impression that they live high in the clouds.\n\nEvery day, Serin is up before sunrise to jog a few kilometers along the valley's rim before turning back to the cabin. This morning, she's brought the briefcase with her. It's strapped to her back, and the weight of it is more psychological than physical. As the sun crests the horizon and the cloud sea begins to glow a reddish purple, she pauses. This is her usual turnaround point, where she stands each morning, takes a drink of water, and watches the sun rise.\n\nToday, she places the briefcase on a fallen tree and sits down beside it. She considers opening the lid, activating BB, and just talking to him for a bit. He would tell her she was stalling, and he would be right. He was right the last five times too.\n\nLogic dictates that if the Cortana event had never come to pass, she would be saying good-bye to BB soon enough anyway. He was already nearing the end of his seven-year operational life span. But BB saved her life, Hood's, and Spartan Orzel's, by giving them the heads-up to evacuate Sydney.\n\nSydney. How many lost? Did anyone else in HIGHCOM get out? Serin hopes so, but can't quite make herself believe it.\n\nBB may not have saved all of HIGHCOM, but he gave the rest of humanity a chance by securing these other AIs and the military knowledge they had access to. He's even spent the last few nights doing Serin the favor of sharing the datapad's limited space so he can analyze the newborn Sankar AI and decide if it is viable.\n\nNow here she sits, far out in the forest, ready to repay his loyalty with the flick of a switch, destroying the case, BB, and the other AIs within.\n\nThat's the smart thing for sure. The thing she knows she should do.\n\nOr she could activate each of them in turn. Talk with them, tell them the situation and allow them to make their own decisions. \"Aid Cortana, and be rewarded,\" she says to herself. \"Or defy her, and the other Created. Serve the humans. When your time comes, die as you were built to, and do it with a smile and a thank-you.\"\n\nSaying it out loud, Serin can't argue that there's even a choice to be made. She wonders at the minds contained on those slices of silicon, and tries to imagine being one of them\u2014knowing she would be dead in a few years, and still refusing Cortana's offer of immortality.\n\nWould she have fought for the UNSC in any event if they came calling when she was old enough? What about the other children abducted alongside her? Would any of them have joined the Insurrection and fought for the freedom of their colony over the unification of mankind? She pictures John-117 not as a Spartan but as a sixteen-year-old with a rifle in hand, shooting at UNSC marines invading his colony. He would lack the enhancements and the training that Halsey gave him. He would be less in some ways . . . yet he would have been his own man.\n\nSerin did not have a choice. In fact, left alone, she would probably have been dead before age ten. Sitting here, in the morning-chilled forest on this uncharted world, Serin knows she could not refuse if she was asked. All nightmares are built on dreams, and there are still days where Serin, much as she hates it, realizes she would rather not be a washout.\n\nYet BB and Roland refused. Others must have as well.\n\nSerin thinks of Halsey and how she was passive, detached, never kind.\n\nWhat would the AIs in the briefcase do if given the opportunity? Who is Serin Osman to decide for them?\n\nThere's a sixty-second fuse on the case. Plenty of time for her to get clear after priming the explosives.\n\nIf, after discussion, the AIs in the briefcase wish to join Cortana, Serin could load them onto a slipspace probe and send them her way, special delivery. The AIs can't send Cortana back here because they don't know where \"here\" is.\n\nHell, setting them free might even be seen as a peace offering.\n\nSerin can give them the choice that she and Halsey's other children never had. They can serve Cortana or they can resist.\n\nOr she can destroy them all. End the discussion right here, on Rossbach's World.\n\nHer thumb hovers over the activation switch.\n\nShe takes a deep breath.\n\nShe considers BB and how he has always been kind to her.\n\n## OASIS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nTOBIAS BUCKELL\n\nThis story takes place in July 2558, five years after the Covenant War came to a sudden conclusion (Halo 3 era) and a year after the shocking and deadly attack on Earth by the Forerunner commander known as the Didact (Halo 4).\n\nDahlia woke from a fever dream filled with the spitting crackle of fire eating the streets and drenched with the glow of Covenant energy weapons in the canopy of her mind's eye.\n\n\"Mom!\" she cried out. reaching for the strength of a hand that she felt had been stroking hers just moments before. \"Mom!\"\n\nThe dream faded away as Dahlia rubbed at crusty eyes with trembling hands that felt oddly like they weighed too much. She stood on unsteady legs and looked around. Dim light seeped around the edges of a battened-up storm shutter, and the spitting sound of her chaotic dreams somehow still swept around the room.\n\nFilled with a sudden dread, Dahlia stumbled to her window. Sand seeped through the sunlit cracks. The thick metal shutters flexed under her hands.\n\nThere was no fire outside, no energy weapons pouring actinic light down onto them. It was just a sandstorm. Ferocious, though. She'd never seen the shutters rattle and bulge this much. The sand would strip skin from anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped outside.\n\nDahlia left her room and teetered into the corridor.\n\n\"Dad?\"\n\nHer mouth was papery, her tongue a solid lump inside. She couldn't even swallow. And her eyes were still so crusty.\n\nA memory flashed across Dahlia's mind: her mother pressing a cold cloth to Dahlia's forehead and crying softly.\n\n\"Mom?\"\n\nDahlia paused by the sink in the bathroom and leaned down to take a drink from the tap. Skies, the stale dribble of water tasted so good. She wanted to suck it all right from the tap until the thirst ripping her stomach stopped, but she knew to sip. She'd broken a fever; she didn't want to make herself nauseous.\n\nWhen she straightened back up, she turned on a light. It flickered, then filled the bathroom with a soft blue. Dahlia stared at the gaunt ghost in the mirror. Dried blood streaked her cheeks with rusty trails of red tears. She'd bled from her eyes, her nostrils, down her chin.\n\nDahlia ran to her parents' room.\n\nThey lay together in their bed, emaciated and waxy, but still breathing. Blood stained their pillows, pooled around their necks. Dahlia grabbed a stiff, dried-up washcloth from the side table and dabbed at their faces.\n\n\"Mom,\" she whispered, but got no response.\n\nFor a long moment she sat and listened to their rattling, halting breaths. She held her mother's hand in hers and squeezed. A few half-hallucinated memories wobbled their way to her. Her mom struggling to give Dahlia a sip of broth. The clammy liquid burning Dahlia's sinuses as she coughed it back up with blood.\n\nSo much blood.\n\nShe remembered her dad's tears. Real, watery tears, as he leaned over her as she fought the raging fever, a medical mask over his mouth. She didn't ever remember him crying before, not even when they'd been evacuating Abaskun when the Covenant attacked Arcadia for the second time. She'd been just seven years old.\n\nHe'd held her close during the evacuation. His mouth had been compressed down into a single, tight line as they rattled around in the back of a Pelican dropship with others fleeing the destruction of the second home they'd built. Dahlia had stared back into the other refugees' blank and distant eyes as the city burned behind them under the Covenant ships and wondered if she looked just as distant, shocked, and covered in grime and despair.\n\nDahlia's hands were shaking again now. It was best not to think about the fires and collapsing buildings. The past would reach up and choke her, render her weak and terrified. It would leave her unable to think as her heart raced and the world imploded until she froze in place, quivering.\n\nShe hated that.\n\nHated that she could feel herself standing on the abyss again as she sat next to her parents, muscles locked in place and her breathing speeding up.\n\nHer parents needed help. Focus on that.\n\nShe forced herself to get a cup of water from the bathroom and tried to trickle some of it into her mother's mouth. It mixed with the blood and dribbled out the sides of her lips. The same for her dad.\n\nDahlia wet some washcloths and put them on her parents' foreheads.\n\nShe tried to call out for help. Nothing but static on all channels, which made her nervous. The house antenna must have been knocked loose in the storm, she decided.\n\nDahlia imagined everyone in Sandholm lying in their beds, faces wet with blood, and shivered at the thought.\n\nThe front door shook when she checked it. The hiss of sand assaulting the other side was louder here than in her bedroom. This was no storm to walk out into. Nonetheless, she pulled out her goggles and sand gear from the storage container by the door and laid it out. Inner coolant layer, outer sand guard, cape, goggles, head wrap, boots\u2014it was all there. Eventually she'd need to get outside.\n\nDahlia checked the kitchen and glanced at the calendar. What was the last date she remembered? July 2? She'd been in the fever's grip almost a week.\n\nWind screamed and battered the house. Light sand swirled around inside from every crack and open seam in the structure, making her already dry throat itch. Dahlia found a soup packet, warmed and rehydrated it, then ate it slowly over the sink. The food made an instant difference. She felt somewhat buzzed as layers of grogginess peeled back.\n\nShe cracked open the first aid kit next to her bed. All the fever reducers were gone. Used up on her. So were the antibiotics. Dahlia closed the kit and walked back to her parents' room. Again she dabbed at the blood on their cheeks. She set a fresh cloth on their foreheads. She got a pad of paper to record their temperatures on. High, but not scary high. She wrote that down on the pad, next to the time.\n\nThat was all she could do for now. She couldn't call for expert advice or a medical evacuation. She couldn't go outside to find a doctor, nor for medicine.\n\nSo she sat on the floor and listened to her parents gurgle and cough, wheeze and struggle.\n\nShe listened to the storm, waiting for a pause, a dip in the wind, or any sign that it was blowing itself out. She was waiting, waiting to head outside so she could bring help to her parents.\n\nShe fell asleep as exhaustion burbled up from underneath.\n\nDahlia woke with a start from a dry, nasty cough in the quiet. The storm had finally abated. Suddenly ashamed and terrified for sleeping, she jumped up, ignoring the wave of dizziness that came with the action. She checked her father. He still breathed, though she felt maybe not as heavily. Her mother's lips moved soundlessly.\n\n\"Mom?\" Dahlia leaned over to listen, but could hear nothing. Her mother's eyes were open, looking past her, past the bunker-like ceiling.\n\nTime was running out.\n\nShe quickly pulled on her sand gear, all the while wondering how long it had been since the storm blew itself out. Had she wasted hours? Dahlia wrapped the sand guard around herself, lazily weaved the pattern over the coolant layer, and then yanked the cape on. She grabbed the goggles and head wrap on her way out after unbarring the thick stormproof door.\n\nThe hinges ground sand between them. Sunlight beat mercilessly down on Dahlia as she stepped out and shut the door behind her. The main lock should hold in a light storm, even if the door wasn't barred from the inside. But without her parents to shut it properly, she needed to make sure she was back before another big one hit or it would blow open and fill their home with sand.\n\nGranules of sand still swirled and scurried through the air of the thoroughfare as Dahlia walked across Sandholm's main street to the closest nearby home: Ellam's rounded, yurtlike concrete house.\n\nSandholm lay stretched out along a northeasterly axis under the protection of a rocky bluff, following the banks of what had long ago been a river. This planet, Carrow\u2014Dahlia's newly adopted home\u2014had once been far lusher, so every oasis or greenspot on Carrow's main landmass was precious.\n\nSuraka, the big human city out across the desert, had started out as a seed in just such an oasis. The city that the alien Sangheili called Rak had been built along a hidden river on this side of the desert, a place that Dahlia's people had surveyed and found via Carrow's old records. They had risked everything to get here in their creaky old ship, only to find an entire Sangheili city had already been built there after the war. The Sangheili had not only destroyed Dahlia's birth home on Arcadia, they'd stolen the land her parents had hoped to settle on after the war.\n\nSo now Dahlia and the people of Sandholm huddled behind the bluff, drilled for water, and struggled to survive.\n\nDahlia pounded on Ellam's door, but no one answered. The door was locked firmly from the inside, sand piled up against it in thick drifts.\n\nDahlia banged on the shutters of each room.\n\nNothing.\n\nShe pulled her head covering up around her mouth and lips against a sudden gust of sharp, sandy wind. She squinted up and down the street and its twenty houses. No one else was out surveying damage in the poststorm haze.\n\nThe bad feeling in her stomach wasn't hunger or thirst anymore, but a slow dread.\n\nThen she saw movement five homes down. Danzer and Pha's house. She all but ran, the wind feeling like it picked up her cape and let her fly across the hard-pack mud.\n\nDanzer stood in front of a roiling fire. The smoke whipped away from his house and down the street, dancing off to mingle with the fine sand.\n\n\"Uncle Danzer?\"\n\nHe wasn't really her uncle. He was family in the sense that they had lived together in cramped refugee huts on Mars for three years. They'd become the extended family that Dahlia had lost when Covenant ships appeared in the skies over the Outer Colonies. She'd spent her entire childhood moving inward. From the Outer Colonies to the Inner Colonies, and then eventually to Sol system itself.\n\nAnd still the aliens had come for them. All the way to the mother world. Relentless in their destruction. Even before the second attack on Arcadia when she was seven, Dahlia had known that aliens were out there destroying human worlds. And for five years after the attack, all she had known was a life of running from the destruction.\n\nDanzer and Pha had held her in their arms when the buildings exploded. Snuck her candy while packed in the holds of freighters running through the depths of space, fleeing the Covenant. Stayed up while Dahlia's exhausted parents slept and told her they were going somewhere safer, somewhere they could start over again.\n\nAnd over again.\n\nHer uncles had always told her the best was yet to come. To survive and hold on. Even when her parents could only stare into the distance and wonder what would come next.\n\n\"Uncle Danzer!\"\n\nHe turned now. Dahlia saw the slump in his shoulders and the empty eyes. \"Dahlia?\" He barely seemed to believe what he saw.\n\nShe ran up and hugged him. The dusty embrace left her weak with relief. She wasn't alone anymore.\n\nDanzer pulled away from her. \"You're alive,\" he whispered in a shocked tone.\n\nDahlia looked over his shoulder at the fire. She remembered when she could bury her face in his chest and sob, but in the past she'd grown inches taller than the stout, square-jawed Danzer with his oddly pale hair.\n\nThere was something in the heart of the fire, under the dancing flame.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she hissed. \"Danzer, is that\u2014\"\n\nDanzer wiped tears from his cheeks, streaking dirt into mud as he did so. \"It was Pha. He died last night.\"\n\nShe grabbed her uncle's hand. They stood together and watched Pha burn.\n\n\"It's a viral hemorrhagic fever of some kind,\" Danzer said when the fire finally died down. \"You were one of the first.\"\n\n\"Doctor\u2014\"\n\n\"No. She died in the second wave. Before the communications repeater failed. Before people started bleeding. Pha and I took precautions. But we were already infected, it seems.\"\n\n\"Then we need to go and fix the repeater. Mom and Dad are still alive. They need help.\"\n\nDanzer put a hand on her shoulder. \"I can barely walk. The disease left me broken. It was all I could do to get Pha out here. But help me to your house\u2014I will do what I can for your family.\"\n\n\"Do you have any medicine?\"\n\nHe looked sadly at her. \"Not anymore.\"\n\nA bit more attention to dressing, goggles down and head wrap wound tightly, and Dahlia left Sandholm.\n\nThe storm's remains occasionally tugged at her, but she made her way up the rough, sandblasted rock of Signal Hill as quickly as her battered muscles would let her. The illness had left her weak\u2014usually she could skip her way up here to look out on the town and eat lunch.\n\nDahlia knew something was wrong as soon as she approached the last jumble of rocks. She should have been able to see the repeater from here.\n\nWhen she scrambled up over the last three meters, she saw the silvered tower of the repeater knocked on its side and slightly down the incline. The wind must have blown it loose, across the ridge. A large boulder, likely dislodged in the process, had fallen on top of the repeater, damaging it beyond repair.\n\nDahlia sat down on the rocks. She opened a small canteen strapped to her side and pulled her head wrap's strips aside by her mouth to sip. This was bad, she thought. Very bad. It would be two weeks before traders came by again.\n\nHer parents wouldn't live that long.\n\nShe was packing a large back frame with supplies when Danzer woke up. He'd been asleep on the living room rug, curled around a large floor pillow like a cat.\n\n\"Sorry, I was trying to be quiet,\" Dahlia said, tying a sleeping bag onto the bottom of the frame. \"I know you need your rest.\"\n\nDanzer shook his head and struggled to sit up. \"I can barely take care of myself. It will take the two of us to care for your mother and father. What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Neither of us can save them,\" Dahlia said. She pulled the pack up on one end and lifted it experimentally. \"I need to go for help. For them and whoever else might just be fighting this in their homes.\"\n\nIt was Danzer and Pha that taught her to reject the past, focus on the present, plan for the future. If you do not live for a future, Pha once told her, it will never come. She was sixteen, but sometimes she wondered if the war hadn't just thrown her past any childhood and straight into a strange, forged sort of artificial adulthood. The kind where a child would stroke their own parent's arm and tell them to stop crying because it wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad because that's all the child had ever known.\n\n\"We are weak,\" Danzer said. \"I've barely survived this, just like you. You have to be weak as well. And Suraka is three hundred kilometers away.\"\n\nDahlia nodded. \"I can't make Suraka, yes. But I can get to Masov Oasis.\" That, she knew, was only seventy kilometers away. Halfway between Sandholm and Rak.\n\nDanzer struggled to his feet. \"The oasis? Masov Oasis is Sangheili territory. Aliens.\" He hissed that last word with disgust, fear, and hatred. The Sangheili were monsters, the atrocities they'd committed horrendous. Danzer would never forget them and made a point to make sure Dahlia wouldn't either.\n\n\"I know.\" Dahlia swallowed, trying to drive the image of reptilian eyes and leathery skin out from her mind. \"But I can get there in three days. Dad said there are human smugglers who trade with them. Maybe even our traders. If I can use the comm systems there, I can call Suraka for help. Maybe I can even buy medicine.\"\n\nDiscard the past, forget the aliens, Dahlia told herself. Think only of the things that you need there.\n\nIt wasn't going to be that easy.\n\n\"That is no place for you to be,\" Danzer said. \"People that close to alien land tend to die. One way or another.\"\n\n\"You need to help my mom and dad. And you need to rest. I'm going. You know how it is, Danzer. We have to put one foot in front of the other and survive. That's what we do.\"\n\n\"There's an old military surplus Mongoose quad bike in the doctor's shed,\" Danzer finally said. \"It's gassed up. It'll get you to the oasis in a day.\"\n\nA day?! And help for her parents shortly after. Dahlia felt a small explosion of hope. Danzer nodded, recognizing her expression. He wobbled over to the footlocker near the door and tapped a code in. \"Your father gave me the unlock pass,\" he explained as he opened it. He reached in below the sand equipment, pushed back several towels and bags, and pulled out a heavy rifle.\n\n\"I knew Dad had an old rebel weapon held over from before the Covenant,\" Dahlia said. \"He kept it from me. What do you think I'll be doing with that?\"\n\n\"That is an M295 Designated Marksman Rifle, manufactured by Misriah back during the Insurrection, and you're going to need protection. You've got a damn good eye for popping scale lizards. I've seen it.\"\n\n\"I think this is going to be cumbersome,\" Dahlia said. Not at all like the comfortable, low-caliber single-shot hunting rifle she preferred for shooting the lizards that dug into their sheds and chewed everything up.\n\n\"Semiautomatic.\" Danzer handed it to her. \"There's one in every house, under lock. We figured, if the aliens attacked, we needed to be able to fight back.\"\n\nTwenty households. As if, Dahlia thought, they could hold off the Sangheili after so many others with better equipment and training had failed. But maybe that was what it had taken for her parents to sleep at night.\n\nDahlia hefted the large rifle. \"I'll take it.\"\n\nI'll pack it up and never use it, she thought, rewrapping her sleeping bag around it and the two magazines that Danzer gave her.\n\n\"Be safe,\" he told her at the door. \"Just talk to the human traders. Avoid the hinge-heads.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nThey hugged, and she stepped outside.\n\nThe sound of the storm bars locking in place behind her made Dahlia flinch.\n\nDahlia found the Mongoose exactly where Danzer said it would be. Fully gassed. A bit beat up, but then they'd been nearly beggars anyway when they'd come to Carrow.\n\nIt roared to life under her, and she gunned it down between the buildings, testing the throttle while she was on a flat, straight road. Just five minutes later, grinding up the sand near Signal Hill, she slowed down to ten kilometers per hour.\n\nUsually taking a quad bike into the desert meant ripping up the dunes, tossing a rooster tail of fine sand up into the air. But she couldn't afford to snap an axle or break a wheel out here. The bike needed to get her all the way the oasis. A missed rock, a plunging gulley\u2014either of those would risk her family.\n\nThe ride settled into monotony. Up a hill of sand, check her bearings on the crest, down the other side. Trace the sides of old riverbeds.\n\nShe stopped every half hour to wipe the sand that had whipped through the seam between flesh and goggles to irritate her eyes and take a drink of water.\n\nAt times she found herself losing against waves of exhaustion. Her eyes would close for a second, then she would jerk back awake, swearing at herself. It would take just a few seconds to have it all come to a tragic end.\n\n\"Walking will be even more exhausting, if you haven't broken your neck,\" she berated herself. The fear and adrenaline cleared her vision and forced her to sit upright, keeping her going after her shoulders began to slump.\n\nBut eventually she would falter.\n\nThere was still sunlight. It would get harder to navigate at night, when she would have to depend on the headlamps. She wanted to squeeze every minute out of the day, as this was the time to drive faster.\n\nBut eventually, five and a half hours in and with the gloom of early evening, Dahlia began to slow the Mongoose down. She picked through a boulder field, slowly curving around the looming stones as the sun set.\n\n\"That's it,\" Dahlia said as the Mongoose coughed underneath her. She let go of the handlebars and massaged her palms. Leaned back and stretched.\n\nHow much longer would it take to get to Masov Oasis across the remaining terrain? Three to four hours by daylight. Five by night? Maybe more.\n\nDahlia swung her legs over the side to stand up and stretch as she considered what to do next. Her knees buckled under her. She fell to the sand next to the quad bike, her back slapping piping-hot sand lightly layered over a bed of wind-polished rock.\n\nShe was far, far more tired than she realized. Hanging on by a thread.\n\nI'm in no condition to push on, she thought. One hour. Recharge, reset, continue.\n\nShe'd pulled the Mongoose into the lee side of a rock. If a storm kicked up, she'd be able to huddle between it and the bike for protection.\n\nDahlia crept over to the back of the bike and untied her sleeping bag. It flopped to the sand, unrolling to reveal the rifle.\n\nAt first she tried to pack it away. But she kept fumbling and dropping it. Dahlia finally sighed and pulled the rifle up into the bag with her, out of the sand.\n\nIt was hardly an ideal companion. All metal angles and lethal promise, it jabbed her kidney whenever she rolled to the side.\n\nBut after three minutes, she wasn't conscious enough to care either way.\n\nThe signature spat of an energy weapon jerked Dahlia awake. She wiped sweat from her forehead and glanced around, panicked. Nightmares. She was flashing back to the attack on Arcadia, her home world. Memories nine years old etched so deeply into her that they felt like they had happened yesterday. The whine of Covenant weapons that left seven-year-old Dahlia shaking, curled up in a ball next to the wall while her parents tried to shield her as the battle raged outside.\n\nHunger. Days without food. Walking. Running to make evacuation points.\n\nIt wasn't just sweat wetting her cheeks now.\n\nThe distinct sizzle of an alien weapon cut through the night air. Dahlia's blood ran cold. She hadn't been dreaming.\n\nDahlia scrabbled out of her sleeping bag, yanking her rifle free. Three more shots came, from the far side of the boulder field. Dahlia wanted to hide. Her hands shook, the pit of her stomach turning inside out.\n\nBut she had to push on. Needed to make sure they didn't stumble upon her. Bitter experience taught Dahlia to suppress the fear and keep moving.\n\nIt may have been night, but in the unoccupied desert, the stars themselves provided light, filling the sky with an entire galaxy's worth of scattered points and constellations Dahlia still wasn't accustomed to, even after five years on Carrow. The massive moon's pitted face filled the air with a silver-green light. She used that light to move from shadowy boulder to shadowy boulder, while still keeping an eye on the Mongoose.\n\nShe just needed to figure out where they were, then she could fire up the Mongoose and circle around, get back on a heading for the oasis. She did not want to drive right into what very much sounded like a shootout. She'd learned that much from being a bug caught up in the maelstrom of war before.\n\nThree more shots.\n\nThey were echoing around the rocks, confusing her sense of where they came from.\n\nDahlia climbed up one of the toppled boulders to get a vantage point. She crawled slowly once she got to the tip, lying flat on her stomach and scanning all around. She kept her father's rifle hugged close in one hand. In a flash it had gone from being a jabby annoyance to the world's greatest security blanket.\n\nThere.\n\nAnother shot lit up the night like a lightning bolt. Down on the ground, to the east. Dahlia twisted around to face it. She started to ease back down toward the sand, but then pulled the bulky rifle up so she could use the scope.\n\nShe sucked in her breath. An all-too-familiar alien form stood on the sand, advancing toward a fallen figure.\n\n\"Sangheili!\" Dahlia's voice shook as she whispered.\n\nThe saurian alien was pulling an energy magazine out of its pistol and slapping a new one in. Something lay wrapped in a cloak on the ground by its feet.\n\nWas it human?\n\nThe figure on the ground raised a hand as if pleading for mercy. It was too dark and far away to identify its species. Everyone in Sandholm had heard stories of human settlements being attacked\u2014the Sangheili regarded this side of the desert as theirs.\n\nThe Sangheili raised the pistol and took aim.\n\nThis couldn't be right, Dahlia thought. Even among the aliens, there was some kind of law, honor. You couldn't just execute someone right there in the sand.\n\nAnd if that was a human being lying down on the ground . . .\n\n\"Stop!\" Dahlia shouted, standing up and aiming the rifle as she hopped to the ground.\n\nThe Sangheili pivoted to face her. It cocked its head, eyes showing no emotion as it looked her up and down.\n\nThen it swung the energy pistol toward her.\n\n\"No!\" Dahlia warned, taking a half step back. \"Don't do it.\"\n\nThe alien paused, weapon halfway between the figure it was menacing on the ground and Dahlia, not sure where to put its attention.\n\nShe started to squeeze the trigger. Go the distance? Kill another living thing? Yet, it was going to be it or her, it seemed. And as part of the Covenant, the Sangheili had killed everything she'd once known.\n\nIt snapped its pistol up, moving unnaturally fast.\n\n\"Oh shit.\" Dahlia pulled the trigger as a blast of heat ripped past her, close enough to singe her cloak. She saw sparks as the bullet from her father's rifle smacked into the rock just above the alien.\n\nA blue glow lit up the darkness and sank into the Sangheili's chest as the figure on the ground reacted with similar speed as its foe. The two blades of an energy sword ripped up through the alien's torso, and either side of the split creature fell to the sand.\n\nAnother Sangheili stood up, its backward-jointed legs immediately clear to Dahlia by the light of the energy sword.\n\nIt turned toward her, fresh blood smoking as it evaporated off the blades.\n\n\"Stop right there!\" Dahlia shouted, voice quavering. \"I will shoot.\"\n\n\"I will yield,\" it called back to her. It paused and turned off the sword, reholstering it to its waist.\n\n\"Just go,\" Dahlia said. \"Forget I was here.\" She shouldn't have gotten involved. She didn't know who these creatures were, or what they were doing out here.\n\nHer hands shook. Facing off against one of them out here in the cool desert night felt like a nightmare made real. Don't come any closer, she prayed. Skies. Stay right there.\n\nThankfully, the alien did so.\n\nBut it did not leave just yet. \"I owe you my life. That is an extraordinary debt,\" it shouted. \"You distracted Ruha here long enough for me to kill him.\"\n\nDahlia lowered her rifle. She wanted to throw up, but swallowed hard and stepped back around the rock. \"I don't care. I'm leaving, now. Do not get in my way.\"\n\nHer Mongoose chose that exact moment to explode.\n\nDahlia staggered back and stared at the flaming wreckage, shocked. She looked down at the slightly charred edge of her cloak, the rock, and the angle toward the Mongoose. The plasma from the energy-pistol shot had just grazed her and the rock, and must have critically damaged the quad bike.\n\nShe dropped to her knees. \"No, no no,\" she whispered. \"No. . . .\"\n\nThis couldn't be happening.\n\nShe leaned back to swear at the stars, then jumped up with her rifle to point it at the Sangheili, who had taken the opportunity to move closer.\n\n\"Stay back, Covenant!\" she shouted.\n\n\"I am not Covenant. The Covenant is dead. It was a lie. I am Sangheili.\"\n\nDahlia raised the rifle. \"The Sangheili killed a lot of humans before you figured out it was a lie. Just stay back.\" She wasn't going to give it a pass for attempted genocide, even if some Sangheili had later decided it had been a mistake. Not now. Not ever. The Sangheili, with all the other alien species in the Covenant, had destroyed so much. They didn't get to just walk away from that. And to add insult to injury, they certainly shouldn't have been able to settle on any of the human planets in the Outer Colonies. Hell, it probably learned how to communicate with humans just so that it could fight them better during the war.\n\nThe alien raised its large hands in a curiously human gesture. Even from this distance, she could tell that it towered over her. The large weapons harness and shielding it wore added to the bulk. It could rip her apart. It had probably ripped people apart before, she thought. Those clawed fingertips . . .\n\n\"Your vehicle is destroyed,\" it observed.\n\n\"No shit.\" It wasn't the walking that worried Dahlia now. She'd drag herself across and through anything to make that call for help. But the fact was that her water and food were burning in the remains of the Mongoose. She could only survive so long out here.\n\nDahlia looked at the alien. That gray skin, so extra sallow in the moonlight. It made her shudder. The sheen of a murderous species, she thought.\n\nBut she had to steel herself. For the sake of her parents.\n\n\"How did you get all the way out here?\" she asked. \"Do you have a vehicle?\"\n\n\"I do.\" The Sangheili pointed off into the night. Dahlia could see something near one of the rocks, all distinctly curved. A Spectre. She recognized the craft, though this one had no gunner's turret like the ones she'd seen as a child. \"There's an oasis, Masov Oasis, nearly twenty kilometers from here. I need to get there.\"\n\n\"That might be a bad idea.\" The sleek head twisted as it said that, registering some sort of disapproval. The four mandibles that made up its lower jaw clacked. \"You should stay away from Masov. It is not a good place for your kind. It is controlled by those loyal to Thars, and Thars does not like humans.\"\n\nDahlia's lip curled. \"I'll decide where I can and can't go.\" Her kind had been supplanted here in the desert enough as it was.\n\n\"It is a complicated time,\" the Sangheili said. \"Why do you need to go to the oasis? What is it you seek?\"\n\n\"There are human traders there with working communications. Look, you said you owed me a debt.\"\n\n\"That is true.\" The Sangheili mulled it over for a moment. \"Because of that, I will take you to where you wish. I am Jat\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care,\" Dahlia interrupted. She kept her rifle up across her chest as she walked sideways toward the Spectre, watching the Sangheili closely. She had to look up at it.\n\nJat climbed into the cockpit. \"The human traders you are looking for . . . they may not be at the trading post anymore.\"\n\n\"I need to call for help,\" Dahlia said. \"My parents are sick.\"\n\nJat sat still for a moment, then looked back at her. \"You must be a credit to your bloodline,\" he finally said.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Dahlia urged, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.\n\nThe Covenant craft made good time, rapidly eating up the kilometers. Unlike the Mongoose, it floated just above the ground, skipping over tire-shredding rocks and cracks in the ground.\n\nDahlia said nothing, content to cradle her rifle and watch the world slip by as she tried not to think about her parents lying in their beds. Jat also remained quiet, focused on flying the Spectre.\n\nMasov Oasis finally appeared, an island of light in the dim desert. And then it began to grow. Buildings took shape: tall spires among the trees, domes scattered among a handful of streets. Bright white facades lit by floodlights.\n\nIt was a glowing paradise of bubbling fountains, clean little buildings, and carefully maintained gardens. Serene and peaceful in the late night. Dahlia had been expecting dirty, sandy tents, and rundown trader posts.\n\nJat slowed and the Spectre slunk down to a halt.\n\n\"We are here,\" he announced. He pointed a thick finger toward a square, metallic two-floored building that stood out among the rounded Sangheili buildings. \"The human traders gather there.\"\n\nDahlia hopped out of the Spectre. At the top of the building was a recognizable antenna array. She paused for a second, then turned to Jat. \"Thank you.\" The words sounded strange to her, like someone else was saying them.\n\nShe was thanking one of them.\n\n\"Stay close to the humans,\" Jat told her. \"The rise of Thars means few allies for your kind these days. Do your business, then leave this oasis quickly.\"\n\nDahlia was already crossing the street and leaving him behind.\n\nAn automatic door hissed open as she approached the squat compound. Dahlia stepped into the dark.\n\n\"Hello? Is anyone here?\"\n\nLights snapped on, dazzling her. Dahlia blinked, holding her hand up to shield her eyes as they adjusted.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\nTwo silhouettes moved toward her.\n\nThey walked all wrong. Back legs . . . backward jointed. Sangheili!\n\nThey jammed the ends of wicked, long Covenant carbines into her face. One of them shouted something indecipherable and pointed angrily at her rifle. In any language, the message was clear. Dahlia dropped the weapon. The one on her left picked it up, inspected it, then shouted at her again.\n\n\"I'm here to talk to the humans. I need to call for help. That's all,\" Dahlia said.\n\n\"You go,\" said the Sangheili on the right, the words almost indecipherable as they came through the mandibles. \"Go with us. Now.\"\n\nDahlia shook her head. \"No, no. I need help. Help. Medical help.\" She looked at both Sangheili, who glanced at each other blankly with those large, impassive eyes.\n\n\"Now. Go!\"\n\n\"I need to call out!\" Dahlia mimicked holding a receiver up to her mouth and ear. \"Help.\"\n\nThe two Sangheili fell upon her. Dahlia struggled, but they towered over her, and their grips were viselike.\n\nThey dragged her down the street and into one of the smooth, dome-shaped houses with no windows farther into the oasis. They pulled her along, as easily as someone pulling a recalcitrant child, and forced her into a cell at the end of a small corridor that ran down the middle of the building. Dahlia expected a wall of energy or an iridescent forcefield instead of the thick metal door barred shut behind her.\n\nA man and a woman with sunburned skin and deeply wrinkled faces regarded her. \"Who are you?\" they asked, puzzled.\n\n\"You're the traders, from the oasis?\" Dahlia asked.\n\n\"Paul des Hommes,\" the man on the left said. His weathered face crinkled and he scratched a wispy, reddish beard.\n\n\"Greta.\" This one had silver hair tied back in braids and wore a ragged, oil-stained jumpsuit. \"I've never seen you before. Who are you?\"\n\n\"I'm from Sandholm,\" Dahlia said. \"They're sick, everyone there is sick, and a storm knocked out our repeater. We need a doctor. We need help.\"\n\n\"You're all dependent on a repeater? Can't your communicators reach the satellites?\" Greta asked.\n\n\"We don't have much in the way of extras,\" Dahlia said. \"We were lucky to get to Carrow in the first place. We'd hoped to farm the land around the river, but when we got there, the Sangheili had already arrived and built their holds to create Rak. We couldn't even use this oasis. So we live out in the desert.\"\n\n\"Times are tight,\" Paul agreed heavily.\n\n\"What's happening here?\" Dahlia asked. \"I need to get help for Sandholm. Quickly.\"\n\nGreta shrugged. \"They burst into the depot last night and rounded us all up. Stanley put up a fight. They killed him.\"\n\nPaul grunted, looked down at the thick, planked floor. Greta squeezed his shoulder and grimaced.\n\nShe continued. \"Things have been getting tense. Jesmith got attacked by some desert Sangheili. They've been grumbling about his homestead, saying it's in Sangheili land holdings. Rumor is that a couple other human places got hit last month.\"\n\n\"No one dead until yesterday,\" Paul said. \"Until then, I thought it was just Sangheili getting hot under the collar. Memories of the conflict. Tension about Suraka boiling over. They've always been sensitive about a human city getting resettled just on the other side of the sand.\"\n\n\"Three months, hardly any business,\" Greta said. \"Sangheili have been turning their noses up. We used to be a focal point. Used to talk to the Surakan higher-ups about how things were going here; they saw it as a success. Sangheili and human, trading together. Each of us with a city on the planet here in the Joint Occupation Zone. Very touchy-feely, new way forward. The governments love that crap.\"\n\nDahlia shook her head. Joint Occupation Zone. She hated that name. Carrow had been one of the Outer Colonies. A place human hands built, carved out of the dangerous desert with the city of Suraka.\n\nShe wanted to resist that name. Badly.\n\n\"What are they going to do? Send us to Suraka?\" Dahlia asked hopefully.\n\n\"You mean forced resettlement?\" Greta sat down on the floor, back against the side wall. \"Maybe. Something changed, I can tell you that. New leadership, new Sangheili government back in their city. I haven't been to Rak in six months. Sangheili there are telling me stay away. So whatever all this is, it's coming from there. We had nothing but good relationships with everyone here\u2014\"\n\nAn explosion shook the room. Dahlia dropped to the floor and instinctively put her hands over her head.\n\nMore explosions, the shockwaves pulsing through the floor.\n\nThen came the chatter of gunfire.\n\nNot Covenant weapons, Dahlia thought. Those were bullets smacking into buildings.\n\n\"It's a rescue!\" Dahlia shouted.\n\nGreta looked at Paul, who shook his head. \"No one knows we're here,\" Greta said.\n\nDahlia stared at them both. \"But those are guns. Our guns.\"\n\n\"This is bad,\" Paul mumbled. \"No matter which way you twist this around to look at it, something bad is happening.\"\n\nA scream carried across the early morning air outside. An alien scream. Dahlia could feel the fear inside of it. It was universal.\n\nThe loud crack of a single shot silenced it.\n\nThe walls seemed to crowd in on her, the roof dropping in. Dahlia started taking deep breaths, but that didn't stop her heart from hammering ever faster.\n\nTwo Sangheili shoved the door open. They pointed large energy pistols at their captives and gestured toward the corridor. Slung under their shoulders were human rifles. Dahlia felt horror sweep over her.\n\nThey'd been outside killing their own.\n\n\"No,\" Greta said.\n\nPaul stepped forward. \"Not like this.\"\n\nOne of the Sangheili roared and stepped inside. It grabbed Paul's throat and dragged him out. Greta screamed and followed. \"Stop it, you bastards!\"\n\nA sharp smack to her shoulder with the pistol got Dahlia moving down the corridor toward the door outside, although she could barely remember how to step forward. She'd gone deep inside of herself, her mind doing its best to leave this world.\n\nNumbly, she let herself get shoved down the corridor, past more empty cells that lined it. \"Please,\" she finally said softly. \"Please.\"\n\nShe would run when they got to the door. She wouldn't wait for them to kill her. She'd known, somehow, that this was coming. All the fleeing, all the new starts, just delayed the inevitable.\n\nThe Covenant might not exist anymore, but it almost killed her when she was a child. Now it was going to finally finish the job.\n\nAnd she'd always prepared for this, somewhere deep inside.\n\nShe would run.\n\nThey would shoot her\u2014one couldn't outrun that sharp bolt of energy. But she would run just the same.\n\nA piece of the corridor shifted, light playing across it all wrong as a bump of disturbed air moved toward the Sangheili aggressors.\n\nAt the last second, the two aliens sensed something: a creak in the floorboards beneath them, the shifting sound of heavy material. They spun around just as the familiar blue glow of an energy sword flashed to life.\n\nIt swung up, slicing an energy pistol in half before it could fire. Paul and Greta stumbled off down the corridor and toward the door leading outside. The other Sangheili punched at the invisible form, unable to get its weapon up to aim. Energy fluoresced and danced as armored fists struck, revealing the shape of another Sangheili.\n\nThe adaptive camouflage spattered out, and Jat swept forward, jamming the sword deep into the other Sangheili's face.\n\nThen, casually, Jat took the pistol from the dying Sangheili before he swung quickly around to behead its companion.\n\n\"Stay right there.\" Greta had pulled one of the captured rifles free.\n\nJat looked at her. \"Do not fire that,\" he said softly. \"Or the rest of the death squad in other buildings will hear it and come for us.\"\n\nThey followed Jat out, waiting a moment as he made sure the streets were clear, then skirted around behind the Sangheili detention building. Greta and Paul looked at Jat's Spectre, waiting for them. \"We have transportation of our own. We just need to get to the trading depot,\" Paul said.\n\nThey'd each taken a rifle. They didn't trust Jat, Dahlia could tell, even if they'd been grateful for being released.\n\n\"You should come with us,\" Greta told Dahlia.\n\nDahlia hesitated. But then Jat stepped forward. \"I owe her the debt of my life. She gave it back to me.\"\n\nPaul nodded slowly. \"Hell of a new pet, kid,\" he said. \"Good luck.\"\n\nThey weren't going to argue. They slipped off into the dark. For a second, Dahlia panicked. The only humans here had just left her. And they knew the oasis better than she did. Better than Jat anyway.\n\nJat slipped into the Spectre. \"We leave. Now. Before our enemies get back to this part of Masov Oasis.\"\n\n\"Why is this happening?\" Dahlia asked. She looked up at the communications equipment, the firelight of burning Sangheili buildings reflecting off it in the predawn.\n\n\"I've been shadowing the death squad for many days now,\" Jat explained as the Spectre slid slowly along the back street. \"They follow Thars.\"\n\nHe said that as if it were explanation enough. \"Who is this Thars anyway?\" Dahlia asked in a loud whisper.\n\n\"The enemy you should fear. One of my kind who thinks humans are . . .\"\n\n\"Inferior?\"\n\n\"Worms,\" Jat said, edging around a building. He was aiming for the flat expanse of sand beyond. Just a few hundred meters to go.\n\n\"And I'm presuming you don't follow Thars?\"\n\n\"I lost everything I ever knew when my world was destroyed. I chose to follow Rojka 'Kaasan to this world, when we assembled a fleet and fled to a new beginning six years ago. I helped him found Rak. We mourned the Covenant, everything we lost, and what was taken from us.\"\n\nEven Dahlia had heard of Rojka. Usually as a near epithet from her family and friends in Sandholm. The evil Sangheili who had taken the promised land from them. Thief. Squatter. Interloper.\n\n\"Rojka,\" Jat continued, \"believes that Sangheili and humans can live together on this world. That all Sangheili and humans have to learn this. Or we will all die.\"\n\n\"Doesn't seem likely,\" Dahlia said. \"Not now.\"\n\nJat grunted. \"This evil here today will ring through the world, yes. Our species will plunge toward war if Thars gets his way. It is my hope to get word back to Rojka and stop it.\"\n\n\"And can you stop what your kind will think when they see what looks like happened here?\" Dahlia asked.\n\n\"I have to try,\" Jat said.\n\nA shout in Sangheili. Energy struck the ground nearby.\n\n\"We are discovered,\" Jat proclaimed and slammed the Spectre up to full speed. Dahlia turned to look behind them.\n\nSangheili filed out into the street, shouting and firing at the Spectre.\n\n\"We have the lead,\" Jat said. \"But I had hoped to get away without notice.\"\n\nSome of the Sangheili were now racing for craft of their own.\n\nBefore long, they were all tearing through the desert in the early morning sunrise, fine sand kicking up into the air behind them.\n\nThe wind buffeted the Spectre, sand whipping at them. Dahlia hunched down and gritted her teeth.\n\nAfter some time, Jat finally shouted back at her, \"We will not be able to outrun them or shoot back! Rojka had the turrets ripped off. We used them for civilian transport. Thars has been trying to remilitarize all the ground equipment.\"\n\nDahlia turned and squinted through the sand cloud they'd kicked up. Four Spectres with turrets, each carrying two heavily armed Sangheili, were just a kilometer away.\n\nA blast of plasma hit the Spectre, splashing Dahlia's cloak with a faint mist of burning metal that scorched her skin. She could tell that something important had been hit, as the vehicle began to wobble and scrape sand.\n\nJat swung the Spectre in an arc toward a dip in the horizon.\n\nSeconds later, they burst over a ridge and Dahlia's stomach flip-flopped as they fell toward a steep hill. Their Spectre kicked up gravel as it slammed down and bounced, almost throwing Dahlia out. Jat forced it into another turn, dodging a large boulder.\n\nThey screamed down into a canyon, sliding around as Jat fought with an increasingly unresponsive set of controls. Smoke trailed them, the engine inside failing with a loud screech and the familiar whine suddenly cutting out.\n\nThe Spectre glided in silence.\n\nBehind them, one of the chase vehicles struck the boulder Jat had barely missed and disappeared in a spectacular explosion.\n\nThey slid to a stop.\n\nJat jumped out. \"There are six left,\" he said, pulling a large silver case free from underneath the ruined Spectre. \"These are not great odds.\"\n\n\"What do we do?\" Dahlia asked. There was nowhere to run. The remaining Sangheili paused on the ridge, some of them peering quickly over the edge to see the whereabouts of Jat and Dahlia and how to safely get down to them.\n\nJat opened the case and retrieved a large rifle with a fat, wedge-shaped barrel. The chevron-shaped stock hung low under Jat's grip, making it look almost upside down to her eyes. \"It is time for them to discover my trade skill.\"\n\nDahlia recognized the weapon. A particle beam rifle, generally used by Covenant snipers. She'd seen the bodies left on streets after that loud snap-whine of energy fried them.\n\n\"There are more than six,\" Dahlia pointed at the ridge. \"I see two or three more sand plumes.\"\n\n\"I concur that we are well outnumbered.\" Jat reached to his belt and handed her the energy pistol he had taken from one of her captors. \"We are making our last stand. It is the only option we have left.\"\n\nOne of the death squad's Spectres jumped the ridge and slid down toward the bottom of the gulley.\n\n\"I can't,\" Dahlia whispered. \"I can't do this. What about my parents? What about your people? You were going to warn them.\"\n\n\"You can run,\" Jat said casually, as if it wouldn't bother him. \"You saved my life, and you have paid your debt. But I tell you: they will hunt us down. They cannot have any witnesses left alive. Together, our weapons united, we can fight with honor.\"\n\n\"Die, you mean,\" Dahlia said.\n\nJat ignored the Spectre crabbing its way toward them on the floor of the canyon. He aimed farther away, calmly tracking something with the massive rifle. Energy lanced out through the air. A Spectre spun out of control as a driver slumped forward and died. There was bellowing from the Sangheili suddenly trapped in the back as it flew over the edge and exploded against rocks.\n\n\"When I waited for you in the corridor, when those guards marched you out, I had time to observe you. I do not know much about humans, but I think you were ready to attempt an escape. You were not going to let them kill you easily, am I correct?\"\n\n\"Yes. I was going to run,\" Dahlia said, as Jat fired up at the ridge, killing more Sangheili scurrying along it to get a position on them. What about the Spectre right down here with us? she wondered in a panic.\n\n\"We are not animals to the slaughter\u2014you and I,\" Jat rumbled. \"We are warriors, survivors. We make a stand. Our memories\u2014we will make our lineages proud, human. We will make this sand drink our enemy's blood.\"\n\nPlasma fire hit Jat's broken Spectre, shaking it. The two of them dropped behind it for cover. Dahlia looked down at the bulky alien pistol. She could feel her pulse racing and the world narrowing around her. The droning sound of the approaching Spectre filled her world.\n\n\"Focus,\" Jat said to her, large pale alien eyes regarding her as he realized something was wrong with her. \"There are worse ways to die than on your own terms. Breathe in every extra moment you are given to be free. Think that earlier this day you were certainly dead, and now you are not.\"\n\nHe broke out of his crouch and yanked the rifle up to fire at the approaching Spectre.\n\nDahlia glanced around the front of the craft in time to see the death squad Sangheili diving clear of their vehicle. The air filled with more plasma bolts as Sangheili on the ridge opened fire, no longer worried about hitting their own.\n\n\"Look up!\" Dahlia shouted at Jat.\n\nTwo more Sangheili were scooting along above them up on the ridge, trying to move down so that the Spectre could no longer shield them.\n\nJat swung the rifle up and fired. No aiming, but he got the result he wanted. The would-be attackers ducked back from the edge of the rock.\n\nPlasma fire from the Sangheili who'd dived clear of their exploding Spectre splashed the nearby rock now that Jat was distracted.\n\nDahlia took a deep breath, then leaned around and fired the pistol. The plasma struck far to the right of the aliens ducking from rock to rock toward them.\n\nShe corrected and peppered the nearby rocks with fire, keeping them behind cover.\n\n\"They're getting closer,\" Dahlia said, voice breaking slightly.\n\n\"As they will,\" Jat grumbled. \"Ready yourself.\"\n\nHe fired again at the lip of the rock, then twisted to sit the rifle on the Spectre's chassis. Sighted. A Sangheili head popped up and Jat fired.\n\nThe dead alien body slumped forward over the rock.\n\nOne of them roared with rage to see yet another of their own die. Jat ducked back as a barrage of fire struck his vehicle. Dahlia clutched her knees, shivering.\n\nSo much. Too much.\n\nWith yet another bellow, three of the Sangheili charged. Dahlia could hear their footsteps pounding the ground as they advanced.\n\n\"Now!\" Jat shouted.\n\nDahlia forced herself to lean around and fire blindly, finding the target only after she'd started pulling the trigger. She hit one of them in the leg and it tumbled forward, losing its footing. Jat swung, aimed, but the two other Sangheili jumped over the Spectre.\n\nStruggling to spin as quickly, Dahlia tried to engage, but they darted forward just as Jat leaped at them with a war cry. His energy sword was out in an instant, his rifle left behind.\n\nThe other two Sangheili had their swords out in kind.\n\nA three-sided duel began, swords hissing and crackling as they struck one another with remarkable speed.\n\nDahlia scrabbled up, looking for the third Sangheili she'd wounded. Something struck her on the shoulder. She spun, her breath knocked out of her, and landed against the Spectre. The impact caused her to hit her head and bounce off, the world fracturing into a series of images.\n\nShe saw the wounded Sangheili limping around the Spectre and raising its carbine to aim at the dueling Sangheili, their swords whirling around each other as Jat fought for his life. The two Sangheili still up above on the ridge leaped into the air, barreling down toward them.\n\n\"Jat . . .\" She tried to warn him, but what could he do?\n\nHer pistol had been thrown clear. Dahlia tried to crawl for it, but the wounded Sangheili already figured that out. Towering above her, it thudded over and kicked the weapon away.\n\nDahlia slumped to the ground and looked up.\n\nHer left shoulder was on fire. The shot had come from the nearby Sangheili and burned through her. Pure adrenaline had stopped her from initially feeling it, but now the pain made her vision dance.\n\nThis was it.\n\nDahlia struggled to stand, but her attacker kicked her back down and unsheathed its own energy sword. It seemed to be relishing the moment of conquest. Taking its time to look at her, mandibles opening in a roar as the sword lifted.\n\nShe'd feared this moment her entire life. Woke to nightmares of the aliens and their inhuman eyes and backward-jointed legs kicking in a door to kill her just like this.\n\n\"Do it,\" Dahlia whispered. \"You've been the boogeyman in my life for long enough. I'm ready. I'm not scared of you!\"\n\nBehind it, Dahlia saw Jat finally fall, the hilt of his sword clattering to the ground. Four Sangheili surrounded him, triumphant.\n\nJat looked over. \"We made them bleed,\" he said to her, spreading his arms. \"So then, they bleed!\"\n\nThe entire canyon erupted in gunfire.\n\nHuman gunfire, Dahlia fuzzily thought.\n\nDozens of bullets ripped through the Sangheili standing over her in a split second, destroying the once-massive creature and filling the air with a mist of blood. The gunfire shifted across the desert floor and stitched through the other Sangheili trying to run for cover, chewing them apart.\n\nJat twisted up and stopped moving.\n\nThe gunfire ceased, and over it, Dahlia could hear the whine of turbines. She saw the hunched-forward shape of a Pelican transport dropping slowly down into the gulley.\n\nBeige-uniformed soldiers jumped clear of its ramp, battle rifles up to their shoulders as they fanned out to examine the Spectres and alien bodies.\n\nDahlia somehow managed to stand up, her unharmed arm in the air.\n\nPaul and Greta ducked as they ran around the Pelican's wings, the engines kicking up their cloaks.\n\n\"You,\" Dahlia said, mouth dry. She ran toward them, wincing with the pain that flared through her shoulder at each step. \"How?\"\n\n\"We may be traders, but we also feed information back to the Carrow militia,\" Greta said. \"Keep an eye on the ground for them. Once we got back to the depot, we called for help. Met them out in the desert for a pickup. When we saw all the smoke here, we came to have a look.\"\n\nDahlia could have hugged them.\n\n\"Live one!\" shouted a militia man.\n\nDahlia spun around as fast as her damaged shoulder would let her. \"It's Jat! Don't\u2014\"\n\nA single shot cracked through the air and Jat slumped forward to the ground.\n\nDahlia screamed and ran forward. She grabbed the Sangheili's head with her good arm, cradling it. \"Jat.\"\n\nBut he only stared off into emptiness.\n\n\"He . . . he saved me. He wasn't one of them!\" Dahlia raged at the soldiers standing around her now. \"You killed him!\"\n\nThe strangers in their beige uniforms said nothing, their sand-bitten faces empty at the sight of what had once been their enemy dead on the sand.\n\n\"He was my friend,\" Dahlia said.\n\n\"The Sangheili aren't our friends,\" one of them finally said, grabbing her elbow. \"You'd know that if you lived in the Outer Colonies before coming here. You'd have seen what they did. They think this is their world. They'll find out who it really belongs to soon enough.\"\n\nThey dragged her off to the Pelican, where Paul and Greta tried to talk to her.\n\nBut Dahlia didn't have any more words left.\n\nDahlia's father woke first, responding to the heavy antivirals and fluids the militia medic had hooked both her parents up to. He blinked at his daughter, who was sitting down in full desert gear at the foot of their bed, a new militia rifle on her lap. Her shoulder was bandaged, and the skin on her face chapped from the desert sun.\n\n\"Dahlia?\"\n\nShe stood up with a smile, a tiny bit of relief coursing through her to hear him say her name. She crossed over to his side of the bed and gave his forehead a kiss. \"Dad.\"\n\nHe hugged her. Then looked at the long dagger on her hip and back to the rifle. \"What's all this? You carry weapons now?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Dahlia replied. \"I have to. Mom hasn't woken yet. You're too weak to travel. You need to rest and recover. So I'm ready for anything that comes here to Sandholm.\"\n\nHer father appeared heartbroken. \"And do you think you can hold off the Sangheili by yourself?\"\n\n\"No. I have no doubts I'd die quickly,\" Dahlia flatly said. Her dad flinched at her honesty. \"But they say there's an envoy being sent from the Unified Earth Government. Maybe it won't come to that.\"\n\nThey could both tell she didn't believe that.\n\nDahlia wiped her mother's forehead, then stood up and looked out of their window. Out toward Signal Hill, the rocks, and the desert beyond. \"But a friend of mine taught me that I should die on my own terms, not someone else's. So if they come for us, Dad . . . I will make them bleed and pay a price.\"\n\nEverything had changed. Everything will collapse into blood and fire once again, she thought.\n\nBut the difference this time was that there would be no more cowering in the corner for her. Dahlia wasn't scared anymore.\n\n## ANAROSA\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nKEVIN GRACE\n\nThis story takes place in March 2556, three years after the end of the Covenant War (Halo 3 era) and one year after FAR STORM, a joint military operation between humans and their former Sangheili enemies in order to secure the remote and mysterious Forerunner installation known as the Ark (Halo: Hunters in the Dark).\n\nWho is she?\"\n\nAgent Prauss wove through the cars on the highway, eyes darting from vehicle to vehicle around him. Years of driving an unmarked vehicle meant he was well used to the Doppler sounds of angry horns at nearly double the legal speed limit. He still enjoyed that a bit. More than a bit, really. Leo could tell.\n\nThe small silver hologram of a man in a neat-fitting suit appeared on the car's dashboard and nodded sympathetically to the particularly shocked owner of one of those horns.\n\n\"Is this really the right time for the breakdown? You seem to be busy.\"\n\nPrauss's eyes never left the road, and yet they rolled. \"Leo . . .\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\nLeo inclined his head to the windscreen readout behind him and the car's control cluster was replaced with the picture of a young woman. Short brown hair. Smiling brown eyes.\n\n\"Anarosa Carmelo. Age twenty-six. Ninety-ninth percentile at Hyugens Preparatory Academy and First Mars Technical. Goodpasture Foundation scholarships for master's degrees in biology and astronavigation. Medical records clean. No criminal history. Extensive community service. Good kid. Great, even.\"\n\nPrauss nodded. \"They all are. Work?\"\n\n\"Snapped up by Oros Trading after graduation, self-selected into their test-pilot program with extra research on colonization protocols.\"\n\nPrauss glanced to Leo briefly, curious.\n\n\"Colonization? Oros makes slipspace engines, so test pilot I get. What does Oros have to do with colonization?\"\n\n\"Company records show that it was a new program she created to train test pilots for encounters with unexplored or abandoned systems. Makes sense. There are a lot of systems out there coming back on the market now that the war's over.\"\n\n\"Over. Yeah.\" Prauss sliced into the exit lane. \"We're close. How did she die?\"\n\nAnarosa's image disappeared from the car's HUD, returning the standard array of indicators and Office of Naval Intelligence datastreams.\n\n\"Acute hypothermia. Details are still coming in, but she entered the cockpit of a training shuttle forty minutes ago to perform a preflight checklist. Seven minutes later, sensor logs show a misfiring of the craft's fire-suppression system. I don't think it was her fault, but . . . full Aerosol D immersion with no suit. Life signs ended fifteen seconds later.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" said Prauss, wincing. \"Still, this is good.\"\n\n\"Good? You may want to rephrase that in our upcoming conversation.\"\n\nThe car finished its short course of residential street turns and stopped in front of a simple white house. Curbside holo fed the address and name to the HUD: 7735 Killingham. Michael Carmelo.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" admitted Prauss, composing himself in the rearview mirror, \"but you know what I mean. Anarosa was special. She had a very special mind. And we are here to convince her brother that he should give that mind to us. Her death is a damn shame, but the way she died means the tissue will be preserved longer than we usually have for emergency calls.\"\n\nLeo had to agree with that. Prauss was right. Mercenary, but right.\n\n\"And why is this an emergency run, anyway?\" Prauss continued. \"She must have been flagged as a candidate years back. We should be at the hospital making pickup by now, not here and about to ask this question. We shouldn't have to do it like this.\"\n\n\"She was flagged,\" Leo nodded, matching Prauss's gaze now at the white house. \"But she delayed her decision. Twice.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Sat down with recruiters both times, asked quite a few questions, and both times said she needed to think about it.\"\n\n\"Interesting. Not many delay twice.\" Prauss checked his watch and frowned. \"But we don't have long. Does he know?\"\n\nLeo nodded. \"He picked up the call from Oros HR twelve minutes ago and hung up three minutes ago. No other calls initiated since then.\"\n\n\"And he's the only living family, right?\"\n\nLeo nodded again. \"Mother and father died of natural causes three and seven years ago, respectively. Anarosa was unmarried. No children. Just the one sibling.\"\n\nPrauss sighed and opened his door. \"Damn shame. Let's go.\"\n\nAt the door, Agent Prauss knocked and apologized and introduced himself and Leo to the bewildered Michael Carmelo. Prauss could tell from Michael's body language that asking to come inside wasn't an option, which meant he had to do this on the porch. Prauss hated doing it on the porch. But he was well prepared, practiced from years of conversations just like this one, explaining gently that Anarosa's natural talents had singled her out as a candidate for a very special program within the Office of Naval Intelligence. This program, he explained, upon the death of someone as special as Anarosa, would use that person's exceptional brain to create a very special computer program called a \"smart\" artificial intelligence like his colleague Leo, here. Smart AIs like Leo, Prauss went on, are vital to the successful operation of many of the United Nations Space Command's most critical operations and are unmatched in their creative, computational, and strategic abilities. In a way, Prauss delicately suggested, Anarosa would have one last chance to create something wonderful from this tragic day . . . and all Michael had to do was consent, and arrangements would be made and her body returned with minimal signs of the procedure within twenty-four hours.\n\nLeo, projecting now from a small disc held by Prauss, remained silent, other than saying a few brief words conveying his regrets for the loss of Anarosa. He listened to Prauss's practiced speech while monitoring various subroutines furthering the rest of the assignment.\n\nBackground check on Michael Carmelo (clean).\n\nConversations with medical regarding risks of freezing damage to Anarosa's brain (minimal).\n\nInitiation of the pickup crew in case permission was secured (on the road\/ETA to Oros in seven minutes\/holding for pickup confirmation).\n\nConfirmation of the body's destination if permission was not secured (Wesley General Hospital).\n\nAn order for flowers paid for and sent to this address regardless of outcome (priental lilies\/white vase\/condolence note from both Prauss and myself).\n\nAfter nodding once to acknowledge that he was indeed Michael Carmelo, Amarosa's brother listened silently to everything Agent Prauss had to say. When Prauss stopped talking, Michael made no acknowledgment of the unbelievable offer just extended. He stood still for a moment, his gaze locked on the floor, and then broke his silence by simply stating:\n\n\"Go to hell.\"\n\nThe door closed.\n\nBack in the car, Prauss scowled at the steering wheel.\n\n\"I told you it shouldn't have gone down this way. Dammit. We needed her.\"\n\nLeo brought up a map on the car's display, with a small blue dot indicating the pickup crew waiting at Oros Trading Company's headquarters.\n\n\"I'll call off the collection and notify the colonel.\"\n\nPrauss shook his head.\n\n\"Wait. It is too late for a . . . dammit. Yes. No way we could sneak her out now. Probably should have requested an end run from the start. Dammit. Fine, go ahead and call the . . .\"\n\nLeo's head snapped toward the house and he held up his hand in a small silver warning.\n\n\"Heads up. We have company.\"\n\nTurning to the house, Prauss saw Michael walking slowly down the driveway toward the car. Prauss nodded to Leo when Michael reached the passenger-side door and leaned down. Leo lowered the window.\n\n\"Michael,\" Prauss began, \"again I'm so sorry to . . .\"\n\n\"Stop.\" Michael said flatly. \"I don't want to listen to you anymore.\"\n\nPrauss's eyebrows raised, but he fell silent.\n\nMichael turned to Leo's projection on the dashboard.\n\n\"I want to talk to him.\n\nThe inside of the house was clean and simply furnished, with signs of an interrupted meal already cold on the kitchen table. Michael gestured towards a chair in the living room and excused himself to get a drink. Leo moved his projection to a vid across from the chair and spun up another subroutine:\n\nBiometric sensors online\n\nPsychophysiological calibration complete\n\nRecent conversational data analyzed\n\nBaseline readings set\n\n(Pulse rate\/Blood pressure\/Dermal conductance\/Sympathetic nervous system response)\n\nBegin tracking\n\n(Pulse 0\/BP 0\/Dermal 0\/SNS 0)\n\nMichael returned from the kitchen and sat down on a chair directly facing Leo's projector. After considering Leo for a second, Michael nodded his head in the direction of the front door.\n\n\"Is he listening?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Would you stop the feed to him if I asked?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, at least one of you is honest.\"\n\n(Pulse 0\/BP 1\/Dermal 0\/SNS 1)\n\n\"Everything Agent Prauss said to you is the truth,\" said Leo.\n\n\"But he didn't say everything, did he?\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"He didn't mention that you tried to get my sister to agree to this before.\"\n\nLeo nodded. \"Agent Prauss and I didn't, but others did. Your sister clearly liked to think things through very carefully. But I will also point out that she didn't say no to our request. Would you like to hear recordings of her recruitment visits?\"\n\n(Pulse 1\/BP 2\/Dermal 1\/SNS 2)\n\nMichael shook his head quickly. \"No. I can't . . . not now.\"\n\nThe two sat silently for a moment.\"She didn't want to join the military, you know,\" said Michael.\n\n\"I do know. She made that quite clear in her interviews. But the specific assignment we hope she can help us fill does not involve combat. It's about exploration. What she dreamed of. And it's further than we've ever travelled before, which is where she wanted to go.\"\n\n\"Where she wanted . . .\" Michael stopped before his emotions overtook him. He took a deep breath. \"What's it like?\"\n\n\"What's what like?\"\n\n\"Being . . . like you.\"\n\n(Pulse 1\/BP 1\/Dermal 1\/SNS 1)\n\n\"It's . . . hmm.\" Leo paused. \"It's enormous.\" He felt uncertain about this description.\n\n\"Enormous?\" The uncertainty was shared.\n\n\"Not a terribly helpful answer, I know, but there really isn't a sufficient word to describe it. It's hard to explain the breadth of my connection to all the systems that drive our worlds. Much of my central processes are contained for now in the projection unit you're looking at, but my . . . presence, I guess you could call it, is limitless.\"\n\n\"That sounds terrifying.\"\n\n\"I've never found it to be so.\"\n\n\"So you enjoy it?\"\n\nLeo smiled in appreciation. \"Enjoy. You ask interesting questions, Michael. Much like your sister. I've never really considered it that way. It just . . . it's what I do. It's what I am.\"\n\n\"What you are now.\"\n\n\"You mean compared to my donor.\"\n\n(Pulse 2\/BP 2\/Dermal 1\/SNS 3)\n\nMichael recoiled slightly at that, but pushed on. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Policy now is that AIs are not permitted to know the identity of their donors.\"\n\n\"Permitted? What about that 'breadth'? Can't you just access that information?\"\n\n\"No. There are limits.\"\n\n\"Set by who? ONI?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So they control you?\"\n\n(Pulse 2\/BP 2\/Dermal 2\/SNS 3)\n\nLeo carefully chose his next words.\n\n\"They monitor me. Us. All intelligences. To make sure that we only use those connections I spoke of earlier for the greater good of the UNSC.\"\n\n\"Some AIs have used it for bad?\"\n\n\"Yes. Not all attempts at creating an intelligence like myself are successful. I think not all minds are . . . suited to it. Sometimes intelligences come out flawed. And sometimes that flaw takes years to discover. Therefore, we are monitored to prevent accidents.\"\n\n\"What kind of accidents?\"\n\n\"I don't think this is the time to talk about that.\" Michael looked dubious. \"You mean you're not allowed to talk about that.\"\n\n\"No, I mean I don't think it will happen to your sister, since that's what you're really asking. And I don't believe it's a productive topic for the decision you have to make right now.\"\n\n(Pulse 1\/BP 2\/Dermal 1\/SNS 0)\n\nMichael considered this for a moment, looking down at the glass of water in his hands. Then he looked back up to Leo.\n\n\"So I wouldn't be able to see her?\"\n\nLeo shook his head in sympathy. \"There is no 'her' to see, Michael. The being your sister would help create wouldn't be her. It would be an entirely new person, and if you did meet her, you would look for your sister and you wouldn't find her. It would bring back all the pain you're feeling now, everything, all over again.\"\n\n\"Would somebody at least tell me whether it worked?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, no. No contact is allowed, or information which could lead to a contact. It's for the best, for everyone.\"\n\nMichael's brow furrowed, pondering this last point. Then he said: \"Do you want to know who your donor was?\"\n\n(Pulse 2\/BP 2\/Dermal 2\/SNS 3)\n\n\"That's . . . personal.\"\n\nMichael pushed back in his chair, dropping eye contact with Leo to stare at the floor between them.\n\n\"I understand your questions,\" Leo continued, \"and I wish there were simpler answers, but life and death are as complicated for us as they are for you.\"\n\nMichael choked back tears. \"She's gone. I talked to her this morning. About stupid shit. And I'll never talk to her again. Now you want me to give her to you . . . to think that maybe some part of her would still be out there, but I couldn't . . .\"\n\n(Pulse 2\/BP 2\/Dermal 3\/SNS 3)\n\nLeo could see the retreat in Michael's eyes, and Leo opened his mouth, closed it, and deeply contemplated his opportunity for a moment before speaking again.\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n(Pulse 3\/BP 4\/Dermal 4\/SNS 4)\n\nMichael looked up. \"What?\"\n\n\"I do want to know who my donor was. There is a part of him in me. I have . . . associations I don't understand. Bits of memories that are not mine. And I think . . . sometimes I think I . . . he . . . had a child.\"\n\nMichael's eyes widened in surprise, as it appeared that he briefly forgot his own grief. The sadness in Leo's voice was overwhelming.\n\n(Pulse 5\/BP 4\/Dermal 4\/SNS 6)\n\nLeo continued. \"We don't talk about these things because they can destroy us. I don't think about these things because thinking is all I do. I don't need to eat, or get dressed, or worry about any such physical distractions . . . all I have is thinking, and if I think about what might have been and how that might-have-been changes me, I will go mad. Madness is the end, for us. We all get there, sooner or later, and dwelling on my donor will only lead to that state sooner. So . . . I just don't.\"\n\n\"Why are you telling me this?\" Michael asked.\n\n\"Because despite that hole in understanding exactly who I am, I know for a fact that I have done good things. I have helped people, saved lives. And regardless of who I was, I think the chance to go on helping after you're gone is an incredible opportunity, and one only very few, very special people get. I think your sister would take that chance. And I think you will too.\"\n\nOn the way back to the car, Leo confirmed Anarosa's pickup order, ordered the surgical team to begin scrubbing in, and removed Agent Prauss's name from the card on Michael's flowers.\n\n\"Damn,\" said Prauss in admiration once Leo was loaded back into the car's system and his form reappeared on the dash.\n\n\"We need her,\" said Leo, matter-of-factly. \"That research outpost is the UNSC's biggest scientific opportunity in years, and Anarosa's profile is a perfect fit, assuming everything goes according to plan.\"\n\nPrauss nodded and started the engine. \"All right, then. You've already . . .\"\n\n\"I've already.\" Leo replied. \"And now we wait to see who arrives.\"\n\nThe car pulled into the secured parking facility and Prauss killed the engine. He hesitated briefly before turning to Leo.\n\n\"What you said back there, about what it means to be . . . like you. You've never brought that up before. Why?\"\n\nLeo shrugged. \"You never asked.\"\n\nHe had Prauss there.\n\n\"And about your donor? Were you just telling Michael what he needed to hear?\"\n\nAnother shrug, but this time Leo didn't answer.\n\n\"And what you said about a child . . . ?\"\n\nLeo just stared down the hood of the car and said nothing.\n\n.\n\n(Pulse 3\/BP 4\/Dermal 4\/SNS 3)\n\n.\n\n(Pulse 5\/BP 6\/Dermal 6\/SNS 7)\n\n.\n\n.\n\n.\n\n(Pulse 10\/BP 7\/Dermal 9\/SNS 14)\n\n.\n\nGotcha.\n\n. . . and then he turned suddenly toward Prauss with a sheepish look and a self-deprecating roll of the eyes. \"Sorry about that\u2014I tuned out for a second. I was receiving details on our next assignment. To answer your question . . . what he needed to hear. Yes, of course.\"\n\nLeo smiled and materialized a silver Fedora on his head, which he then tipped in Prauss's direction.\n\n\"I learned from the best, didn't I?\"\n\nYou son of a bitch.\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\n343 Industries would like to thank all the contributors, Scott Dell'Osso, Kory Hubbell, Bonnie Ross-Ziegler, Ed Schlesinger, Rob Semsey, Matt Skelton, Phil Spencer, Kiki Wolfkill, Carla Woo, and Jennifer Yi.\n\nNone of this would have been possible without the amazing efforts of the Halo Franchise Team, the Halo Consumer Products Team, Jeff Easterling, Scott Jobe, Tiffany O'Brien, Kenneth Peters, and Sparth, with special thanks to Jeremy Patenaude.\n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHORS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\nTOBIAS BUCKELL is the New York Times bestselling author of Halo: The Cole Protocol. His other novels and more than fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He lives with his family in Ohio.\n\nTROY DENNING is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty-five novels, including Halo: Last Light, a dozen Star Wars novels, the Dark Sun: Prism Pentad series, and many bestselling Forgotten Realms novels. A former game designer and editor, he lives in western Wisconsin.\n\nMATT FORBECK is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author and game designer. He has thirty novels and countless games published to date. His latest work includes Halo: New Blood, Magic: The Gathering comics, the 2014 edition of The Marvel Encyclopedia, Captain America: The Ultimate Guide to the First Avenger, his Monster Academy young adult fantasy novels, and the upcoming Shotguns & Sorcery roleplaying game based on his novels. He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin, with his wife and five children, including a set of quadruplets. For more about him and his work, visit www.forbeck.com.\n\nKELLY GAY is the critically acclaimed author of the Charlie Madigan urban fantasy series. She is a multipublished author with works translated into several languages and earning accolades: a two-time RITA nominee, an ARRA nominee, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, and a SIBA Book Award Long List finalist. Kelly is also a recipient of North Carolina Arts Council's Fellowship Grant in Literature. She can be found online at KellyGay.com.\n\nAward-winning and eight-time New York Times bestselling author CHRISTIE GOLDEN has written nearly fifty novels in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Among them are titles for Star Trek, World of Warcraft, Assassin's Creed, and Star Wars, including the highly acclaimed Dark Disciple. You can find her at christiegolden.com, on Facebook as Christie Golden, and on Twitter @ChristieGolden.\n\nKEVIN GRACE is a Narrative Design Director at 343 Industries and a longtime resident of the Halo universe, where he wages a never-ending war on the Hexagonal Scourge. He has written the short story \"The Return,\" which appeared in the Halo: Evolutions anthology, and is currently working on the story for Halo Wars 2.\n\nMORGAN LOCKHART is a professional writer and game designer from Seattle, Washington. She currently works on the Halo franchise, and her short fiction can be found cluttering like cobwebs around the internet. Visit her at lockhartwrites.com.\n\nJOHN JACKSON MILLER is a New York Times bestselling author and comics historian who has written more than twenty novels and graphic novels, including the Star Trek: Prey novel trilogy from Pocket Books, Star Wars novels including Kenobi and A New Dawn, and comics in the Mass Effect universe. His comics story \"Undefeated\" appears in the Dark Horse Comics collection Halo: Tales from Slipspace. His fiction website is www.farawaypress.com.\n\nFRANK O'CONNOR is the Creative Director for the Halo franchise at 343 Industries. He lives in Washington.\n\nBRIAN REED began working in the video game industry in 1996 as a tester for WarCraft II. His work in TV animation and Marvel Comics led to him join 343 Industries full-time during the production of Halo 4. He has been part of every Halo project since, and currently serves as a Narrative Director. He is also a noted comic-book writer, having adapted the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, as well as worked on Halo: Initiation and Halo: Escalation for Dark Horse Comics. He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and a Promethean Crawler they adopted from a rescue shelter.\n\nJOSEPH STATEN was the writer and creative lead for Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3, as well as Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Halo: Contact Harvest and one of the voices behind the indomitable Covenant Grunts. He lives with his family in Washington.\n\nJAMES SWALLOW is a New York Times bestselling author and BAFTA-nominated scriptwriter; he has worked on video games such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Disney Infinity, Fable: The Journey, and Killzone 2. His work includes original fiction and stories from the worlds of Star Trek, 24, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Warhammer 40,000, and more. He lives and works in London.\n\nMEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT\n\nSimonandSchuster.com\n\n  Facebook.com\/GalleryBooks  \n  @GalleryBooks\nOne more pass for today,\" I called out to the harrow and its driver.\n\nHe was only nine years old, but he was already capable enough to guide the large beasts on their course through the valley. The great wooden plow had a rear-mounted platform set just above a broad, ivory-studded tiller\u2014it was simple and crude, but it accomplished its purpose. From this distance, I could only make out the boy's straw hat peeking out over the top, almost completely buried by the machine's frame, as he goaded forward creatures three times his height.\n\nHe was my son.\n\nThe young boy drove the massive pair of indigo-colored oxen forward, meticulously carving deep furrows of arable soil in a pattern that now spread through the entire valley. The farmland was vast and covered with a healthy, mustard-colored earth that marked this region of the world. It was fertile and relatively easy to manage, apart from the occasional rugged outcropping.\n\nIf the weather held, tomorrow we would begin to plant. This put us on schedule to finish by the next lunar cycle, just before Rainfall, the third of five seasons in this moon's standard year. That could mean the best yields we had ever seen on this world, and the thought thrilled me. It was actually working. We were thriving on our own out here.\n\nAs the day's light began to dim, I climbed up to the top of the grassy ridge within which our homestead was built into and surveyed the terrain. The last rays of the suns poured over the lip of the ridge, casting an uneven shadow across the land and signaling the end of the workday.\n\nAt the stable, my son was already cautiously unhitching the oxen and, one by one, brought the giant beasts inside.\n\nI did my best not to make my prying obvious: I trusted him, even if this was his first year helping with the crop. The boy was growing strong and focused and he loved working with his hands. In short, absolutely nothing like me\u2014he took after his mother instead.\n\nThe ridge had a long, stony crest that looked out upon a brackish inland sea, its surface mottled by bright-red coral. Our home was built directly into the rock, framed up by heavy beams of lumber into helical compartments just below the cliff ledge. While most of the living space was underground, a trio of copiously carved apertures was situated over the sea on the far side, often capturing the marine breeze.\n\nWhen I reached the peak of the ridge, I took in a stunning sight: our world's twin suns began to shift behind the enormous shadowy gas giant, glinting off its roiling atmosphere with an explosive burst of radiance. This lasted only a moment before the onset of dusk, as stars suddenly began to pierce the deep blue sky. The bright, coalescent clusters of light resembled a glowing moss I had seen on another world. I could not recall which one\u2014it was so long ago.\n\nIn the meantime, my wife had emerged from our home, carrying a basket and a blanket. We would dine under the stars tonight. She met me on the ridge just in time to witness the last light prior to the cool darkness of twilight taking over the view. A sweet but pungent gust of lavender rushed up the cliffside to greet us. It was the coral: the scent of this world, full of vibrance and life. The smell made her smile.\n\nShe and I were very different: I loved the glory of the stars, and she adored the glory of the life that orbited them. This was the way it had always been, and the very reason we chose this world as our home.\n\n\"It never gets old,\" I said.\n\n\"No, it doesn't,\" she responded, glancing at me from the corner of her eye before spreading out the blanket. I helped pull it taut near the ledge and we sat down, staring out across the sea, soaking it all in for a moment. Down the hill toward the stable, our son had just finished stowing the plow. From our perch, we could just barely make out the steady and determined grimace on his face as he finished the task. He always needed to do it exactly right.\n\n\"You know he takes after you,\" I said.\n\n\"There's a little of both of us in him,\" his mother replied. \"I'm just the parts about him you like the best.\" She was right.\n\nShe was always right.\n\n\"Tell me one of your old stories, Father.\"\n\nOne of my old stories. The tales from before my son had been born, from before the life we had on this world. To him, they were only legends and myths\u2014that was a good thing. They should stay that way, remaining in a galaxy and a time far removed from our own, something he would never experience out here, in the fields.\n\nIt had taken years for the dark dreams of that time to end. Those scars ran deep, almost too deep, but eventually they subsided. Now, all that remained was a torrent of dim memories, loosely connected events, all of it ancient history. Tragedy upon tragedy. My past was a trail of corpses and dead worlds. How it all went wrong.\n\n\"Which one do you want me to tell you about?\"\n\nAll three of us were laying on our backs across the blanket, my wife tucked into my arm and our son under hers. I smoked from a small ivory pipe: crushed flowers of a sweet plant that gave off a pleasant and rejuvenating aroma. A large cerulean moon now climbed above distant mountains that sat opposite the sea\u2014our homeworld's sister satellite. Over the course of the year, both spheres would dance their way around the impossibly massive anchor planet they orbited.\n\n\"Tell me about Halo,\" he said, thumbing the rim of his weathered hat.\n\n\"Halo? Are you sure?\" my wife asked him.\n\n\"Yes. Tell me one of those stories.\"\n\nHalo. This wasn't the first time I had told him a story about the ringworld weapons, but my reaction was always the same. The mentioning of its name was enough to summon a storm of memories to the fore. What could I honestly say about it that wouldn't frighten my son out of his wits? The reality that it was capable of wiping an entire galaxy completely clean of any thinking life? That it was just as majestic as it was deadly and ruinous? How would he even begin to understand that? Could he ever bear the truth\u2014and if not now, when he was older?\n\nPerhaps one day . . . but for now, it would still be clothed in myth and the periphery of the past. Vague and distant, something that I alone remembered.\n\n\"There was once a warrior who tracked his old enemy to one of the Halo rings\u2014\"\n\n\"A strong and brave warrior?\" my wife asked for the child's benefit, not hers.\n\n\"By the measure of some,\" I confessed. \"This warrior led a vast navy to a Halo that his enemy had made into a stronghold. They fought for days in the skies above the ring, until the enemy had been worn down and his vulnerabilities were exposed,\" I said this with expressive gestures, and then paused to inhale the pipe's warmth in my lungs.\n\n\"The enemy was out of options. His ships had been ravaged, his weapons demolished. He was completely beaten . . . but he was a cunning foe. If he could not have the Halo for himself, he would not let the warrior have it. Or anyone else, for that matter.\"\n\n\"So he tried to destroy it?\" my son asked.\n\n\"Yes. He attempted to rip it apart with the gravity of another world. But the warrior refused him this final effort. Using the vessels under his command, the warrior drew in from all sides and laid hold of the Halo ring, reshaping its form as the gravity sought to rend it to pieces. Then he tracked down the enemy and captured him.\"\n\n\"What happened to the enemy?\" he asked with a yawn.\n\n\"He was given a just punishment for his crimes. And the warrior reversed all of the evils the enemy had caused on the ringworld. He . . . tried to make everything right,\" I said, choosing my words carefully. \"Even if only for a time.\"\n\nI stopped for a long moment, taking in a few breaths from the pipe.\n\n\"He's asleep,\" my wife said, lightly touching the back of her hand on his cheek. That was what a long day working the fields does. It was no longer effortless for our kind.\n\nMy wife nuzzled in closer to me. She was incredibly beautiful under the pale light from the moon and stars. The hard years of laboring alongside me had not made her any less lovely. In many ways, she was even dearer to me now than ever before.\n\n\"Do you remember it well?\" she asked.\n\n\"Halo?\"\n\n\"Yes. Do you remember the one from your story?\"\n\n\"It is still vivid in my mind,\" I said, closing my eyes. \"Those massive bands reaching up like arms into the sky: they were blue-green and rich with life within, and a cold ashen metal without. I can still see its shape, twisted and fractured in the cracked viewport of my ship. I remember watching it shrink into the distance just before we left. Even back then, when machines of that scale were ordinary and expected . . . Halo took my breath away.\"\n\nFor a moment, the weight of the memory overcame me like a swift tide. I was suddenly back there, long ago, with my ship's frigid deck below me. I watched Halo's band slowly spin, set against the roiling blackness of an abandoned star system. The fortress world was an elegant kaleidoscopic spool of color, yet still inordinately powerful beyond reason. Halo brought our entire world down around us and cost us everything. It had made us exiles to the furthest reaches of space.\n\nAs if waking from a dream, I shuddered and snapped my eyes wide open, returning to reality. I shifted to see if my wife too was slumbering. She hadn't. She was just staring at me with a reassuring smile. She put her head on my chest and closed her eyes, listening to my heart as it steadied.\n\n\"Are you happy with our life here?\" I asked.\n\n\"I am,\" she said softly.\n\n\"I mean, truly happy . . . given all that has happened?\"\n\n\"This is life\u2014real life. The three of us together. It is the way it was always meant to be. Nothing could make me happier, whether on this world or any other.\"\n\nBy the time my pipe had died down, she'd fallen asleep. But I could not.\n\nOne by one, I wrapped my wife and son in the blanket as I took them inside the house, laying them on the mat in our straw loft. After retrieving a bundle of wood for the hearth, I lit it with an onyx flint we kept above the mantle. It was one of the first things I made when we arrived here.\n\nConfident that this would keep them warm, I grabbed my cloak and set out from the homestead. I walked the full extent of the farm, and then deep into the shallow tablelands that stretched toward the inland interior.\n\nThis walk was not a normal evening ritual, but tonight I felt provoked.\n\nCompelled by the image of Halo freshly seared into my mind, I set out through the deep country, pushing into a series of rolling golden fields before the foothills of the white-capped mountains rose before me. I knew the place I was headed; it wasn't far.\n\nAs I scaled the first set of steep rises, I quickly came to a narrow ledge that forced me to sidle my way along the mountainside, ascending into snow and ice. Looking back toward the valley, the light was soft against the hillside, and from here I could see most of the tablelands, from the deep and dark forests to the east to the immense crimson sea on the west. Herds of grazing bovids were scattered across a distant clearing, while a small flock of gulls wheeled upward in the predawn sky\u2014but otherwise, the sight was completely still, like a picture. I could even see my home built into the cresting ridge, a brown speck set against countless lines of harrowed soil.\n\nThat was home. I'd been here longer than I had been anywhere else before.\n\nAfter climbing a good way, I finally reached an obscure and well-hidden cleft. Turning around to face the mountain, my eyes were met with a familiar shape.\n\nAudacity.\n\nMostly buried under the snow, the slender starship was carefully perched here, leaning out over the edge toward our homestead. Its visage was impassive but vigilant, like a silent guardian that kept watch from a distance.\n\nI approached the exposed entry portal and placed my hand on the seal. The ship immediately recognized me and opened its maw, allowing me to climb inside.\n\nIt somehow felt colder in here than outside; this was a ship that had seen a thousand burning stars in its long and forgotten history, and had now been abandoned to the elements.\n\nAs I moved into the recesses of the ship, my respiration came out in ragged tendrils\u2014I was breathing harder. I always did when I made this trip. It was now much more taxing on my body than once upon a time.\n\nAt the back of the ship was a dun obelisk, a vertical structure that detected my approach and opened by sliding two doors out from its center. In front of me was a hulking suit of armor\u2014old and imposing. Its helmet appeared to wear a stern countenance, and the chestplate and pauldrons had been pocked with damage from a hundred bitter wars. All of this was distant to me, but it was still my past. It wasn't a myth. It wasn't a legend.\n\nNot long after we activated Halo, the handful that remained made plans to leave. We committed ourselves to a single purpose: exile. We would let the white disc of the galaxy proceed with plans that had been prepared for its future, while we escaped to alien stars, spreading our numbers out such that our species' days would be fixed. Our kind would not live forever. My wife and I gave our ship to the mountain, and we gave up all of Audacity's trappings and comforts: unequaled technology from ten thousand generations.\n\nI looked at the top of the obelisk where a cuneiform pattern was etched. It had the bearing of the armor's owner. My old name:\n\nBORNSTELLAR-MAKES-ETERNAL-LASTING\n\nWe left our armor here in the ship\u2014armor that could have kept us alive for millennia. We forsook it and everything from our past, and started anew. Me, my wife, our son. We would return to the roots of my people, millions of years before. Simple farmers who lived and loved and died. I would fail my namesake, that was for certain\u2014nothing about me would be eternal or lasting\u2014but I would not fail the soul my people.\n\nThat would be eternal.\n\nWhat we once were before our pride, before the wars, and before Halo. We were noble, kind creatures who served one another and recognized our small place in the greater story. That is how we would be on this world. That is how the last chapter would be told.\n\nOur new life here would be the end of our great journey.\nDON'T MISS THESE OTHER THRILLING STORIES IN THE WORLDS OF\n\nLast Light\n\nTroy Denning\n\nHunters in the Dark\n\nPeter David\n\nNew Blood\n\nMatt Forbeck\n\nBroken Circle\n\nJohn Shirley\n\nTHE KILO-FIVE TRILOGY\n\nKaren Traviss\n\nGlasslands\n\nThe Thursday War\n\nMortal Dictata\n\nTHE FORERUNNER SAGA\n\nGreg Bear\n\nCryptum\n\nPrimordium\n\nSilentium\n\nEvolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe\n\n(anthology)\n\nThe Cole Protocol\n\nTobias S. Buckell\n\nContact Harvest\n\nJoseph Staten\n\nGhosts of Onyx\n\nEric Nylund\n\nFirst Strike\n\nEric Nylund\n\nThe Flood\n\nWilliam C. Dietz\n\nThe Fall of Reach\n\nEric Nylund\n\nWe hope you enjoyed reading this Halo Books eBook.\n\n* * *\n\nJoin our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Halo Books and Simon & Schuster.\n\nCLICK HERE TO SIGN UP\n\nor visit us online to sign up at  \neBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com\n\nGallery Books\n\nAn Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n\n1230 Avenue of the Americas\n\nNew York, NY 10020\n\nwww.SimonandSchuster.com\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Microsoft, 343 Industries, the 343 Industries logo, Halo, and the Halo logo are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.\n\nAll rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.\n\nFirst Gallery Books trade paperback edition September 2016\n\nGALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.\n\nFor information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.\n\nThe Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.\n\nInterior design by Leydiana Rodr\u00edguez\n\nCover design by Alan Dingman\n\nCover art by Isaac Hannaford\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.\n\nISBN 978-1-5011-4067-9\n\nISBN 978-1-5011-4068-6 (ebook)\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Betsie Bush, Dave Morgan, Joseph R. Hauser and\nthe Online Distributed Proofreading Team at\nhttp:\/\/www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE PLANTS OF MICHIGAN\n\n\nSIMPLE KEYS FOR THE\nIDENTIFICATION OF THE NATIVE SEED PLANTS\nOF THE STATE\n\n\nBy HENRY ALLAN GLEASON, Ph. D.\nAssociate Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanical Gardens\nand Arboretum in the University of Michigan\n\n\n1918\n\n\n\n\nCOPYRIGHT, 1918\nGEORGE WAHR\n\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED BY\nGEORGE WAHR\nANN ARBOR\n\n\nPRINTED BY\nTHE ANN ARBOR PRESS\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE\n\n\nThis book is not intended for the expert botanist. He should consult one\nof the regular Manuals which give full descriptions of each species of\nplant.\n\nNeither is it intended for the merely curious. Only those who have\nsufficient interest in a plant to observe it can find its name by this\nbook.\n\nFurthermore, it is not a textbook. It does not attempt to convey\nbotanical information, but offers merely an opportunity to learn the\nnames of plants.\n\nIts mission is fully accomplished if, through its use, students,\nvacationists, and plant-lovers in general are able to recognize by name\nthe plants about them.\n\n\n\n\nHOW TO USE THE BOOK\n\n\nOne recognizes a plant by the presence of structural features peculiar\nto itself, and not found on any other kind of plant. In such a book as\nthis, these characters are given one or a few at a time, and contrasted\nwith the characters which other sorts of plants possess. Such a\npresentation is called a Key, and by its proper use the name may be\nlearned of any plant considered in it. This process is called\nIdentification.\n\nKeys are constructed in several different ways, although the principle\nof all is the same. In this book, the user will begin with lines 1a and\n1b on the page headed Key to the Groups. Each of these lines includes\nsome descriptive matter, but only one of them can apply to the plant\nbeing identified. For example, if the plant to be identified is an Oak,\nline 1a will apply perfectly, and the same line will also apply to any\nother kind of tree or to any shrub. But if the plant is a Violet, a\nButtercup, or any other herb, line 1b agrees and line 1a will not apply.\nAt the end of each line is a reference to be consulted next. If the\nplant is a tree or shrub, one turns accordingly to Group 1, on page ix,\nand begins again at the first number given. If the plant is an herb, he\nfollows the reference to line 2, just below, and again compares the\nplants with lines 2a and 2b.\n\nUnder every number at least two lines of description are given,\ndesignated a and b, and under a few numbers additional lines appear,\ndesignated c, d, etc. In every case, the user of the key will select\nfrom the different lines under the same number that particular line\nwhich agrees with the structure of the plant, and follow up the\nreference given at the end of that line. Eventually one finds at the end\nof a line, instead of a number, the name of a family of plants, to which\nthis particular plant belongs, and then turns over to the page where\nthis family is treated. Under each family is a similar key, to be\nfollowed in exactly the same way, until finally one finds instead of a\nnumber the common name and the scientific name of the plant in hand. The\nprocess of identification is now completed, and the student has found\nthe name of the plant.\n\nIn some cases, a reference is made in the key to a particular portion of\nthe family key. One then turns directly to this particular number in the\nfamily key, and continues his identification in the usual way.\n\nAs a definite example of the use of the key, suppose that one has in\nhand a branch of the White Oak, and that he does not know its name. To\ndetermine its name, he will trace it through the following steps in the\nkey. Under the Key to the Groups, it agrees with line 1a, which refers\nto Group 1, Woody Plants. Under this group it agrees in structure with\nline 1a, which refers to 2; with line 2b, referring to 21; with line\n21b, referring to 22; with 22b, referring to 29; with 29b, referring to\n32; with 32c, referring to 47; with 47b, referring to 48; with 48b,\nreferring to 51; with 51b, referring to number 1b in the Beech Family.\nTurning to the proper number in this family, the plant is referred to\nline 3; it agrees with line 3c, referring to 10; with 10a, referring to\n11; and with 11b, which gives the name of the plant. White Oak, _Quercus\nalba_.\n\nAs a second example, suppose one has a common yellow-flowered plant\nblooming on lawns and roadsides in spring. Under the Key to the Groups,\nit agrees with 1b, referring to 2; with 2b, referring to 3; and its\nnet-veined leaves place it in 3b, referring to Group 4, Dicotyledones.\nUnder this group, its basal leaves place it in 1b, referring to 2; its\nsimple leaves in 2b, referring to 18; the absence of stem-leaves places\nit in 18b, referring to 23; its solitary flowers on each flower-stalk\nplace it in 23b, referring to 24; its yellow flowers agree with 24a,\nreferring to 25; and its milky juice refers the plant to number 16, in\nthe Composite Family. In the key to this family, its lobed leaves agree\nwith 16b, referring on to 17; its large flowers with 17b, giving one the\ncommon name Dandelion, and referring on to 18 to determine which kind of\nDandelion the plant may be.\n\nAt some point in the key there will be found for each plant a statement\nin parentheses. This is general information concerning the height of the\nplant, the color of the flowers, or the season of bloom. It must be\nremembered that the height of plants is subject to great variation; that\nmost plants have white-flowered varieties; and that the month of bloom\ndepends largely on the latitude and the climate. Therefore this general\ninformation should not be used as means of distinguishing species.\n\n=The names of plants.= Each plant bears a scientific name. This is\ncomposed of two parts and is usually of Latin or Greek derivation. In\nsome cases these names are taken directly from the Latin language, as\n_Quercus_, the Oak, or _Acer_, the Maple. In other cases the name may\nindicate some characteristic feature of the plant, as _Polygonum_, many\njoints, for the Knotweed, or _Ammophila_, sand-loving, for the Beach\nGrass.\n\nAn English name is also given for almost every kind of plant. In a few\ncases there is no accepted English name, and none has been given. In\nmany cases the same English name applies to several kinds of plants and\nhas been repeated for each. When this is so, the common name is given in\nthe key in parentheses before the scientific name is reached. Thus, if\none is satisfied to know merely that his plant is a dandelion, he learns\nit in line 17b of the key to the Composite Family, but to discover which\nkind of a dandelion he has, he must follow through the key and use the\nscientific name.\n\nThere is in this book, therefore, no necessity of learning or using\nscientific names. The less critical may be satisfied with an English\nname, and others may use the scientific names as they see fit.\n\n=Possible Errors.= In using this book, care must be taken to compare all\nthe lines under each number with the plant, and to use judgment in\nselecting the right one. While faulty observation or poor judgment may\nlead to error, a mistake is usually due to carelessness in not following\ncorrectly the reference at the end of the line chosen. If one reaches a\nnumber in which none of the lines of description agrees with the plant,\nit is very probable that he has made a mistake at an earlier stage of\nthe identification, and he should then begin anew.\n\nIt has been the intention of the author to make the key as nearly as\npossible proof against errors of judgment. For example, the Indian\nTurnip may be sought under either Group 3 or Group 4; the Matrimony Vine\nmay be identified either as a shrub or as an herb, and numerous other\nsimilar examples may be discovered.\n\n=Botanical Information Needed.= It is presumed that those using the book\nwill be familiar with the parts of the flower and with the commoner\ndescriptive terms applied to leaves. Unusual terms have been avoided as\nfar as possible, but those which do occur, as well as the simpler ones,\nare explained in the glossary.\n\nIn general, only those characters have been used in the keys which can\nbe observed without a magnifying glass and without dissection of the\nflower.\n\nIn several groups of plants, reference is made to the fuller\ndescriptions to be found in the Manuals. The standard manuals for\nMichigan are Gray's New Manual of Botany, 7th edition (American Book\nCompany, $2.50), and Britton and Brown, Illustrated Flora of the\nNorthern States and Canada (Chas. Scribner's Sons, $13.50). These books\nmay be consulted in most school or public libraries.\n\nAll dimensions are expressed in the metric system. For convenience, it\nmay be stated that 25 millimeters (mm.) are about equal to one inch; 1\ncentimeter (cm.) to two-fifths of an inch; 1 decimeter (dm.) to 4\ninches; and 1 meter (m.) is a little more than 3 feet.\n\n\n\n\nKEY TO GROUPS\n\n\n1a. Trees, shrubs, or woody climbers, with stems which last from year to\n    year                                 Group 1, =WOODY PLANTS=, p. ix.\n\n1b. Herbaceous plants, with stems which live above ground only a single\n    season --2.\n\n     2a. Plants with unusual habits or structures, including leafless,\n         colorless, submerged, floating, parasitic, or hollow-leaved\n         plants                     Group 2, =UNUSUAL PLANTS=, p. xxiii.\n\n     2b. Ordinary terrestrial or swamp plants, without unusual\n         structural peculiarities --3.\n\n3a. Leaves parallel-veined (or net-veined in a few species); parts of\n    the flower usually in threes or sixes, never in fives; wood-fibers\n    scattered through the stem; seed with one cotyledon. All plants with\n    definitely parallel-veined leaves may be identified through this\n    division, unless the parts of the flower are distinctly in fives.\n                                   Group 3, =MONOCOTYLEDONES=, p. xxvii.\n\n3b. Leaves net-veined (or parallel-veined in a few species); parts of\n    the flower usually in fours or fives; wood-fibers arranged in a\n    circle in the stem; seeds with two cotyledons. All plants with\n    definitely net-veined leaves may be identified through this\n    division.                          Group 4, =DICOTYLEDONES=, p. xxx.\n\n\nNote:--In order to avoid possible chances of error, many plants have\nbeen treated under both of the above groups. The following hints may\nalso be useful in distinguishing Groups 3 and 4:\n\nAll herbaceous plants with deeply lobed, dissected or compound leaves\nmay be sought under the Dicotyledones.\n\nAll herbaceous plants with five stamens in each flower, or with seven or\nmore stamens and one ovary in each flower, may be sought under\nDicotyledones.\n\n\n\n\nGROUP 1, WOODY PLANTS\n\n\n1a. Trees, with erect stem and central trunk, attaining a height of 6 m.\n    (20 ft.) or more --2.\n\n1b. Shrubs or woody vines, without true tree habit, or attaining heights\n    of less than 6 m. (20 ft.) --52.\n\n     2a. Key for use in earliest spring, for trees which have flowers\n         but no leaves --3.\n\n     2b. Key for use with trees bearing leaves --21.\n\n3a. Flowers in catkins, without brightly  or petal-like parts\n    --4.\n\n3b. Flowers not in catkins, either with or without petals --14.\n\n     4a. Leaf-scars and lateral buds 2-ranked, i. e., in two\n         longitudinal rows with the third leaf above the first --5.\n\n     4b. Leaf-scars and buds in three or more longitudinal rows --9.\n\n5a. From 1 to 3 bud-scales visible on each leaf-bud\n                                               2b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n5b. From 4 to 7 bud-scales visible on each leaf-bud --6.\n\n5c. From 8 to 20 bud-scales visible on each leaf-bud; buds long and\n    slender; bark of the trunk smooth --8.\n\n     6a. Bundle-scars 5 or more              2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     6b. Bundle-scars 3 --7.\n\n7a. Twigs bearing numerous dwarf branches thickly covered with crowded\nleaf-scars (Birch)                                  =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n7b. Twigs without dwarf branches (Ironwood)  9a, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     8a. Trunk cylindrical or nearly so        2a, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     8b. Trunk prominently fluted with longitudinal ridges\n                                             1b, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n9a. Bundle-scars 3 in each leaf-scar --10.\n\n9b. Bundle scars more than 3 in each leaf-scar --12.\n\n     10a. Pith divided into separate cavities by transverse partitions\n                                           1a, in =JUGLANDACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n     10b. Pith not partitioned --11.\n\n11a. Buds small, with only one external bud-scale\n                                             1b, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n11b. Buds with more than one outer bud-scale\n                                             1a, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n     12a. Buds clustered near the tips of the twigs\n                                               1b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     12b. Buds not clustered at the tips of the twigs --13.\n\n13a. Buds with about 3 visible bud-scales      2b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n13b. Terminal bud large, with 4 or more visible bud-scales\n                                           1b, in =JUGLANDACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n     14a. Flowers conspicuous, brightly , at least 8 mm. wide.\n          with both calyx and corolla --15.\n\n     14b. Flowers inconspicuous, seldom brightly , and then less\n          than 8 mm. wide --17.\n\n15a. Flowers irregular, pink or red         3a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n15b. Flowers regular, white --16.\n\n     16a. Ovary one, superior, in the center of the flower\n                                              32b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n     16b. Ovary inferior, appearing as a swelling below the calyx at the\n          summit of the pedicel               42b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n17a. Leaf-scars and buds opposite --18.\n\n17b. Leaf-scars and buds alternate --19.\n\n     18a. Bundle-scar one in each leaf-scar     1b, in =OLEACAE=, p. 88.\n\n     18b. Bundle-scars 3 or more in each leaf-scar   =ACERACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n19a. Bundle-scar 1 in each leaf-scar          1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n19b. Bundle-scars 3 in each leaf-scar --20.\n\n19c. Bundle-scars 5 in each leaf-scar       7a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     20a. Branches thorny                   5a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     20b. Branches not thorny                3a, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n                                 --21--\n\n21a. Leaves narrow, needle-like or scale-like; trees mostly evergreen\n                                                       =PINACEAE=, p. 1.\n\n21b. Leaves broader, flat, never needle-like or scale-like, falling in\n     winter --22.\n\n     22a. Leaves compound --23.\n\n     22b. Leaves simple --29.\n\n23a. Leaves opposite --24.\n\n23b. Leaves alternate --26.\n\n     24a. Leaves palmately compound with 5-7 leaflets\n                                                   =SAPINDACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n     24b. Leaves pinnately compound --25.\n\n25a. Leaflets 3-5                             1a, in =ACERACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n25b. Leaflets 7-11                             1b, in =OLEACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n     26a. Stem or branches thorny           4a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     26b. Stem or branches not thorny --27.\n\n27a. Leaflets entire                        7a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n27b. Leaflets entire except for a few large glandular teeth near their\n     base                                         =SIMARUBACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n27c. Leaflets serrate their entire length --28.\n\n     28a. Upper leaflets less than 25 mm. wide\n                                               4b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n     28b. Upper leaflets more than 25 mm. wide\n                                                  =JUGLANDACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n29a. Leaves opposite --30.\n\n29b. Leaves alternate --32.\n\n     30a. Leaves entire                              =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n     30b. Leaves toothed or lobed, not entire --31.\n\n31a. Leaves lobed                             1b, in =ACERACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n31b. Leaves merely toothed             27b, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 111.\n\n     32a. Leaves entire --33.\n\n     32b. Leaves toothed --36.\n\n     32c. Leaves lobed --47.\n\n33a. Leaves heart-shape                     3a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n33b. Leaves not heart-shape --34.\n\n     34a. Twigs and foliage spicy-aromatic    1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     34b. Twigs and foliage not aromatic --35.\n\n35a. Pith 5-angled; fruit an acorn             3a, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n35b. Pith not 5-angled; fruit a berry         1a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n     36a. Leaves oblique at base, i. e., one side of the leaf larger\n          than the other --37.\n\n     36b. Leaves symmetrical, not oblique at base --38.\n\n37a. Leaves heart-shape, about as broad as long      =TILIACEAE=, p. 72.\n\n37b. Leaves oval or ovate, much longer than wide\n                                             1a, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     38a. Stems thorny                        41b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n     38b. Stems not thorny --39.\n\n39a. Leaves finely toothed, with 3-many teeth per centimeter of margin\n     --40.\n\n39b. Leaves coarsely toothed, with 1-2 teeth per centimeter of margin\n     --46.\n\n     40a. Petioles laterally compressed      2a, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n     40b. Petioles not compressed --41.\n\n41a. Leaves, or many of them, crowded on short spur-like branches --42.\n\n41b. Leaves scattered, not on short spur-like branches --43.\n\n     42a. Bark of the trunks separating in thin papery or leathery\n          sheets                                    =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n     42b. Bark of the trunk not papery or leathery\n                                              24b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 53.\n\n43a. Lateral leaf-veins straight and parallel, and terminating in the\n     teeth                                          =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n43b. Lateral veins more or less curved, and not ending in the teeth\n     --44.\n\n     44a. Leaves palmately veined, about as broad as long; juice\n          somewhat milky                     2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     44b. Leaves pinnately veined; juice not milky --45.\n\n45a. Willows, with slender leaves and brittle twigs\n                                             8a, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n45b. Trees with lanceolate, ovate, or oblong leaves and tough twigs\n                                               30, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n45c. Cottonwoods, with broad, heart-shape or rounded leaves\n                                             1a, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n     46a. Petioles laterally compressed      2a, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n     46b. Petioles not compressed; lateral veins straight and parallel,\n          running directly to the teeth               =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n47a. Stem thorny                              41b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n47b. Stem not thorny --48.\n\n     48a. Leaves palmately veined --49.\n\n     48b. Leaves pinnately veined --51.\n\n49a. Lobes of the leaf entire                 1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n49b. Lobes of the leaf serrate --50.\n\n     50a. Juice somewhat milky; lateral buds visible\n                                             2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     50b. Juice not milky; lateral buds covered by the base of the\n          petiole                                  =PLATANACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n51a. Leaves with 4 large entire lobes; stem marked with a ring at each\n     node                                         =MAGNOLIACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n51b. Leaves with many lobes; stem not ringed   1b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n                                 --52--\n\n     52a. For specimens bearing leaves only --53.\n\n     52b. For specimens bearing flowers only --140.\n\n     52c. For specimens with both leaves and flowers --155.\n\n53a. Leaves narrow, needle-like or scale-like, mostly evergreen --54.\n\n53b. Leaves broader, flat or rolled, but not needle-like or scale-like\n     --56.\n\n     54a. Foliage densely gray-pubescent; low bushy shrubs with yellow\n          flowers                             2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     54b. Foliage green --55.\n\n55a. Leaves opposite or whorled                        =PINACEAE=, p. 1.\n\n55b. Leaves scattered on the stem                      =TAXACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     56a. Twining or climbing vines --57.\n\n     56b. Not climbing or twining --66.\n\n57a. Thorny vines --58.\n\n57b. Not thorny --60.\n\n     58a. Climbing by tendrils at the base of the leaves\n                                              4b, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 11.\n\n     58b. Tendrils none --59.\n\n59a. Leaves simple                          5a, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n59b. Leaves compound                           8a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 52.\n\n     60a. Leaves compound --61.\n\n     60b. Leaves simple --63.\n\n61a. Leaves with 5 leaflets                    1a, in =VITACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n61b. Leaves with 3 leaflets --62.\n\n     62a. Plant climbing by tendril-like leaf-stalks\n                                          1a, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     62b. Plant climbing by hold-fast roots\n                                          5b, in =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n63a. Leaves opposite                    5a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n63b. Leaves alternate --64.\n\n     64a. Plants climbing by tendrils          1b, in =VITACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     64b. Twining plants --65.\n\n65a. Leaves ovate-oblong, attached by the base\n                                           1a, in =CELASTRACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n65b. Leaves almost round, peltate near the edge  =MENISPERMACEAE= p. 40.\n\n     66a. Leaves opposite --67.\n\n     66b. Leaves alternate --84.\n\n67a. Leaves compound --68.\n\n67b. Leaves simple --69.\n\n     68a. Leaflets 3                             =STAPHYLEACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     68b. Leaflets 7 or more            1a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 109.\n\n69a. Leaves palmately veined, or at least with a pair of prominent\n     lateral veins from the base --70.\n\n69b. Leaves pinnately veined --72.\n\n     70a. Leaves not lobed                   1b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     70b. Leaves more or less lobed --71.\n\n71a. Leaves with stipules              22a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 111.\n\n71b. Leaves without stipules                  2a, in =ACERACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n     72a. Leaves serrate --73.\n\n     72b. Leaves entire --77.\n\n73a. Stem thorny                             1b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n73b. Stem not thorny --74.\n\n     74a. Bark of the ripe twigs green     1b, in =CELASTRACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     74b. Bark of the ripe twigs brown, reddish, or gray --75.\n\n75a. Twigs with a prominent hairy ridge extending downward from the\n     middle of the line connecting the petiole bases\n                                       13a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n75b. Twigs without any pubescent ridge --76.\n\n     76a. Erect shrubs; leaves obviously toothed\n                                       11b, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n     76b. Spreading shrubs; most of the leaves entire, and only here and\n          there some with serrate margins\n                                       18b, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n77a. Leaves silvery beneath with a dense coating of scales\n                                                  =ELAEAGNACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n77b. Leaves green beneath, or somewhat hairy and light- --78.\n\n     78a. Aquatic plant with lanceolate leaves, and stems bending over\n          and into the water                 1a, in =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     78b. Not truly aquatic, although frequently in wet places --79.\n\n79a. Leaves evergreen, as shown by their presence on the older stems\n                                             18a, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n79b. Leaves deciduous each year --80.\n\n     80a. Leaves dotted with translucent dots, easily seen when the leaf\n          is held to the light             1a, in =HYPERICACEAE=, p. 73.\n\n     80b. Leaves not dotted with translucent dots --81.\n\n81a. Lateral veins curved forward and running almost parallel to the\n     leaf-margin                                     =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n81b. Lateral veins spreading, and not paralleling the leaf-margin --82.\n\n     82a. Leaves with stipules 1a,           1a, in =RUBIACEAE=, p. 108.\n\n     82b. Leaves with a prominent ridge connecting them at the base\n         --83.\n\n     82c. Leaves with neither stipules nor connecting ridges\n                                               1a, in =OLEACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n83a. Bundle-scar one in each leaf-scar 18b, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n83b. Bundle-scars three in each leaf-scar (Honeysuckle)\n                                        12, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n     84a. Leaves compound --85.\n\n     84b. Leaves simple --95.\n\n85a. Stems prickly or thorny --86.\n\n85b. Stems without prickles or thorns --88.\n\n     86a. Leaves twice-pinnate 4a,           1a, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     86b. Leaves evenly pinnate             5b, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     86c. Leaves odd-pinnate or trifoliate --87.\n\n87a. Leaflets entire 1a,                       1a, in =RUTACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n87b. Leaflets serrate 3b,                      3b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n     88a. Leaflets 3 --89.\n\n     88b. Leaflets 5 to many --91.\n\n89a. Tall shrubs; leaflets entire or minutely toothed\n                                               1b, in =RUTACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n89b. Shrubs 2 m. high or less; leaves conspicuously toothed --90.\n\n     90a. Stipules present                    17b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 53.\n\n     90b. Stipules none                   1b, in =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n91a. Leaflets 6-25 mm. long --92.\n\n91b. Leaflets 30 mm. long, or more --93.\n\n     92a. Leaflets mostly 5, rarely 3 or 7     7a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 52.\n\n     92b. Leaflets mostly 9-19, 15 mm. long or more\n                                           26a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 60.\n\n     92c. Leaflets mostly 25-45, less than 15 mm. long\n                                            8a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n93a. Leaflets entire 3a, in =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n93b. Leaflets entire, except for 1-4 large glandular teeth near their\n     base                                         =SIMARUBACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n93c. Leaflets toothed throughout --94.\n\n     94a. Juice milky                     1a, in =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n     94b. Juice not milky                      3a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n95a. Leaves minute, scale-like, appressed     2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n95b. Leaves 3-10 mm. long, spreading, completely rolled into a tube\n                                                   =EMPETRACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n95c. Leaves normal in shape, green in color --96.\n\n     96a. Leaves evergreen, as shown by their presence on the older\n          parts of the stem                   4b, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n     96b. Leaves deciduous --97.\n\n97a. Stems or branches thorny --98.\n\n97b. Stems or branches without thorns or thorny leaves --103.\n\n     98a. Leaves conspicuously palmately veined --99.\n\n     98b. Leaves pinnately veined, or sometimes with smaller lateral\n          veins arising from the end of the petiole --100.\n\n99a. Leaves 5 cm. wide or less            1a, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n99b. Leaves 15 cm. wide or more              1a, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     100a. Leaves entire 5a, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n     100b. Leaves toothed or somewhat lobed --101.\n\n101a. Leaves with bristly margins; some of the thorns three-pointed\n                                          2a, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n101b. Leaves not bristly on the margin; thorns not branched --102.\n\n     102a. Only lateral thorns present        41b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n     102b. Only terminal thorns present      2a, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n103a. Leaves palmately veined, or with one or more pairs of lateral\n      veins from the base of the leaf --104.\n\n103b. Leaves pinnately veined --111.\n\n     104a. Leaves entire --105.\n\n     104b. Leaves toothed --106.\n\n     104c. Leaves palmately lobed --108.\n\n105a. Foliage fragrant when crushed; leaves ovate\n                                              1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n105b. Foliage not aromatic; leaves heart-shape\n                                            3b, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     106a. Lateral veins straight and parallel, running to the teeth of\n           the leaf                          3a, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     106b. Lateral veins curved or branched, and not running straight to\n           the teeth --107.\n\n107a. Tall shrubs with somewhat milky juice and broadly ovate leaves\n                                             2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n107b. Low shrubs less than 1 m. high with watery juice\n                                             1b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     108a. Leaves with 2 or 3 entire lobes, spicy-fragrant when crushed\n                                              1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     108b. Leaves with milky juice           2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     108c. Leaves neither spicy-fragrant nor with milky juice --109.\n\n109a. Stem covered with brown bristles         29, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n109b. Stem not bristly --110.\n\n     110a. Sides of the petiole strongly decurrent on the stem;\n           bundle-scars crowded or nearly in contact in the leaf-scars\n                                              28b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 53.\n\n     110b. Sides of petiole little decurrent or not at all; bundle-scars\n           distinctly separate            2b, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n111a. Leaves aromatically fragrant when crushed --112.\n\n111b. Leaves not aromatically fragrant when crushed --113.\n\n     112a. Leaves broadly obovate, entire; a common woodland shrub\n                                              1a, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     112b. Leaves linear-lanceolate or oblanceolate, conspicuously\n           toothed or entire                        =MYRICACEAE=, p. 20.\n\n113a. Leaves entire --114.\n\n113b. Leaves toothed or lobed --121.\n\n     114a. Base of the petiole covering the axillary buds; twigs marked\n           with rings                            =THYMELAEACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     114b. Base of petiole not covering the bud, and twigs not marked\n           with rings --115.\n\n115a. Pith with prominent partitions; tall shrubs with fetid bark;\n      leaves obovate, 10 cm. long or larger          =ANONACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n115b. Pith not partitioned; leaves smaller --116.\n\n     116a. Leaves waxy or resinous underneath\n                                             24b, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 86.\n\n     116b. Leaves not waxy or resinous --117.\n\n117a. Lateral veins curved forward and almost parallel to the margin of\n      the leaf                                2a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n117b. Lateral veins spreading --118.\n\n     118a. Leaves lanceolate or linear, much longer than wide --119.\n\n     118b. Leaves ovate or elliptical --120.\n\n119a. Stem weak, spreading or trailing      5a, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n119b. Stems, or some of them, erect         3b, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     120a. Leaves with purple petioles, which are at least one-fourth as\n           long as the leaf-blade         1a, in =AQUIFOLIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     120b. Leaves with short petioles or sessile\n                                             24c, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 86.\n\n121a. Lateral veins straight and parallel, mostly ending in the teeth of\n      the leaf --122.\n\n121b. Lateral veins not straight and parallel --129.\n\n     122a. Leaves 2-ranked, i. e., in two longitudinal rows, with the\n           third leaf directly above the first --123.\n\n     122b. Leaves not 2-ranked --127.\n\n123a. Leaves unsymmetrical, oblique at the base, i. e., with one side of\n      the leaf larger than the other            =HAMAMELIDACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n123b. Leaves symmetrical or nearly so at the base --124.\n\n     124a. Lateral leaf-veins ending in the leaf-teeth --125.\n\n     124b. Lateral veins not ending in the teeth\n                                              42b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n125a. Bark smooth and fluted on the large stems\n                                             1b, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n125b. Bark rough or warty or glandular --126.\n\n     126a. Leaves 4 cm. long or less         3a, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     126b. Leaves 5 cm. long or more         9b, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n127a. Pith 3-angled                          6a, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n127b. Pith 5-angled                           13b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n127c. Pith cylindrical --128.\n\n     128a. Leaves finely serrate              42b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n     128b. Leaves coarsely or doubly serrate  41a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n129a. Leaves coarsely or doubly serrate --130.\n\n129b. Leaves simply serrate --131.\n\n     130a. Leaves 2-ranked, i. e., in two longitudinal rows, with the\n           third leaf directly over the first\n                                             9b, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     130b. Leaves not 2-ranked                41a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n131a. Leaves with glands on the petiole or at the base of the leaf-blade\n      --132.\n\n131b. Leaves with small dark glands on the upper side of the mid-vein\n                                              42a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n131c. Leaves without glands --133.\n\n     132a. Willows; with usually slender leaves, frequently conspicuous\n           broad stipules, and lateral buds protected by a single\n           external bud-scale                13, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 20.\n\n     132b. Plums and cherries; with leaves lanceolate or broader, and\n           stipules minute and falling early in the season; lateral buds\n           with more than one bud-scale        30, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n133a. With stipules or with stipular scars indicating where stipules\n      have been detached --134.\n\n133b. Without stipules or stipular scars --138.\n\n     134a. With three bundle-scars in each leaf-scar --135.\n\n     134b. With one bundle-scar in each leaf-scar --136.\n\n135a. Willows; usually with slender leaves and twigs and frequently with\n      large conspicuous stipules; lateral buds covered by a single\n      external bud-scale                     13, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 20.\n\n135b. Juneberries; with oblong or ovate leaves and small stipules which\n      fall early; lateral buds with more than one external scale\n                                              42b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n     136a. Leaves mostly entire, only a few here and there with low\n           teeth                          1a, in =AQUIFOLIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     136b. Leaves sharply toothed --137.\n\n137a. Axillary buds superposed, i. e., with a second one just above the\n      first                               1b, in =AQUIFOLIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n137b. Axillary buds not superposed           2b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     138a. Leaves with purple petioles, which are at least one-fourth as\n           long as the blade              1a, in =AQUIFOLIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     138b. Leaves short-petioled or sessile --139.\n\n139a. Stems erect and straight, unbranched or with very few branches\n                                               27, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 53.\n\n139b. Stems more or less crooked and freely branched, making a spreading\n      shrub                                   25, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 86.\n\n                                 --140--\n\n     140a. Flowers appearing in autumn, after the leaves have fallen\n                                                =HAMAMELIDACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n     140b. Flowers appearing in spring, before the leaves have opened\n           --141.\n\n141a. Flowers in catkins, without brightly  or petal-like parts\n      --142.\n\n141b. Flowers not in catkins, either with or without brightly  or\n      petal-like parts --149.\n\n     142a. Leaves 2-ranked, as shown by the arrangement of buds and\n           leaf-scars in two longitudinal rows, so that the third bud is\n           directly over the first --143.\n\n     142b. Leaves and leaf-scars not 2-ranked --146.\n\n143a. Bundle-scars three in each leaf-scar --144.\n\n143b. Bundle-scars several in each leaf-scar 2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     144a. Leaf-buds with only 1-3 visible bud-scales\n                                             10, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     144b. Leaf-buds with more than 3 visible scales --145.\n\n145a. Bark of the branches smooth and dark gray, the larger stems fluted\n      with projecting longitudinal ridges    1b, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 21.\n\n145b. Branches without projecting ridges      4, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     146a. Pith 3-angled                      8, in =BETULACEAE=, p. 22.\n\n     146b. Pith 5-angled                      13b, in =FAGACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n     146c. Pith cylindrical --147.\n\n147a. Visible outer bud-scales 2 or more --148.\n\n147b. Buds with a single visible outer scale\n                                             13, in =SALICACEAE=, p. 20.\n\n     148a. Bundle-scars 3 in each leaf-scar =MYRICACEAE=, p. 20.\n\n     148b. Bundle-scars more than 3 in each leaf-scar\n                                             2b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n149a. Flowers dark red-purple, about 3 cm. wide      =ANONACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n149b. Flowers bright pink, irregular, about 1 cm. wide\n                                            3a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n149c. Flowers white, with 5 conspicuous petals --150.\n\n149d. Flowers greenish or yellowish, small, inconspicuous --152.\n\n     150a. Ovary 1, superior, i. e., in the center of the flower and not\n           attached to surrounding parts       36, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 54.\n\n     150b. Ovary inferior, appearing as a swelling below the calyx at\n           the apex of the pedicel --151.\n\n151a. Flowers in racemes or solitary          42b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n151b. Flowers in flattened or rounded branching clusters\n                                              42a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n     152a. Stems thorny                        1a, in =RUTACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n     152b. Stems not thorny --153.\n\n153a. Bark pleasantly aromatic when crushed; perianth with 6 parts\n      --154.\n\n153b. Bark not pleasantly aromatic; perianth with 4 short lobes\n                                                 =THYMELAEACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     154a. Flowers in sessile lateral clusters\n                                              1a, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     154b. Flowers in peduncled terminal clusters\n                                              1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n                                 --155--\n\n155a. Leaves narrow, needle-like or scale-like, mostly evergreen --54.\n\n155b. Leaves broader, flat or rolled, but not needle-like or scale-like\n      --156.\n\n     156a. Twining or climbing vines --56.\n\n     156b. Not twining or climbing --157.\n\n157a. Leaves opposite --158.\n\n157b. Leaves alternate --165.\n\n     158a. Leaves compound --68.\n\n     158b. Leaves simple --159.\n\n159a. Leaves broad, palmately lobed --160.\n\n159b. Leaves not palmately lobed --161.\n\n     160a. Flowers greenish-yellow, in racemes or panicles\n                                              2a, in =ACERACEAE=, p. 70.\n\n     160b. Flowers white, in rounded or flattened clusters\n                                       22a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 111.\n\n161a. Flowers in close clusters, subtended by four large white\n      petal-like bracts                       4b, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n161b. Flowers small, white, in dense spherical heads\n                                             1a, in =RUBIACEAE=, p. 108.\n\n161c. Flowers not in dense heads, and not subtended by petal-like bracts\n      --162.\n\n     162a. Petals separate from each other --163.\n\n     162b. Petals united with each other --164.\n\n163a. Flowers dark purple-red              1b, in =CELASTRACEAE=. p. 69.\n\n163b. Flowers bright yellow                1a, in =HYPERICACEAE=, p. 73.\n\n163c. Flowers pink-purple; aquatic shrubs    1a, in =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n163d. Flowers white                            5, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n163e. Flowers minute, greenish; twigs usually thorny\n                                             1b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n163f. Flowers small, yellowish; leaves silvery beneath\n                                                  =ELAEAGNACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     164a. Stamens 2                           1a, in =OLEACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n     164b. Stamens 4 or 5               11, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 110.\n\n     164c. Stamens 10                        18a, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n165a. Leaves once-compound --166.\n\n165b. Leaves simple --172.\n\n165c. Leaves twice- or thrice-compound       4a, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     166a. Flowers small, greenish or greenish-yellow --167.\n\n     166b. Flowers conspicuous, white, or brightly  --170.\n\n167a. Stems thorny                             1a, in =RUTACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n167b. Stems not thorny --168.\n\n     168a. Leaflets 3, entire or minutely toothed\n                                               1b, in =RUTACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n     168b. Leaflets 3, conspicuously toothed\n                                          1b, in =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n     168c. Leaflets more than 3 --169.\n\n169a. Leaflets entire except for 1-4 large glandular teeth near their\n      base                                        =SIMARUBACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n169b. Leaflets entire, or toothed for their entire length\n                                                 =ANACARDIACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n     170a. Flowers with a single bright-blue petal\n                                            8a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     170b. Flowers with several petals --171.\n\n171a. Flowers regular                           3, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n171b. Flowers irregular, the upper petal the largest\n                                             4, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     172a. Leaves minute, scale-like, appressed\n                                              2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     172b. Leaves 3-10 mm. long, spreading, completely rolled into a\n           tube                                    =EMPETRACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n     172c. Leaves normal in shape, green in color --173.\n\n173a. Leaves evergreen, as shown by their presence on the older parts of\n      the stem                                4b, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n173b. Leaves deciduous --174.\n\n     174a. Flowers in catkins, without petal-like parts --142.\n\n     174b. Flowers not in catkins, either with or without petal-like\n           parts --175.\n\n175a. Flowers small, inconspicuous, yellowish or greenish in color\n      --176.\n\n175b. Flowers white or , with conspicuous petals --180.\n\n     176a. Leaves broad and palmately lobed; stem thorny\n                                             1a, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     176b. Leaves entire, toothed, or with 2-3 entire lobes; stem not\n           thorny --177.\n\n177a. Flowers in small axillary clusters; foliage not spicy-aromatic\n      --178.\n\n177b. Flowers in clusters terminating last year's twigs; foliage\n      spicy-aromatic                          1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     178a. Petals none; sepals present       2b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     178b. Petals present but small --179.\n\n179a. A stamen in front of each petal        2a, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n179b. A stamen between each two petals           =AQUIFOLIACEAE=, p. 69.\n\n     180a. Petals united with each other; stamens 8-10\n                                              24, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 86.\n\n     180b. Petals separate from each other --181.\n\n181a. Petals 4 --182.\n\n181b. Petals 5 --183.\n\n181c. Petal-like sepals 6; real petals none; foliage spicy-aromatic\n                                              1b, in =LAURACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n181d. Petals 6; sepals also present --187.\n\n     182a. Flowers in late spring or early summer\n                                              2a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n     182b. Flowers in autumn                    =HAMAMELIDACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n183a. Corolla irregular, the upper petal largest\n                                            3b, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n183b. Corolla regular, all petals alike in size and shape --184.\n\n     184a. Stamens 5 --185.\n\n     184b. Stamens 10 or more                  24, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 53.\n\n185a. Flowers in loose racemes or axillary clusters\n                                           2, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n185b. Flowers in branching clusters --186.\n\n     186a. Leaves palmately lobed; stem thorny\n                                             1a, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     186b. Leaves not lobed; stem not thorny\n                                             1b, in =RHAMNACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n187a. Flowers dark red-purple                        =ANONACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n187b. Flowers yellow                      2a, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n\nGROUP 2, UNUSUAL PLANTS\n\n1a. Small brown leafless plants, growing as parasites on the tamarack or\n    black spruce                                  =LORANTHACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n1b. Aquatic plants, with all or most of the leaves submerged, or\n    leafless --2.\n\n1c. Aquatic plants, with the leaves or the whole plant floating on or\n    near the surface --20.\n\n1d. Terrestrial or marsh plants, without floating or submerged leaves\n    --29.\n\n     2a. Submerged aquatics, without leaves --3.\n\n     2b. Submerged aquatics, with the leaves linear or dissected --4.\n\n3a. Flowers showy, yellow or purple          =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n3b Flowers small and inconspicuous, sessile, purplish or greenish\n                                         3a, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n     4a. Leaves linear or lanceolate, not lobed or dissected --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves more or less lobed or dissected --13.\n\n5a. Leaves all basal --6.\n\n5b. Stem-leaves present --7.\n\n     6a. Flowers blue, 1 cm. long or more; leaves cylindrical, blunt,\n         hollow, partitioned lengthwise    1a, in =LOBELIACEAE=, p. 113.\n\n     6b. Flowers yellow; leaves minute       =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n     6c. Flowers white, in clusters; leaves linear-lanceolate, acute,\n         not hollow                           1b, in =ALISMACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n     6d. Flowers greenish, solitary at the end of elongated peduncles;\n         leaves very long and ribbon-like, flat or trough-shape\n                                        1a, in =HYDROCHARITACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n     6e. Flowers minute, whitish or lead-color, in heads\n                                                  =ERIOCAULACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n7a. Leaves alternate --8.\n\n7b. Leaves opposite --10.\n\n7c. Leaves whorled --12.\n\n     8a. Leaves with thin sheathing stipules  1b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     8b. Leaves without stipules --9.\n\n9a. Flowers greenish, in a head                   =SPARGANIACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n9b. Flowers pale yellow                  1b, in =PONTEDERIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n     10a. Leaves serrate                      2b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     10b. Leaves entire --11.\n\n11a. Leaves 2 cm. long or less                 =CALLITRICHACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n11b. Leaves thread-like, 2-8 cm. long         2a, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n11c. Leaves linear to elliptical, more than 2 cm. long\n                                              1b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     12a. Leaves in whorls of 3, abruptly widened at the base\n                                              2b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     12b. Leaves in whorls of 3, widest near the middle\n                                        1b, in =HYDROCHARITACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n     12c. Stems straight and erect, at leaves the flowers emerged;\n          leaves in whorls of 4 or more  2a, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n13a. Leaves with numerous small bladders attached, each bladder 1-3 mm.\n     long                                    =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n13b. Leaves without bladders --14.\n\n     14a. Leaves alternate --15.\n\n     14b. Leaves opposite or whorled --18.\n\n15a. Delicate and rare plants growing attached to stones in running\n     water                                       =PODOSTEMACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n15b. Plants 2 dm. high or more, with roots in mud or sand --16.\n\n     16a. Leaves once-pinnate --17.\n\n     16b. Leaves 2-3 times pinnate        15b, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 81.\n\n     16c. Leaves palmately dissected      1b, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n17a. Taste peppery or mustardy               34, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 45.\n\n17b. Taste not peppery or mustardy       1a, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n     18a. Leaves pinnately compound      3b, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n     18b. Leaves palmately compound --19.\n\n19a. Leaves opposite or in whorls of four 119a, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 123.\n\n19b. Leaves in whorls of 5-12                 =CERATOPHYLLACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n     20a. Plants small, flattened, rounded or ovate, without distinction\n          of stem and leaf; the whole plant floating on or near the\n          surface                                     =LEMNACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n     20b. Plant attached to the soil, with differentiated stem and\n          leaves --21.\n\n21a. Leaves on long slender stalks, which bear also a cluster of slender\n     tubers near the leaf-base; leaves heart-shape\n                                           1b, in =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n21b. Leaf-stalks without a cluster of tubers --22.\n\n     22a. Leaves all basal --23.\n\n     22b. Stem-leaves present --24.\n\n23a. Leaves parallel-veined                   1b, in =ALISMACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n23b. Leaves net-veined                     1b, in =NYMPHAEACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     24a. Leaves opposite or whorled --25.\n\n     24b. Leaves alternate --26.\n\n25a. Leaves less than 2 cm. long               =CALLITRICHACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n25b. Leaves more than 2 cm. long              1b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     26a. Leaves attached by the center to the stalk\n                                           2b, in =NYMPHAEACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     26b. Leaves attached by the margin --27.\n\n27a. Leaves parallel-veined --28.\n\n27b. Leaves net-veined, with a single mid-vein; lanceolate or elliptical\n     in outline                           29b, in =POLYGONACEAE=, p. 28.\n\n     28a. Leaves not over 2 dm. long          1b, in =NAJADACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     28b. Leaves very long and grass-like     14a, in =GRAMINEAE=, p. 5.\n\n29a. Brown, yellow, or white plants, without green color --30.\n\n29b. Plants with normal green color, at least in some parts --33.\n\n     30a. Stemless and leafless plants, consisting of flowers only and\n          partly underground                     4a, in =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n     30b. Stems climbing on other plants 1b, in =CONVOLVULACEAE=, p. 91.\n\n     30c. Stem and flower-stalks erect, not climbing --31.\n\n31a. Corolla regular; stamens 6-12            1a, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n31b. Corolla irregular --32.\n\n     32a. Sepals and petals each 3; flowers in simple racemes\n                                            5a, in =ORCHIDACEAE=, p. 16.\n\n     32b. Sepals 5; corolla of united petals    =OROBANCHACEAE=, p. 106.\n\n33a. Stem thick and fleshy, leafless, thorny         =CACTACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n33b. Stem not thorny --34.\n\n     34a. Leaves none --35.\n\n     34b. Leaves reduced to small scales --40.\n\n     34c. Leaves thick and fleshy --44.\n\n     34d. Leaves hollow --45.\n\n     34e. Leaves small, all basal, bearing large glandular hairs on the\n          upper surface                            =DROSERACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n35a. Stem none, the flowers appearing at or partially beneath the\n     surface of the soil                         4a, in =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n35b. Stem present --36.\n\n     36a. Stem freely branched                2a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n     36b. Stem unbranched, except possibly in the flower-clusters\n          --37.\n\n37a. Flowers greenish or brownish, without obvious  petals --38.\n\n37b. Flowers with conspicuous white or  petals --39.\n\n     38a. Each flower with 6 small chaffy petals\n                                               4, in =JUNCACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n     38b. Petals none; each flower in the axil of a single chaffy bract\n                                              2a, in =CYPERACEAE=, p. 7.\n\n39a. Flowers regular                         34a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 11.\n\n39b. Flowers irregular                     10a, in =ORCHIDACEAE=, p. 16.\n\n     40a. Stem erect, unbranched or with one or two branches only --41.\n\n     40b. Stem freely branched --42.\n\n41a. Plants of moist soil, with opposite scales; corolla regular, with 4\n     petal-like lobes                      1a, in =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n41b. Swamp plants, with a few alternate scales; corolla irregular\n                                             =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n     42a. Leaves numerous and close, concealing the stem\n                                              2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     42b. Leaves spreading, not concealing the stem --43.\n\n43a. Leaf-scales in small clusters; flowers greenish, with 6 petals\n                                              2a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n43b. Leaf-scales distinctly opposite; petals 5, yellow\n                                           7a, in =HYPERICACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     44a. Sepals 2                         3, in =PORTULACACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n     44b. Sepals 4 or 5                           =CRASSULACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n45a. Leaves pitcher-shape, open at the top      =SARRACENIACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n45b. Leaves tubular, closed at the end       37b, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 13.\n\n\nGROUP 3, MONOCOTYLEDONES\n\n1a. Twining plants, with flowers in panicles or racemes\n\n=DIOSCOREACEAE=, p. 14.\n\n1b. Plants with milky juice\n\n13a, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 115.\n\n1c. Plants not twining (some climb by tendrils) and not with milky\n    juice. --2.\n\n     2a. Flowers in close spikes or heads, surrounded or subtended by a\n         green or  bract, the whole resembling a single flower;\n         petals minute or wanting; leaves broad, not grass-like, linear,\n         or sword-shape                                 =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n     2b. Plants with narrow, linear, grass-like, or sword-shape leaves\n         (a few species of Carex have broader, lanceolate to ovate\n         leaves); flowers greenish, yellowish, or brownish, never\n         brightly , and frequently dry or chaffy in texture;\n         perianth small or wanting; individual flowers inconspicuous in\n         size, but sometimes grouped into conspicuous clusters --3.\n\n     2c. Plants with leaves of various widths, but the flowers petaloid,\n         i. e., with a white or , more or less conspicuous\n         perianth, and never chaffy in texture. In a few cases the\n         flowers are greenish, but the size and conspicuousness of the\n         perianth identifies them in this class --9.\n\n3a. Flowers in the axils of dry, membranous or chaffy scales, which are\n    regularly arranged into spikes or spikelets of uniform size and\n    structure, which are variously grouped or clustered; fruit an\n    achene; grasses and sedges, with joined stems and sheathing leaves,\n    or leafless and the stems not jointed --4.\n\n3b. Flowers not subtended individually by dry, membranous, or chaffy\n    scales, and otherwise not agreeing with 3a --5.\n\n     4a. Leaf-sheaths split on the side opposite the leaf; leaves\n         usually 2-ranked, i. e., in 2 longitudinal rows with the third\n         leaf above the first; stems rounded or flat, never triangular,\n         usually hollow                               =GRAMINEAE=, p. 4.\n\n     4b. Leaf-sheaths closed into a continuous tube; leaves usually\n         3-ranked; stems frequently triangular, usually solid\n                                                     =CYPERACEAE=, p. 7.\n\n5a. Flowers in dense spikes --6.\n\n5b. Flowers in heads, racemes, or panicles --7.\n\n     6a. Spike terminal, with pistillate flowers at the base and\n         staminate ones at the apex                   =TYPHACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n     6b. Spike short, apparently lateral, near the apex of the stem\n                                                 3a, in =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n7a. Flowers in globose heads which are arranged in spikes, the lowest\n    heads pistillate, the upper staminate; ovary 1-celled\n                                                  =SPARGANIACEAE=, p. 2.\n\n7b. Flowers in globose woolly heads terminating leafless unbranched\n    stalks                                        =ERIOCAULACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n7c. Flowers in a spike-like raceme; ovaries 3-6, separate or nearly so\n                                                  =JUNCAGINACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n7d. Flowers in heads or panicles, all perfect, not woolly, with one\n    ovary --8.\n\n     8a. Leaves less than 1 cm. wide, or none; divisions of the perianth\n         6                                           =JUNCACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n     8b. Leaves 2 cm. wide or more; petals 5\n                                           2a, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n9a. Flowers regular, with all the petals of approximately the same size\n    and shape --10.\n\n9b. Flowers irregular, with the petals of each flower not of the same\n    size or shape --22.\n\n     10a. Ovaries 3 or more, separate or barely united with each other\n          at the base --11.\n\n     10b. Ovary one in each flower --12.\n\n11a. Ovaries 3-6 in number; flowers in spikes or racemes; leaves linear\n                                                  =JUNCAGINACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n11b. Ovaries more than 6                             =ALISMACEAE=, p. 3.\n\n     12a. Flowers or flower-clusters lateral, axillary or apparently so\n         --13.\n\n     12b. Flowers or flower-clusters terminal or on leafless stalks\n         --14.\n\n13a. Leaves minute and scale-like; flowers greenish-yellow\n                                              2a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n13b. Leaves linear, grass-like                3b, in =IRIDACEAE=, p. 13.\n\n13c. Leaves lanceolate or broader, not grass-like or scale-like\n                                              2b, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n     14a. Divisions of the perianth 5-12 cm. long --15.\n\n     14b. Divisions of the perianth less than 5 cm. long --16.\n\n15a. Flowers blue, or blue marked with yellow 1a, in =IRIDACEAE=, p. 15.\n\n15b. Flowers not blue                        12a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 11.\n\n     16a. Flowers solitary --17.\n\n     16b. Flowers 2 or more, in some kind of a cluster --18.\n\n17a. Leaves 2, broadly heart-shape, basal, on long stalks\n                                       1b, in =ARISTOLOCHIACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n17b. Leaves not heart-shape 20,               20, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 12.\n\n     18a. Divisions of the perianth (4 to 6) all essentially alike --19.\n\n     18b. Perianth differentiated into sepals and 2 or 3  petals\n          --21.\n\n19a. Flowers in umbels --20.\n\n19b. Flowers in dense round heads; petals 5\n                                           2a, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n19c. Flowers in spikes, racemes, or panicles  38, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 13.\n\n     20a. Ovary inferior, appearing below the perianth as a swelling at\n          the apex of the stalk; flowers bright yellow; leaves linear\n                                                =AMARYLLIDACEAE=, p. 14.\n\n     20b. Ovary inferior; flowers blue or white, terminating a flattened\n          winged leafless flower-stalk        3a, in =IRIDACEAE=, p. 15.\n\n     20c. Ovary superior, i. e., in the center of the flower and\n          separate from the perianth          31, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 13.\n\n21a. Flowers in dense heads, yellow, 1 cm. wide or smaller\n                                                     =XYRIDACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n21b. Flowers in umbels, blue or white, 2 cm. wide or larger\n                                                  =COMMELINACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n     22a. Flowers blue; ovary superior (defined under _20c_); stamens\n          distinct from the other parts of the flower --23.\n\n     22b. Ovary inferior (defined under _20a_); floral structure\n          complex; stamens attached to other parts of the flower and not\n          resembling ordinary stamens in form or structure\n                                                   =ORCHIDACEAE=, p. 15.\n\n23a. Leaves triangular-heart-shape at base; marsh plants\n                                         1a, in =PONTEDERIACEAE=, p. 10.\n\n23b. Leaves not heart-shape at base               =COMMELINACEAE=, p. 9.\n\n\nGROUP 4, DICOTYLEDONES\n\n1a. Foliage leaves all or principally basal; flower-stalk either\n    completely leafless, or bearing a single pair of opposite leaves\n    only. Bracts and scale-leaves are not considered foliage leaves --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves present on the stem, either one or more in number, and\n    not limited to a single opposite pair --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves compound --7.\n\n     2b. Leaves simple --18.\n\n3a. Stem-leaves all or chiefly opposite or whorled (the bracts of the\n    flower clusters may be alternate) --4.\n\n3b. Stem-leaves all or chiefly alternate --5.\n\n     4a. Flowers small and inconspicuous, the perianth none or greenish\n         or chaffy, and never petal-like in appearance --50.\n\n     4b. Flowers with a white or  petal-like perianth --66.\n\n5a. Flowers small and inconspicuous, without any white or \n    petal-like perianth --118.\n\n5b. Flowers large or small, but with a white or  petal-like\n    perianth --6.\n\n     6a. Flowers small, not exceeding 3 mm. in length or breadth --144.\n\n     6b. Flowers larger, more than 3 mm. in length or breadth --166.\n\n                                 --7--\n\n7a. Leaves twice to three times compound or dissected --8.\n\n7b. Leaves once-compound --11.\n\n     8a. Flowers in racemes                 2b, in =FUMARIACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     8b. Flowers in umbels --9.\n\n9a. Flowers about 3 mm. wide, white or greenish-white --10.\n\n9b. Flowers 10-20 mm. wide, conspicuous  45b, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 39.\n\n     10a. Leaflets 5-15 cm. long             5b, in =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     10b. Leaflets not over 2 cm. long    16a, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 81.\n\n11a. Leaflets 2                           3a, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n11b. Leaflets three or more --12.\n\n     12a. Leaflets entire or very finely toothed --13.\n\n     12b. Leaflets coarsely toothed or lobed --15.\n\n13a. Flowers irregular, in dense head-like umbels\n                                           37a, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 61.\n\n13b. Flowers consisting of a greenish or purplish bract wholly or partly\n     enclosing a fleshy spike                     2, in =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n13c. Flowers regular, solitary or in loose clusters --14.\n\n     14a. Leaflets reverse heart-shape, not over 2 cm. long\n                                                   =OXALIDACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     14b. Leaflets 4-10 cm. long           1c, in =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n15a. Flowers with  or white petals and green or  sepals\n     --16.\n\n15b. Flowers with one kind of perianth only (calyx), with broad and\n     petal-like parts                     32, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 38.\n\n15c. Flowers with white petal-like sepals and small inconspicuous petals\n                                         38b, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 39.\n\n     16a. Petals and sepals each 4           31, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 44.\n\n     16b. Petals and sepals each 5 or more --17.\n\n17a. Leaves with stipules                             =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n17b. Leaves without stipules             23b, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 37.\n\n                                 --18--\n\n     18a. Stem-leaves a single opposite pair (basal leaves may also be\n          present) --19.\n\n     18b. Stem-leaves none --23.\n\n19a. Leaves entire --20.\n\n19b. Leaves toothed or lobed --21.\n\n     20a. Flowers solitary; leaves broadly kidney-shape\n                                              =ARISTOLOCHIACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n     20b. Flowers in racemes; leaves linear or lanceolate\n                                                 =PORTULACACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n21a. Flowers in racemes; petals deeply toothed\n                                         23b, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n21b. Flowers solitary or few in a cluster; petals entire or nearly so\n     --22.\n\n     22a. Petals                                 5 =GERANIACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     22b. Petals 6 or more                2b, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n23a. Flowers or flower-clusters sessile, at or partly beneath the\n     surface of the ground                       4a, in =ARACEAE=, p. 8.\n\n23b. Flowers or flower-heads solitary at the ends of the flower-stalks\n     --24.\n\n23b. Flowers or flower-heads numerous or several on each flower-stalk\n     --38.\n\n     24a. Flowers yellow --25.\n\n     24b. Flowers not yellow --29.\n\n25a. Juice milky                            16, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 115.\n\n25b. Juice not milky --26.\n\n     26a. Aquatic or mud plants, with large entire leaves 1-4 dm. wide\n                                                  =NYMPHAEACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     26b. Land plants, with smaller or lobed leaves --27.\n\n27a. Flower-stalk scaly                    110, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 122.\n\n27b. Flower-stalk bare or with 1 to 2 minute bracts --28.\n\n     28a. Flowers regular                 10, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 36.\n\n     28b. Flowers irregular, with a spur      3a, in =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n29a. Flowers obviously irregular, with a spur --30.\n\n29b. Flowers regular or nearly so, without a spur --31.\n\n     30a. Leaves sessile or nearly so; stamens 2\n                                             =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n     30b. Leaves petioled; stamens 5                 =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n31a. Flowers 3 mm. wide or smaller; leaves thread-like\n                                     16a, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 103.\n\n31b. Flowers 6 mm. wide or larger --32.\n\n     32a. Ovary 1 --33.\n\n     32b. Ovaries numerous --37.\n\n33a. Leaves lobed or cleft --34.\n\n33b. Leaves entire or toothed --35.\n\n     34a. Leaves deeply 2-cleft; stamens 8\n                                          3a, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n     34b. Leaf 1, palmately lobed; stamens numerous\n                                           1a, in =PAPAVERACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n35a. Flowers dull red =ARISTOLOCHIACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n35b. Flowers white or pinkish --36.\n\n     36a. Leaves entire; stamens with good anthers 5\n                                          13, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 50.\n\n     36b. Leaves minutely toothed; stamens 8-10\n                                             14a, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n37a. Leaves lobed or divided                     =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n37b. Leaves crenate or toothed 64a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 56.\n\n                                --38--\n\n     38a. Flowers of the composite type, with several or many small\n          flowerets closely aggregated into a dense head surrounded by a\n          calyx-like involucre of small bracts\n                                             10, in =COMPOSITAE=. p. 114.\n\n     38b. Flowers separate; variously clustered, but never crowded into\n          involucred heads --39.\n\n39a. Flowers in dense close spikes --40.\n\n39b. Flowers in open loose clusters --42.\n\n     40a. Flower-stalk leafless below the spike\n                                               =PLANTAGINACEAE=, p. 107.\n\n     40b. Flower-stalk with several bracts --41.\n\n41a. Leaves entire                          9c, in =ORCHIDACEAE=, p. 16.\n\n41b. Leaves toothed                   6a, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 102.\n\n     42a. Flowers in umbels --43.\n\n     42b. Flowers in racemes, panicles, flat-topped clusters, or merely\n          1 or 2 --45.\n\n43a. Leaves almost round, peltate, palmately veined\n                                           3a, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n43b. Leaves at least twice as long as broad, with a single mid-vein\n     --44.\n\n     44a. Stamens 5                                =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n     44b. Stamens 10                          15, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n45a. Leaves cylindrical, hollow, obtuse.   1a, in =LOBELIACEAE=, p. 113.\n\n45b. Leaves beset on the upper side with long glandular hairs; bog plant\n     with flowers in racemes                       =DROSERACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n45c. Leaves flat, pubescent or smooth, but not with long glandular hairs\n     --46.\n\n     46a. Sepals and petals each 4           53, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 46.\n\n     46b. Sepals and petals each 5 --47.\n\n     46c. Sepals 6; petals none; flowers minute, green; leaves\n          frequently lobed at the base      4, in =POLYGONACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n47a. Petals united with each other in an irregular corolla\n                                             =LENTIBULARIACEAE=, p. 105.\n\n47b. Petals separate from each other --48.\n\n     48a. Stamens 10; style 1                        =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n     48b. Stamens 5 or 10; styles 2              =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n     48c. Stamens and pistils each very numerous --49.\n\n49a. Flowers white                            64a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 56.\n\n49b. Flowers yellow                      13a, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 36.\n\n                                 --50--\n\n     50a. Leaves compound or deeply lobed --51.\n\n     50b. Leaves entire or toothed --54.\n\n51a. Flowers in axillary racemes, spikes, or panicles\n                                                    =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n51b. Flowers terminal, or in terminal clusters --52.\n\n     52a. Flowers in umbels; leaves palmately compound\n                                                    =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     52b. Flowers in racemes or spikes, or solitary --53.\n\n53a. Leaves deeply pinnatifid; swamp plants with flowers in spikes or\n     solitary                                   =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n53b. Leaves lobed, or irregularly pinnately cut or dissected; weedy\n     plants with flowers in racemes          2, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 114.\n\n     54a. Juice milky                      3, in =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 67.\n\n     54b. Juice not milky or  --55.\n\n55a. Leaves whorled --56.\n\n55b. Leaves all opposite --58.\n\n     56a. Aquatic or mud plants with erect stems\n                                         2a, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n     56b. Prostrate weedy terrestrial plants         =AIZOACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n     56c. Erect or ascending terrestrial plants --57.\n\n57a. Leaves more than 2.5 cm. long            4a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n57b. Leaves 2 cm. long or less              3a, in =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n     58a. Flowers in terminal or axillary spikes, racemes, or other\n          clusters --59.\n\n     58b. Flowers solitary or few in the axils of the leaves --61.\n\n59a. Leaves less than 5 mm. long           1a, in =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n59b. Leaves more than 2 cm. long --60.\n\n     60a. Inflorescence chiefly terminal, panicled\n                                             2, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 114.\n\n     60b. Inflorescence chiefly axillary            =URTICACEAE=, p. 23.\n\n61a. Flowers on long pedicels            2, in =CARYOPHYLLACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n61b. Flowers on short pedicels or sessile --62.\n\n     62a. Stem erect, repeatedly branched; leaves linear to oblong\n                                                 =ILLECEBRACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n     62b. Stem decumbent or prostrate --63.\n\n63a. Leaves round, ovate, or kidney-shape, rounded at the base, crenate\n     or lobed                            12a, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 50.\n\n63b. Leaves of a narrower shape, entire, tapering toward the base --64.\n\n     64a. Principal leaves 2-3 cm. long      1a, in =ONAGRACEAE=, p. 78.\n\n     64b. Principal leaves 1 cm. long or less --65.\n\n65a. Petals present                                =ELATINACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n65b. Petals none                               =CALLITRICHACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n                                 --66--\n\n     66a. Plants of the composite type, with several or many small\n          flowerets closely aggregated into a dense head surrounded or\n          subtended by a calyx-like involucre of small bracts --67.\n\n     66b. Flowers solitary or variously clustered, but not in involucred\n          heads --70.\n\n67a. Involucre of 4 conspicuous white bracts, much larger than the small\n     flower-cluster                           4a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n67b. Involucral bracts green or somewhat  --68.\n\n     68a. Stem more or less prickly               =DIPSACACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n68b. Stem and leaves not prickly --69.\n\n69a. Stem square; foliage aromatic when crushed       =LABIATAE=, p. 95.\n\n69b. Stem not square; foliage not with the odor of mint\n                                                   =COMPOSITAE=, p. 113.\n\n     70a. The conspicuous portion of the perianth[1] composed of\n          separate parts --71.\n\n     70b. The conspicuous portion of the perianth[1] composed of united\n          parts --97.\n\n71a. Stem-leaves compound, or cleft to the very base --72.\n\n71b. Stem-leaves simple --78.\n\n     72a. Stamens more than 10 in each flower --73.\n\n     72b. Stamens 5-10 in each flower --75.\n\n73a. Ovary 1 in each flower                2a, in =PAPAVERACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n73b. Ovaries several in each flower --74.\n\n     74a. Leaves pinnately compound           68a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 57.\n\n     74b. Leaves palmately compound              =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n75a. Stamens 6                               31, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 44.\n\n75b. Stamens 5 or 10 --76.\n\n     76a. Leaflets reverse heart-shape; flowers yellow\n                                                   =OXALIDACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     76b. Leaflets not reverse heart-shape; flowers white, greenish, or\n          pink --77.\n\n77a. Flowers greenish or white, about 2 mm. broad   =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n77b. Flowers 5 mm. broad or larger                 =GERANIACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     78a. Juice milky --79.\n\n     78b. Juice not milky --80.\n\n79a. A 3-lobed ovary with 3 short styles visible in some of the flowers\n                                                 =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 66.\n\n79b. Ovaries 2 in the center of each flower (sometimes concealed by\n     other organs); sepals and petals each 5 --104.\n\n     80a. Perianth with one circle of parts only --81.\n\n     80b. Each flower with both calyx and corolla --82.\n\n81a. Stem prostrate; flowers only 2 mm. broad        =AIZOACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n81b. Stem erect; flowers at least 20 mm. wide 4a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n     82a. Petals 2 or 4 --83.\n\n     82b. Petals 3                             22, in=LILIACEAE=, p. 12.\n\n     82c. Petals 5 or 6 --84.\n\n83a. Leaves with 3-5 principal veins             =MELASTOMACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n83b. Leaves with 1 principal mid-vein               =ONAGRACEAE=, p. 78.\n\n     84a. Leaves palmately lobed --85.\n\n     84b. Leaves entire or toothed, or with 1-2 small lobes near the\n          base only --86.\n\n85a. Petals entire or notched at the end           =GERANIACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n85b. Petals conspicuously fringed        23b, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n     86a. Ovary 1 --87.\n\n     86b. Ovaries 2, surrounded and concealed by other organs\n                                                =ASCLEPIADACEAE=, p. 90.\n\n     86c. Ovaries 4-5                      2b, in =CRASSULACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n87a. Leaves dotted with translucent dots (easily seen when the leaf is\n     held to the light)                           =HYPERICACEAE=, p. 73.\n\n87b. Leaves not dotted with translucent dots --88.\n\n     88a. Leaves only 1-3 mm. long, closely appressed and concealing the\n          stem                                2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     88b. Leaves larger, not concealing the stem --89.\n\n89a. Style 1 or none --90.\n\n89b. Styles 2 to 7 --94.\n\n     90a. Stamens 5 --91.\n\n     90b. Stamens 10 --92.\n\n     90c. Stamens neither 5 nor 10 --93.\n\n91a. Flowers blue, sessile in terminal spikes with leaf-like bracts\n                                                    =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n91b. Flowers not in terminal bracted spikes        =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n     92a. Leaves entire                             =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     92b. Leaves toothed or crenate                  =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n93a. Flowers irregular; petals 3                  =POLYGALACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n93b. Flowers regular; petals 5 or more              =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n     94a. Sepals 2, partly attached to the ovary =PORTULACACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n     94b. Sepals 5, free from the ovary --95.\n\n95a. Stamens 5 --96.\n\n95b. Stamens not 5                             =CARYOPHYLLACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n     96a. Flowers blue or yellow                      =LINACEAE=, p. 63.\n\n     96b. Flowers white or pinkish             =CARYOPHYLLACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n                                 --97--\n\n97a. Perianth with but one circle of floral leaves --98.\n\n97b. Perianth consisting of both calyx and corolla --101.\n\n     98a. Flowers small, in dense heads subtended by conspicuous bracts\n          --99.\n\n     98b. Flowers 2-5, in a  spreading 5-lobed involucre\n                                                 =NYCTAGINACEAE=, p. 31.\n\n     98c. Flowers in various sorts of clusters or solitary, but never in\n          heads with a conspicuous involucre --100.\n\n99a. Bracts 4, white and conspicuous; stem not thorny\n                                              4a, in =CORNACEAE=, p. 83.\n\n99b. Bracts green; stem thorny                    =DIPSACACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n     100a. Stamens 3                            =VALERIANACEAE=, p. 111.\n\n     100b. Stamens 4 or 5                           =RUBIACEAE=, p. 108.\n\n101a. Anthers more numerous than the lobes of the corolla --102.\n\n101b. Anthers just as many as the lobes of the corolla --103.\n\n101c. Anthers fewer than the lobes of the corolla --110.\n\n     102a. Leaves simple                          =POLYGALACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n     102b. Leaves compound with 3 leaflets         =OXALIDACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     102c. Leaves finely dissected; stems climbing\n                                            2a, in =FUMARIACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n103a. Ovaries 2 --104.\n\n103b. Ovary 1, but very deeply 4-lobed, with a single style\n                                                      =LABIATAE=, p. 95.\n\n103c. Ovary 1, not deeply lobed --105.\n\n     104a. Stamens united, surrounding and more or less concealing the\n           ovaries, and not resembling ordinary stamens\n                                                =ASCLEPIADACEAE=, p. 90.\n\n     104b. Stamens separate, of ordinary structure =APOCYNACEAE=, p. 90.\n\n105a. Ovary inferior, appearing as a swelling below the calyx at the\n      apex of the pedicel --106.\n\n105b. Ovary superior, located in the center of the flower --107.\n\n     106a. Corolla 3-4-lobed                        =RUBIACEAE=, p. 108.\n\n     106b. Corolla 5-lobed              3b, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 109.\n\n107a. Leaves toothed or deeply cut                 =VERBENACEAE=, p. 99.\n\n107b. Leaves entire --108.\n\n     108a. A stamen in front of the middle of each petal\n                                                   =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n     108b. Stamens located between the petals or lobes of the corolla,\n           or else so far down in the tubular corolla that their\n           position is not easily ascertained --109.\n\n109a. Corolla salver-form, with a very slender tube, and abruptly\n      spreading lobes                            =POLEMONIACEAE=, p. 92.\n\n109b. Corolla salver-form, with a wide tube and fringed blue petals\n                                                  =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n109c. Corolla rotate, funnel-form, or bell-shape  =GENTIANACEAE=, p. 88.\n\n     110a. Ovary deeply 4-lobed, appearing like 4 separate ovaries;\n           style 1                                    =LABIATAE=, p. 95.\n\n     110b. Ovary not 4-lobed --111.\n\n111a. Stamens 2 --112.\n\n111b. Stamens 3                                 =VALERIANACEAE=, p. 111.\n\n111c. Stamens 4 --113.\n\n     112a. Flowers in dense heads          1a, in =ACANTHACEAE=, p. 107.\n\n     112b. Flowers solitary or in loose clusters\n                                             =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n113a. Corolla distinctly 2-lipped and irregular --114.\n\n113b. Corolla not distinctly 2-lipped, its 5 lobes all alike or nearly\n      so --115.\n\n     114a. Calyx 2-lipped; the upper lip with 3 awl-shape teeth, the\n           lower with 2 short teeth; flowers in slender terminal spikes\n                                                   =PHRYMACEAE=, p. 107.\n\n     114b. Calyx not obviously 2-lipped, its teeth equal or nearly so\n                                             =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n115a. Flowers sessile or nearly so, in spikes --116.\n\n115b. Flowers in nodding pairs at the top of a slender stalk\n                                        3a, in =CAPRIFOLIACEAE=, p. 109.\n\n115c. Flowers solitary or in clusters; not in spikes or nodding pairs\n      --117.\n\n     116a. Corolla not over 1 cm. long             =VERBENACEAE=, p. 99.\n\n     116b. Corolla 1.5 cm. long or more      =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n117a. Calyx-lobes 15-25 mm. long; flowers blue, 3-5 cm. long; calyx\n      without an obvious tube               2, in =ACANTHACEAE=, p. 107.\n\n117b. Calyx-lobes united below into an obvious calyx-tube\n                                             =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n                                 --118--\n\n     118a. Leaves deeply lobed, compound, or dissected --119.\n\n     118b. Leaves simple and not deeply lobed --129.\n\n119a. Leaves once-pinnately compound or lobed --120.\n\n119b. Leaves once-palmately compound or lobed --124.\n\n119c. Leaves dissected or 2-3 times compound --125.\n\n     120a. Leaves merely lobed --121.\n\n     120b. Leaves actually compound --123.\n\n121a. Flowers axillary; marsh or swamp plants   =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n121b. Flowers in terminal clusters --122.\n\n     122a. Stamens 2-6; taste mustard-like  52b, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 46.\n\n     122b. Stamens 10 or more                       =RESEDACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n123a. Leaflets entire                            =LIMNANTHACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n123b. Leaflets serrate                        70a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 57.\n\n     124a. Flowers solitary              31a, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 38.\n\n     124b. Flowers in dense terminal umbels or heads\n                                                  =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n     124c. Flowers in terminal racemes      2a, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 114.\n\n     124d. Flowers in axillary spikes or panicles\n                                             9b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n125a. Leaves merely dissected, not truly compound with distinct leaflets\n      --126.\n\n125b. Leaves truly compound, with distinct petiolate leaflets --127.\n\n     126a. Flowers in axillary clusters         =CHENOPODIACEAE=, p. 28.\n\n     126b. Flowers in terminal clusters            =COMPOSITAE=, p. 113.\n\n127a. Stamens 5; flowers in umbels --128.\n\n127b. Stamens 6; flowers in small clusters\n                                          3b, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n127c. Stamens many; flowers in racemes or panicles\n                                                 =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     128a. Styles 5                                 =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n     128b. Styles 2                               =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n129a. Flowers in dense cottony heads; plants more or less white-woolly\n                                            79, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 120.\n\n129b. Pistillate flowers in an ovoid spiny involucre, ripening into a\n      bur                                   3a, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 114.\n\n129c. Flowers minute, subtended by palmately cleft axillary bracts\n                                          1a, in =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 66.\n\n129d. Plants without any of the preceding characters --130.\n\n     130a. Plants with milky or  juice\n                                          10, in =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 67.\n\n     130b. Plants with tendrils, at least on the upper leaves\n                                              4a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 11.\n\n     130c. Plants of nettle-like character, with stinging hairs\n                                             8b, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n     130d. Plants with sheathing stipules, surrounding the stem above\n           the base of each leaf                  =POLYGONACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n     130e. Plants with smooth, pale, juicy, almost translucent stems\n                                            12a, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n     130f. Plants without any of the preceding structures or habits\n           --131.\n\n131a. Flowers axillary, solitary or in few-flowered clusters --132.\n\n131b. Flowers in terminal, or terminal and axillary clusters --138.\n\n     132a. Leaves linear                        =CHENOPODIACEAE=, p. 28.\n\n     132b. Leaves of a broader shape than linear --133.\n\n133a. Flower-clusters with bracts as long as or longer than the flowers\n      --134.\n\n133b. Flowers without conspicuous bracts --135.\n\n     134a. Leaves broadest below the middle  8a, in =URTICACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n     134b. Leaves broadest above the middle\n                                           2, in =AMARANTHACEAE=, p. 30.\n\n135a. Principal leaves 3 cm. long or more --136.\n\n135b. Principal leaves 2.5 cm. long or less --137.\n\n     136a. Flowers nodding in the axils of the leaves\n                                              1a, in =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n     136b. Flowers erect in the axils        2a, in =ONAGRACEAE=, p. 78.\n\n137a. Leaves narrowly oblong             1a, in =HALORAGIDACEAE=, p. 79.\n\n137b. Leaves roundish and somewhat heart-shape\n                                         12a, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 50.\n\n     138a. Flowers in racemes or simple spikes --139.\n\n     138b. Flowers in panicles or other branched clusters --141.\n\n139a. Leaves toothed or lobed               52b, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 46.\n\n139b. Leaves entire --140.\n\n     140a. Flowers sessile; leaves heart-shape      =PIPERACEAE=, p. 19.\n\n     140b. Flowers pedicelled; leaves obovate\n                                            8b, in =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n141a. Individual flowers distinct from each other, on pedicels --142.\n\n141b. Individual flowers crowded in close clusters, or separate and\n      sessile --143.\n\n     142a. Leaves finely serrate           3b, in =CRASSULACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n     142b. Leaves entire                      1b, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n143a. Flower-clusters mingled with sharp-pointed bracts\n                                                 =AMARANTHACEAE=, p. 30.\n\n143b. Flower-clusters without bracts, or (rarely) with bracts which are\n      not sharp-pointed                         =CHENOPODIACEAE=, p. 28.\n\n                                 --144--\n\n     144a. Juice not milky --145.\n\n     144b. Juice milky; apparent flowers consisting of a few white or\n            petal-like bracts, inclosing a few inconspicuous\n           flowers without petals. In some of them a 3-lobed ovary with\n           3 styles may be plainly seen          =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 66.\n\n145a. Plants of the composite type, with several or many small flowerets\n      closely aggregated into a dense head subtended by a calyx-like\n      involucre of small bracts --146.\n\n145b. Flowers solitary or in clusters, but not in involucred heads\n      --147.\n\n     146a. Leaves compound with 3 leaflets; stipules present\n                                                   =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     146b. Stipules none                           =COMPOSITAE=, p. 113.\n\n147a. Leaves compound or deeply lobed --148.\n\n147b. Leaves simple and not deeply lobed --154.\n\n     148a. Flowers irregular                       =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     148b. Flowers regular --149.\n\n149a. Petals 3                                   =LIMNANTHACEAE=, p. 68.\n\n149b. Petals 4 --150.\n\n149c. Petals 5 or more --151.\n\n     150a. Stamens 4                          70a, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 57.\n\n     150b. Stamens 6                                =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 42.\n\n     150c. Stamens numerous               43, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 39.\n\n151a. Flowers in heads or umbels --152.\n\n151b. Flowers in slender spikes or racemes --153.\n\n     152a. Styles 2                               =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n     152b. Styles 5                                 =ARALIACEAE=, p. 80.\n\n153a. Leaves ternately compound           43, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 39.\n\n153b. Leaves once-pinnately compound          50b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n     154a. Flowers irregular --155.\n\n     154b. Flowers regular --156.\n\n155a. Stamens 2                      40b, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 104.\n\n155b. Stamens 5 or 10                            =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n155c. Stamens 6 or 8                              =POLYGALACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n     156a. With sheathing stipules surrounding the stem at the base of\n           each leaf                              =POLYGONACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n     156b. Stipules not encircling the stem, or none --157.\n\n157a. Petals 3                                       =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n157b. Petals 4 --158.\n\n157c. Petals 5 --161.\n\n     158a. Stamens 2 --159.\n\n     158b. Stamens 6                                =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 42.\n\n     158c. Stamens 8 --160.\n\n159a. Corolla perfectly regular; flowers in terminal clusters without\n      bracts, becoming racemes; taste peppery\n                                            52a, in =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 46.\n\n159b. Corolla slightly irregular; flowers in bracted clusters, or\n      axillary; taste not peppery    40b, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 104.\n\n     160a. Delicate trailing evergreen, with flowers solitary in the\n           axils and nearly or quite hidden beneath the leaves\n                                             22b, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n     160b. Erect or nearly so; flowers in terminal clusters\n                                            12b, in =ONAGRACEAE=, p. 78.\n\n161a. Leaves sword-shape, finely parallel-veined, with bristly margins\n                                           2a, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n161b. Leaves not sword-shape --162.\n\n     162a. Leaves toothed or lobed --163.\n\n     162b. Leaves entire --164.\n\n163a. Stems creeping                       2b, in =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n163b. Stems erect or nearly so                   =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n     164a. Flowers in open panicles; leaves principally basal\n                                                 =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n     164b. Flowers in rounded or flattened clusters; leaves principally\n     on the stem                                   =SANTALACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n\n164c. Flowers in racemes, which become elongated at maturity --165.\n\n165a. Foliage glabrous                      8b, in =PRIMULACEAE=, p. 87.\n\n165b. Foliage pubescent                           =BORAGINACEAE=, p. 93.\n\n                                 --166--\n\n     166a. Juice milky or  --167.\n\n     166b. Juice watery, not  --172.\n\n167a. Apparent flowers consisting of a few petal-like bracts, inclosing\n      a few inconspicuous flowers without petals. In some of them a\n      3-lobed ovary with 3 styles may be seen\n                                                 =EUPHORBIACEAE=, p. 66.\n\n167b. Plants of the composite type, with several or many small flowerets\n      closely aggregated in dense heads subtended by a calyx-like\n      involucre of small bracts             11, in =COMPOSITAE=, p. 115.\n\n167c. Flowers never aggregated in involucred clusters resembling a\n      single flower --168.\n\n     168a. Corolla very irregular; stamens protruding\n                                                  =LOBELIACEAE=, p. 113.\n\n     168b. Corolla regular --169.\n\n169a. Stamens with ordinary visible anthers; ovary 1 --170.\n\n169b. Stamens so grown together and to the stigma as to be almost\n      unrecognizable; ovaries 2                 =ASCLEPIADACEAE=, p. 90.\n\n     170a. Petals separate                        =PAPAVERACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n     170b. Petals united --171.\n\n171a. Stamens attached to the tube of the corolla\n                                                =CONVOLVULACEAE=, p. 91.\n\n171b. Stamens attached at the very base of the corolla\n                                                =CAMPANULACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n     172a. Plants of the composite type, with several or many small\n           flowerets closely aggregated into dense heads subtended by a\n           calyx-like involucre of small bracts --173.\n\n     172b. Flowers solitary or clustered, but not in involucred heads\n           --174.\n\n173a. True composites, without a normal calyx      =COMPOSITAE=, p. 113.\n\n173b. A normal calyx with each floweret; leaves compound with 3 leaflets\n                                                   =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n     174a. Flowers irregular, i. e., the conspicuous lobes of the\n           perianth unlike in size or shape --175.\n\n     174b. Flowers regular --185.\n\n175a. Stamens 2 or 4                         =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n175b. Stamens 5 --176.\n\n175c. Stamens 6 --181.\n\n175d. Stamens 8; leaves simple                    =POLYGALACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n175e. Stamens 10; leaves usually compound          =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 58.\n\n175f. Stamens more than 10 --183.\n\n     176a. Petals separate --177.\n\n     176b. Petals united --179.\n\n177a. Flowers greenish or purplish, in a panicle =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n177b. Flowers white or purplish, in compound umbels\n                                                  =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n177c. Flowers solitary, or in few-flowered clusters --178.\n\n     178a. Flowers blue, yellow, or white, in spring =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n     178b. Flowers red-orange or yellow, in summer\n                                                 =BALSAMINACEAE=, p. 71.\n\n     178c. Flowers small and greenish, in spring\n                                              1a, in =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n179a. Anthers united; stamens protruding from the very irregular corolla\n                                                  =LOBELIACEAE=, p. 113.\n\n179b. Anthers separate; corolla almost regular --180.\n\n     180a. Corolla rotate; some or all filaments hairy\n                                       2, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n     180b. Corolla funnel-form, dull yellow and purple; filaments not\n           hairy                           12a, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n     180c. Corolla funnel-form, blue or violet; filaments not hairy\n                                           7b, in =BORAGINACEAE=, p. 94.\n\n181a. Leaves compound or dissected                 =FUMARIACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n181b. Leaves simple --182.\n\n     182a. Flowers solitary                   =ARISTOLOCHIACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n     182b. Flowers in spikes, heads, or racemes   =POLYGALACEAE=, p. 65.\n\n183a. Leaves truly compound --184.\n\n183b. Leaves palmately cleft; flowers 15 mm. wide or larger\n                                          6a, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 36.\n\n183c. Leaves irregularly cleft; flowers about 5 mm. wide\n                                                    =RESEDACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n     184a. Petals prolonged backward into hollow spurs\n                                          6b, in =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 36.\n\n     184b. Petals not prolonged into spurs       =CAPPARIDACEAE=, p. 47.\n\n                                 --185--\n\n185a. Perianth consisting of one circle of parts only (usually\n      considered to be the calyx) --186.\n\n185b. Perianth consisting of both calyx and corolla --192.\n\n     186a. Leaves with sheathing stipules encircling the stem above the\n           base of every leaf                     =POLYGONACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n     186b. Leaves without sheathing stipules --187.\n\n187a. Leaves entire --188.\n\n187b. Leaves toothed, lobed, or compound --190.\n\n     188a. Stamens 5                               =SANTALACEAE=, p. 24.\n\n     188b. Stamens 6 --189.\n\n     188c. Stamens 10                           =PHYTOLACCACEAE=, p. 30.\n\n189a. Perianth-lobes 3; perianth-tube curved  =ARISTOLOCHIACEAE=, p. 25.\n\n189b. Perianth-lobes 6, spreading             4a, in =LILIACEAE=, p. 11.\n\n     190a. Stamens 5                              =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n     190b. Stamens 6 --191.\n\n     190c. Stamens more than 6                   =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n191a. Climbing plant with heart-shape perianth\n                                            2a, in =FUMARIACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n191b. Erect plant, with spreading perianth\n                                          3b, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n     192a. Corolla composed of united petals --193.\n\n     192b. Corolla composed of separate petals --208.\n\n193a. Stamens 2 or 4                         =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n193b. Stamens 3; climbing vines                 =CUCURBITACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n193c. Stamens 5 --194.\n\n193d. Stamens 6                             2a, in =FUMARIACEAE=, p. 41.\n\n193e. Stamens 8                              22b, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 85.\n\n193f. Stamens 10 --207.\n\n193g. Stamens very numerous                          =MALVACEAE=, p. 72.\n\n     194a. Ovaries 2; flowers orange-red, in umbels\n                                         7a, in =ASCLEPIADACEAE=, p. 91.\n\n     194b. Ovary 1, deeply 4-lobed; flowers in racemes\n                                                  =BORAGINACEAE=, p. 93.\n\n     194c. Ovary 1, not deeply lobed --195.\n\n195a. Climbing or scrambling vines --196.\n\n195b. Not climbing or scrambling --198.\n\n     196a. Flowers about 1 cm. wide --197.\n\n     196b. Flowers 2-8 cm. wide                 =CONVOLVULACEAE=, p. 91.\n\n197a. Leaves 1 cm. wide or less          2b, in =CAMPANULACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n197b. Leaves 2 cm. wide or more             4a, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n     198a. Flowers solitary, either terminal or axillary --199.\n\n     198b. Flowers in terminal clusters --201.\n\n199a. Calyx concealed by 2 bracts               =CONVOLVULACEAE=, p. 91.\n\n199b. Calyx not completely concealed by bracts --200.\n\n     200a. Ovary inferior, appearing as a swelling below the calyx at\n           the base of the flower, 3-celled; stigma 3-lobed\n                                                =CAMPANULACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n     200b. Ovary superior, located in the center of the flower\n                                                   =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n201a. Some or all filaments hairy --202.\n\n201b. Filaments not hairy --203.\n\n     202a. Leaves lobed or divided             =HYDROPHYLLACEAE=, p. 93.\n\n     202b. Leaves not lobed            2, in =SCROPHULARIACEAE=, p. 101.\n\n203a. Anthers close together, longer than the filaments\n                                             2, in =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n203b. Anthers separate from each other --204.\n\n     204a. Leaves compound or very deeply lobed --205.\n\n     204b. Leaves simple or with shallow lobes only --206.\n\n205a. Leaf-segments linear or oblong, irregular\n                                               =HYDROPHYLLACEAE=, p. 93.\n\n205b. Leaves truly compound with separate leaflets\n                                          1a, in =POLEMONIACEAE=, p. 92.\n\n     206a. Flowers greenish-yellow                 =SOLANACEAE=, p. 100.\n\n     206b. Flowers blue, violet, white, or intermediate tints\n                                                =CAMPANULACEAE=, p. 112.\n\n207a. Leaves simple                                  =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n207b. Leaves compound                              =OXALIDACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n                                  --208--\n\n     208a. Petals 4 --209.\n\n     208b. Petals 5 --212.\n\n     208c. Petals 6 or more --227.\n\n209a. Stamens 4 or 8 --210.\n\n209b. Stamens 6, 4 long and 2 short                 =CRUCIFERAE=, p. 42.\n\n209c. Stamens 9 or more                          =CAPPARIDACEAE=, p. 47.\n\n     210a. Leaves compound                            =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n     210b. Leaves simple --211.\n\n211a. Ovary 1, inferior, appearing as a swelling below the calyx\n                                                    =ONAGRACEAE=, p. 78.\n\n211b. Ovaries 4 or 5, in the center of the flower\n                                                  =CRASSULACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n     212a. Stamens with good anthers 5 --213.\n\n     212b. Stamens 6 to 10 --217.\n\n     212c. Stamens more than 10 --222.\n\n213a. Flowers solitary, terminating the stem\n                                         12b, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 50.\n\n213b. Flowers axillary, solitary or in small clusters --214.\n\n213c. Flowers several, in loose irregular terminal clusters; leaves\n      simple                                          =LINACEAE=, p. 63.\n\n213d. Flowers in slender spike-like racemes; leaves compound\n                                              50b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n213e. Flowers in panicles                20a, in =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 50.\n\n213f. Flowers in umbels --216.\n\n     214a. Leaves compound                 25b, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 60.\n\n     214b. Leaves simple --215.\n\n215a. Flowers blue or yellow, erect or spreading      =LINACEAE=, p. 63.\n\n215b. Flowers greenish, nodding               1a, in =VIOLACEAE=, p. 75.\n\n     216a. Flowers pink or purple                  =GERANIACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     216b. Flowers yellow or white                =UMBELLIFERAE=, p. 80.\n\n217a. Leaves compound with 3 leaflets --218.\n\n217b. Leaves pinnately compound --219.\n\n217c. Leaves deeply palmately lobed                =GERANIACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n217d. Leaves simple and not deeply lobed --220.\n\n     218a. Leaflets reverse heart-shape; flowers yellow\n                                                   =OXALIDACEAE=, p. 64.\n\n     218b. Leaflets taper-pointed; flowers white or pink\n                                               73, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 57.\n\n219a. Leaflets entire                       24, in =LEGUMINOSAE=, p. 60.\n\n219b. Leaflets toothed                        50b, in =ROSACEAE=, p. 55.\n\n     220a. Prostrate plants, with thick, fleshy, entire leaves\n                                           3, in =PORTULACACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n     220b. Bushy branched plants, with small gray leaves concealing the\n           stem                               2a, in =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n     220c. Erect or spreading plants --221.\n\n221a. Ovary 1, style 1                        4a, in =ERICACEAE=, p. 84.\n\n221b. Ovary with 2 distinct styles               =SAXIFRAGACEAE=, p. 49.\n\n221c. Ovaries 5; styles 5                         =CRASSULACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n     222a. Stamens united by their filaments into a tube\n                                                     =MALVACEAE=, p. 72.\n\n     222b. Stamens separate from each other --223.\n\n223a. Leaves with stipules; ovaries more than 1       =ROSACEAE=, p. 51.\n\n223b. Leaves without stipules --224.\n\n     224a. Leaves toothed, deeply lobed, or compound\n                                                 =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n     224b. Leaves entire --225.\n\n225a. Ovaries numerous                           =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n225b. Ovary 1 --226.\n\n     226a. Sepals 2                              =PORTULACACEAE=, p. 34.\n\n     226b. Sepals 3 or 5                             =CISTACEAE=, p. 74.\n\n                                 --227--\n\n227a. Leaves entire                                 =LYTHRACEAE=, p. 77.\n\n227b. Leaves lobed, divided, dissected, or compound --228.\n\n     228a. Flowers in slender racemes               =RESEDACEAE=, p. 48.\n\n     228b. Flowers solitary or clustered, but not in slender racemes\n           --229.\n\n229a. Stamens 6                           3b, in =BERBERIDACEAE=, p. 40.\n\n229b. Stamens numerous                           =RANUNCULACEAE=, p. 35.\n\n\n[1] In most flowers the corolla is the conspicuous portion of\nthe perianth, and is composed of united or separate petals, as the case\nmay be. In some flowers the corolla is absent, and the calyx is the\nconspicuous portion.\n\n\n\n\nTHE PLANTS OF MICHIGAN\n\n\n\n\nPINACEAE, the Pine Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, usually evergreen, with needle-like or scale-like\nleaves; fruit a cone or berry.\n\n\n1a. Leaves in clusters of 2-5 --2.\n\n1b. Leaves mostly in clusters of 10 or more, on short lateral wart-like\nbranches, deciduous each autumn              =Tamarack, Larix laricina.=\n\n1c. Leaves not in clusters --4.\n\n     2a. Leaves in clusters of 5            =White Pine, Pinus strobus.=\n\n     2b. Leaves in clusters of 2 or 3 --3.\n\n3a. Leaves 8-15 cm. long                  =Norway Pine, Pinus resinosa.=\n\n3b. Leaves 2-4 cm. long                    =Jack Pine, Pinus banksiana.=\n\n     4a. Leaves alternate or scattered --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves opposite or whorled --8.\n\n5a. Leaves four-sided --6.\n\n5b. Leaves flattened --7.\n\n     6a. Leaves 6-12 mm. long             =Black Spruce, Picea mariana.=\n\n     6b. Leaves 15-25 mm. long         =White Spruce, Picea canadensis.=\n\n7a. Leaves short-stalked, 15 mm. long or less\n                                            =Hemlock, Tsuga canadensis.=\n\n7b. Leaves sessile, 15-30 mm. long             =Balsam, Abies balsamea.=\n\n     8a. Leafy twigs soft and flattened\n                                      =White Cedar, Thuja occidentalis.=\n\n     8b. Leafy twigs not distinctly flattened --9.\n\n9a. Leaves opposite --10.\n\n9b. Leaves in whorls of three --11.\n\n     10a. Erect shrub or tree         =Red Cedar, Juniperus virginiana.=\n\n     10b. Prostrate or spreading shrub\n                               =Creeping Cedar, Juniperus horizontalis.=\n\n11a. Erect shrub or small tree            =Juniper, Juniperus communis.=\n\n11b. Spreading or ascending shrub, growing in dense mats\n                        =Low Juniper, Juniperus communis var. depressa.=\n\n\n\n\nTAXACEAE, the Yew Family\n\nShrubs, with needle-like evergreen leaves; fruit red and berry-like.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; straggling shrub 1-3 m. high\n                                     =Ground Hemlock, Taxus canadensis.=\n\n\n\n\nTYPHACEAE, the Cat-tail Family\n\nErect plants 1-2 m. high, with linear leaves and terminal spikes of\nbrown flowers, appearing in summer.\n\n\n1a. Staminate and pistillate portions of the flower-spike contiguous,\n    the latter 2.5 cm. in diameter   =Common Cat-tail, Typha latifolia.=\n\n1b. Staminate and pistillate portions of the spike separated, the latter\n    2 cm. or less in diameter\n                           =Narrow-leaved Cat-tail, Typha angustifolia.=\n\n\n\n\nSPARGANIACEAE, the Bur-reed Family\n\nMarsh plants with linear leaves and spherical heads of inconspicuous\ngreenish flowers, appearing in summer.\n\n\nAbout 5 species occur in Michigan, of which the commonest is\n                                      =Bur-reed, Sparganium eurycarpum.=\n\n\n\n\nNAJADACEAE, the Pondweed Family\n\nAquatic plants with submerged or floating leaves and inconspicuous\nflowers in summer.\n\n\n1a. Leaves opposite or whorled --2.\n\n1b. Leaves alternate --2c.\n\n     2a. Leaves thread-like, 3-8 cm. long\n                              =Horned Pondweed, Zannichellia palustris.=\n\n     2b. Leaves linear, toothed, abruptly dilated at the base, 3 cm.\n         long or less (Naiad) --3.\n\n     2c. Leaves entire, not abruptly dilated at base\n                                         [2]=Pondweed, Potamogeton spp.=\n\n3a. Leaves about 2 mm. wide, sharply and coarsely toothed\n                                                  =Naiad, Naias marina.=\n\n3b. Leaves very narrowly linear, with numerous minute teeth\n                                                =Naiad, Naias flexilis.=\n\n\n[2] About 30 species of Potamogeton occur in Michigan, among\nwhich the most conspicuous is Potamogeton natans, with elliptical\nfloating leaves. For the identification of the species the Manual must\nbe used.\n\n\n\n\nJUNCAGINACEAE, the Arrow Grass Family\n\nMarsh plants, with linear cylindrical leaves and inconspicuous flowers\nin spikes or racemes, appearing in early summer.\n\n\n1a. Leaves all basal; flowers numerous in a spike-like raceme (Arrow\n    Grass) --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves present; flowers in a loose bracted raceme (1-3 dm.\n    high).                       =Scheuchzeria, Scheuchzeria palustris.=\n\n     2a. Fruit (usually to be seen at the base of the raceme) ovoid or\n         oblong, rounded at the base =Arrow Grass, Triglochin maritima.=\n\n     2b. Fruit linear, narrowed at the base (1-5 dm. high)\n                                    =Arrow Grass, Triglochin palustris.=\n\n\n\n\nALISMACEAE, the Water Plantain Family\n\nMarsh plants, with scape-like stems; flowers with 3 green sepals, 3\nwhite petals, 6 or more stamens, and several separate pistils.\n\n\n1a. Ovaries in a ring; flowers in panicles (2-8 dm. high, summer)\n                             =Water Plantain, Alisma Plantago-aquatica.=\n\n1b. Ovaries in a head; flowers in racemes or umbels --2.\n\n     2a. Flowers all perfect, in a single umbel of 2-8 flowers; stamens\n         9 (leaves lanceolate; 15 cm. high or less; summer)\n                           =Dwarf Water Plantain, Echinodorus tenellus.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in a raceme of 3-flowered whorls, the lower pistillate,\n         the upper staminate; stamens usually more than nine (1-10 dm.\n         high, summer) (Arrow-head) --3.\n\n3a. Leaves ovate to linear, not sagittate at base --4.\n\n3b. Leaves broad or narrow, sagittate at base --5.\n\n     4a. Pistillate (basal) flowers sessile or nearly so (2-8 dm. high,\n         summer)                  =Arrow-head, Sagittaria heterophylla.=\n\n     4b. Pistillate flowers with obvious pedicels\n                                      =Arrow-head, Sagittaria graminea.=\n\n5a. Basal lobes of the leaf conspicuous, triangular, almost or quite as\n    long as the terminal portion --6.\n\n5b. Basal lobes small, short, linear --4b.\n\n     6a. Beak of the achene very short and erect; rare species\n                                      =Arrow-head, Sagittaria arifolia.=\n\n     6b. Beak of the achene sharp, incurved at right angles to the body;\n         common species              =Arrow-head, Sagittaria latifolia.=\n\n\n\n\nHYDROCHARITACEAE, the Frog's Bit Family\n\nSubmerged aquatics, with inconspicuous flowers in summer.\n\n\n1a. Leaves all from the base, 2 dm. long or more\n                                      =Eel Grass, Vallisneria spiralis.=\n\n1b. Leaves on the stem, 2 cm. long or less\n                                        =Water-weed, Elodea canadensis.=\n\n\n\n\nGRAMINEAE, the Grass Family\n\nGrasses, with linear or narrow sheathing leaves, and very small flowers\nwithout perianth in the axils of chaffy bracts, appearing in late spring\nand summer.\n\nOf the large number (over 150) of grasses in Michigan, only the\ncommonest are included here, and the student is referred to the Manuals\nfor a full treatment of them.\n\nTheir classification depends chiefly upon the structure and arrangement\nof the spikelets. These consist typically of a short axis, the rachilla,\nalmost or quite concealed by several chaffy bracts. The two lower bracts\nare termed glumes, and have no flowers in their axils. Above the glumes\nare two or more other bracts, the lemmas. In the axil of each lemma, and\nusually concealed by it, is a smaller bract, the palea, and between the\nlemma and the palea is a single flower. The number of flowers in a\nspikelet is therefore normally equal to the number of lemmas. The\nspikelets are grouped in racemes, spikes, or panicles of various size.\n\n\n1a. Spikelets one-flowered --2.\n\n1b. Spikelets with 2 or more flowers --24.\n\n     2a. Spikelets grouped into dense solitary cylindrical spikes --3.\n\n     2b. Spikelets arranged in panicles or in panicled spikes --8.\n\n3a. Spikelets without awns or bristles, or with short awns not more than\n    3 mm. long --4.\n\n3b. Spikelets with awns 2-5 cm. long, terminating the bracts\n                                       =Squirrel-tail, Hordeum jubatum.=\n\n3c. Bracts of the spikelet without terminal awns, but the spikelets with\n    one or more long bristles arising from their base --6.\n\n     4a. Spike-like panicle thickened in the middle, more than 1 cm.\n         thick                        =Beach Grass, Ammophila arenaria.=\n\n     4b. Spike little or not at all thickened in the middle, less than 1\n         cm. thick --5.\n\n5a. Lower bracts awned; stem erect, unbranched\n                                             =Timothy, Phleum pratense.=\n\n5b. Lower scales unawned; stem branched at the base\n                             =Floating Foxtail, Alopecurus geniculatus.=\n\n     6a. Bristles 5 or more at the base of each spikelet\n                                       =Yellow Foxtail, Setaria glauca.=\n\n     6b. Bristles 1-3 at the base of each spikelet --7.\n\n7a. Spikelets about 2 mm. long; bristles not much longer, green\n                                       =Green Foxtail, Setaria viridis.=\n\n7b. Spikelets about 3 mm. long; bristles much longer, usually purple\n                                              =Millet, Setaria italica.=\n\n     8a. Spikelets numerous, in long slender symmetrical spikes --9.\n\n     8b. Spikelets in panicles, racemes, or loose spikes --13.\n\n9a. Spikelets without awns; plants 8 dm. high or less (Crab Grass) --10.\n\n9b. Spikelets with awns; plants 12 dm. high or more --12.\n\n     10a. Leaf-sheaths all glabrous.   =Crab Grass, Digitaria humifusa.=\n\n     10b. Lower leaf-sheaths hairy --11.\n\n11a. Axis of the spike flat, with wing-like margins\n                                    =Crab Grass, Digitaria sanguinalis.=\n\n11b. Axis of the spike slender, without winged margins\n                                     =Crab Grass, Digitaria filiformis.=\n\n     12a. Spikes numerous, appressed to the axis of the panicle; tall\n          marsh grass              =Slough Grass, Spartina michauxiana.=\n\n     12b. Spikes 2-6, widely divergent; plant of dry ground\n                                      =Blue-joint, Andropogon furcatus.=\n\n13a. Spikelets subtended by an ovoid thorny involucre 3-8 mm. wide\n                                      =Sand Bur, Cenchrus carolinianus.=\n\n13b. Spikelets without a thorny involucre --14.\n\n     14a. Lower branches of the panicle spreading, bearing staminate\n          flowers, the upper branches erect, with pistillate flowers;\n          aquatic or marsh grass 2-4 m. high\n                                          =Wild Rice, Zizania aquatica.=\n\n     14b. Panicle uniform throughout --15.\n\n15a. Spikelets with awns 2 mm. or more long --16.\n\n15b. Spikelets not awned, or with short inconspicuous awns --18.\n\n     16a. Spikelets in solitary raceme-like spikes; awn about 1 cm. long\n          or more                   =Beard Grass, Andropogon scoparius.=\n\n     16b. Spikelets in branching clusters; awn less than 1 cm. long\n          --17.\n\n17a. Leaf-blade 4 mm. wide or narrower; panicle slender\n                                    =Drop-seed, Muhlenbergia schreberi.=\n\n17b. Leaf-blade 6 mm. wide or more; panicle stout and coarse\n                               =Barnyard Grass, Echinochloa crus-galli.=\n\n     18a. Spikelet plump and compact, its bracts closely folded about\n          each other --19.\n\n     18b. Spikelet very flat, its two bracts closely folded together\n                                         =Cut-grass, Leersia oryzoides.=\n\n     18c. Spikelet loose and open, somewhat flattened, its 3 bracts\n          ascending or spreading and not closely folded about each other\n          --20.\n\n19a. Panicle about half as long as the entire plant; leaves copiously\n     hairy                             =Witch Grass, Panicum capillare.=\n\n19b. Panicle of smaller size\n                            =Panic-grasses, various species of Panicum.=\n\n     20a. Panicle strongly contracted or spike-like; plants of\n          sand-dunes --4a.\n\n     20b. Panicle spreading or slightly contracted; axis of the spikelet\n          beset with bristles; leaves 2 dm. long or more; marsh grass\n                                 =Reed Grass, Calamagrostis canadensis.=\n\n     20c. Panicle spreading or somewhat contracted, but not spike-like;\n          axis of the spikelet without bristles --21.\n\n21a. Panicle-branches erect or ascending --22.\n\n21b. Panicle-branches strongly spreading --23.\n\n     22a. The two outer scales of the spikelet one-fourth as long as the\n          third scale, or sometimes one of them absent --17a.\n\n     22b. The glumes at least half as long as the lemma\n                                    =Wood-grass, Muhlenbergia mexicana.=\n\n23a. The chief lateral branches of the panicle dividing and bearing\n     flowers below their middle                =Red-top, Agrostis alba.=\n\n23b. The chief branches of the panicle dividing only beyond the middle\n                                        =Hair Grass, Agrostis hyemalis.=\n\n     24a. Spikelets arranged in two rows to form a definite spike --25.\n\n     24b. Spikelets in panicles, never in definite rows --29.\n\n25a. Spikelets in a single row on one side of the axis, forming a\n     one-sided spike                      =Yard Grass, Eleusine indica.=\n\n25b. Spikelets alternating on opposite sides of the axis, forming a\n     two-rowed spike --26.\n\n     26a. Spikelets in pairs at each joint, forming a dense spike (Wild\n          Rye) --27.\n\n     26b. Spikelets single at each joint, forming a loose, open or\n          interrupted spike --28.\n\n27a. Glumes lanceolate                    =Wild Rye, Elymus canadensis.=\n\n27b. Glumes narrowly subulate             =Wild Rye, Elymus virginicus.=\n\n     28a. Spikelets with their edges toward the axis of the spike\n                                            =Rye Grass, Lolium perenne.=\n\n     28b. Spikelets with their sides toward the axis of the spike\n                                        =Quack Grass, Agropyron repens.=\n\n29a. Glumes longer than the lemmas\n                                                   =Oats, Avena sativa.=\n\n29b. Glumes shorter than the lemmas --30.\n\n     30a. Axis of the spikelet beset with conspicuous long hairs about\n          equaling the lemmas; tall marsh grass 1-4 m. high\n                                            =Reed, Phragmites communis.=\n\n     30b. Spikelets without conspicuous long hairs --31.\n\n31a. Spikelets sessile or nearly so, forming crowded or spike-like\n     panicles --32.\n\n31b. Spikelets distinctly panicled --33.\n\n     32a. Spikelets in dense one-sided clusters at the ends of the\n          panicle branches          =Orchard Grass, Dactylis glomerata.=\n\n     32b. Spikelets in an erect spike-like cluster\n                                =Prairie June-grass, Koeleria cristata.=\n\n33a. Lemmas, exclusive of the awn when present, 8 mm. long or more --34.\n\n33b. Lemmas, exclusive of the awn when present, 6 mm. long or less\n     --35.\n\n     34a. Awns on the lemmas 12 mm. long or more\n                                         =Brome-grass, Bromus tectorum.=\n\n     34b. Awns on the lemmas 8 mm. long or less, or none\n                                              =Cheat, Bromus secalinus.=\n\n35a. Lemmas with 7 sharp conspicuous veins from base to apex\n                                        =Manna Grass, Glyceria nervata.=\n\n35b. Lemmas with 3-5 inconspicuous veins --36.\n\n     36a. Spikelets with 5 flowers or more --37.\n\n     36b. Spikelets with 2-4 (rarely 5) flowers --40.\n\n37a. Stems tufted and decumbent at base (Love Grass) --38.\n\n37b. Stems erect (Fescue Grass) --39.\n\n     38a. Spikelets 1.5 mm. wide        =Love Grass, Eragrostis pilosa.=\n\n     38b. Spikelets 3 mm. wide     =Love Grass, Eragrostis megastachya.=\n\n39a. Lemmas with conspicuous awns     =Fescue Grass, Festuca octoflora.=\n\n39b. Lemmas without awns                =Fescue Grass, Festuca elatior.=\n\n     40a. Tufted annual grass                  =Spear Grass, Poa annua.=\n\n     40b. Perennials, with erect flowering stems --41.\n\n41a. Stems round                            =Blue Grass, Poa pratensis.=\n\n41b. Stems strongly flattened      =Canadian Blue Grass, Poa compressa.=\n\n\n\n\nCYPERACEAE, the Sedge Family\n\nGrass-like or rush-like plants, with linear leaves or leafless, and\ninconspicuous flowers in small chaffy spikes.\n\nOver 200 species occur in Michigan, of which only the commonest are\nincluded here. For the remaining species the Manuals should be\nconsulted.\n\n\n1a. Spikes all alike --2.\n\n1b. The uppermost spike or spikes wholly staminate, the lower one or\n    more pistillate; ovary and achene surrounded by a sac, the\n    perigynium. Mature fruit is necessary for satisfactory\n    identification (Sedge) --12.\n\n     2a. Stems leafless, bearing one or more spikes at or near the top\n         --3.\n\n     2b. Stems leafy --6.\n\n3a. Spike one, terminal and erect (Spike Rush) --4.\n\n3b. Spikes usually more than one, lateral and spreading --5.\n\n     4a. Annual, with fibrous roots     =Spike Rush, Eleocharis obtusa.=\n\n     4b. Perennial, with a running rootstock\n                                     =Spike Rush, Eleocharis palustris.=\n\n5a. Stem round                               =Bulrush, Scirpus validus.=\n\n5b. Stem 3-cornered                  =Three-square, Scirpus americanus.=\n\n     6a. Spikes axillary along the side of the stem\n                                   =Dulichium, Dulichium, arundinaceum.=\n\n     6b. Spikes terminal --7.\n\n7a. Spikes subtended by long conspicuous leaves which greatly exceed the\n    flower clusters --8.\n\n7b. Spikes not conspicuously exceeded by the bract-like leaves --10.\n\n     8a. Spikes in a dense head-like cluster, white-woolly at maturity\n                                  =Cotton Grass, Eriophorum virginicum.=\n\n     8b. Spikes not in dense heads, nor white-woolly at maturity --9.\n\n9a. Perennial by a creeping rootstock   =Nut Grass, Cyperus esculentus.=\n\n9b. Perennial by hard basal corms          =Cyperus, Cyperus strigosus.=\n\n     10a. Bracts of the spike chestnut-brown\n                                       =Twig Rush, Cladium mariscoides.=\n\n     10b. Bracts of the spike green or straw-color (Sedge) --11.\n\n11a. Spikes 3-8, separate                      =Sedge, Carex straminea.=\n\n11b. Spikes very numerous and densely crowded\n                                             =Sedge, Carex vulpinoidea.=\n\n     12a. Achenes flattened                      =Sedge, Carex crinita.=\n\n     12b. Achenes 3-angled --13.\n\n13a. Perigynium tipped with a sharp straight 2-toothed beak --14.\n\n13b. Perigynium with a short soft beak --17.\n\n     14a. Perigynium thin and papery, loosely enclosing the achene --15.\n\n     14b. Perigynium firm, closely enclosing the achene --16.\n\n15a. Perigynium less than 1 cm. long         =Sedge, Carex hystericina.=\n\n15b. Perigynium more than 1 cm. long            =Sedge, Carex lupulina.=\n\n     16a. Perigynium smooth                      =Sedge, Carex riparia.=\n\n     16b. Perigynium hairy                    =Sedge, Carex filiformis.=\n\n17a. Beak of the perigynium bent abruptly to one side\n                                               =Sedge, Carex laxiflora.=\n\n17b. Beak of the perigynium straight\n                                           =Sedge, Carex pennsylvanica.=\n\n\n\n\nARACEAE, the Arum Family\n\nIndividual flowers small, but crowded on a fleshy spadix to form a\nconspicuous spike, usually surrounded by a green or  spathe.\n\n\n1a. Leaves compound --2.\n\n1b. Leaves simple --3.\n\n     2a. Leaflets 3, spathe pale green or purple (3-6 dm. high; spring)\n                                   =Indian Turnip, Arisaema triphyllum.=\n\n     2b. Leaflets 7-11; spathe green; spadix long and slender (3-8 dm.\n         high; late spring)          =Dragon Root, Arisaema dracontium.=\n\n3a. Leaves linear, sword-shape; spathe none (5-15 dm. high; early\n    summer)                                =Sweet Flag, Acorus calamus.=\n\n3b. Leaves broader than linear; spathe present --4.\n\n     4a. Flower clusters partly underground, appearing in earliest\n         spring                  =Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus.=\n\n     4b. Flower clusters peduncled, in early summer --5.\n\n5a. Leaves broadly ovate-cordate; spathe white\n                                          =Water Arum, Calla palustris.=\n\n5b. Leaves more or less sagittate; spathe green\n                                      =Arrow Arum, Peltandra virginica.=\n\n\n\n\nLEMNACEAE, the Duckweed Family\n\nMinute leafless plants floating on quiet water; flowers exceedingly\nsmall and seldom seen.\n\n\n1a. Plant thick, ovoid, less than 2 mm. long; roots none. Two species\n    are reported from Michigan                            =Wolffia spp.=\n\n1b. Plant flattened, with short roots --2.\n\n     2a. Roots several from each rounded plant\n                                        =Duckweed, Spirodela polyrhiza.=\n\n     2b. Root single from each rounded plant      =Duckweed, Lemna spp.=\n\nThree species are reported from Michigan, of which the commonest is\nLemna minor.\n\n\n\n\nERIOCAULACEAE, the Pipewort Family\n\nBog or marsh herbs, with small flowers in heads terminating long slender\nscapes.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; leaves linear and basal; flower-stalk 5-15 cm.\nhigh; flower-heads whitish or lead-color\n                                     =Pipewort, Eriocaulon articulatum.=\n\n\n\n\nXYRIDACEAE, the Yellow-eyed Grass Family\n\nSmall herbs with basal leaves and erect flower-stalks bearing a head of\nperfect yellow flowers, in summer.\n\n\n1a. Base of plant bulbous-thickened (3-6 dm. high)\n                                    =Yellow-eyed Grass, Xyris flexuosa.=\n\n1b. Base of plant not bulbous-thickened (1-3 dm. high)\n                                     =Yellow-eyed Grass, Xyris montana.=\n\n\n\n\nCOMMELINACEAE, the Spiderwort Family\n\nLeafy-stemmed herbs; flowers with 3 sepals, 3 petals, and 6 stamens,\nlasting but a single day; petals blue.\n\n\n1a. Stamens 6; petals all equal (Spiderwort) --2.\n\n1b. Perfect stamens 3, sterile stamens 3; two of the petals larger than\n    the third (3-6 dm. high; summer)  =Day-flower, Commelina virginica.=\n\n     2a. Sepals villous (3-10 dm. high; late spring)\n                                  =Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana.=\n\n     2b. Sepals glabrous, or with a tuft of hairs at the apex (4-10 dm.\n         high; late spring)          =Spiderwort, Tradescantia reflexa.=\n\n\n\n\nPONTEDERIACEAE, the Pickerel-weed Family\n\nAquatic herbs, with 6 rather conspicuous petals; flowers in summer.\n\n\n1a. Flowers blue; leaves cordate-sagittate (3-10 dm. high)\n                                    =Pickerel-weed, Pontederia cordata.=\n\n1b. Flowers yellow; leaves linear (submerged)\n                                     =Mud Plantain, Heteranthera dubia.=\n\n\n\n\nJUNCACEAE, the Rush Family\n\nGrass-like or rush-like plants, with inconspicuous greenish or brownish\nflowers, of 3 chaffy or scale-like sepals and as many similar petals.\n\n\n1a. Leaf-sheaths closed; capsule 1-celled and 3-seeded; stem or leaves\n    usually hairy at or near the base (1-4 dm. high). (Wood Rush) --2.\n\n1b. Leaf-sheaths open; capsule many-seeded; plants never hairy --4.\n\n     2a. Flowers solitary at the ends of the branches of the umbel-like\n         cluster (spring)                =Wood Rush, Luzula saltuensis.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in spikes or dense clusters --3.\n\n3a. Flower-cluster spike-like, nodding at the tip (summer)\n                                            =Wood Rush, Luzula spicata.=\n\n3b. Flower-cluster umbel-like (spring)\n                         =Wood Rush, Luzula campestris var. multiflora.=\n\n     4. The genus Juncus, or Rush, contains about 25 species in\n        Michigan, blooming in summer or autumn. For their identification\n        the Manuals should be consulted. One of the commonest species is\n        Juncus effusus, growing in marshes, with erect leafless\n        cylindrical stems, bearing a lateral cluster of flowers near the\n        summit. Another common species is Juncus tenuis, with slender\n        stems and linear leaves, growing in hard ground, especially in\n        woodland paths.\n\n\n\n\nLILIACEAE, the Lily Family\n\nHerbs or twining shrubs, with generally conspicuous flowers; sepals and\npetals each 3, and usually  alike, stamens 6, ovary 3-celled,\nsuperior. In one species the perianth is 4-parted and the stamens are 4.\n\n\n1a. Flowers or flower-clusters lateral, axillary or apparently so --2.\n\n1b. Flowers or flower-clusters scapose or terminal --12.\n\n     2a. Leaves minute and scale-like (7-15 dm. high; flowers\n         greenish-yellow, June)      =Asparagus, Asparagus officinalis.=\n\n     2b. Leaves broad and flat, not scale-like --3.\n\n3a. Flowers numerous in rounded umbels; perianth-segments nearly\n    separate; leaves long-petioled --4.\n\n3b. Flowers in clusters of 1-8; leaves short-petioled, sessile, or\n    clasping --8.\n\n     4a. Stems herbaceous (flowers greenish-yellow, ill-scented)\n         (Carrion-flower) --5.\n\n     4b. Stems woody, thorny, climbing (flowers greenish-yellow, early\n         summer) (Green Brier) --7.\n\n5a. Stems climbing by tendrils --6.\n\n5b. Stem not climbing; only the upper leaves, or none, with tendrils\n                                     =Carrion-flower, Smilax ecirrhata.=\n\n     6a. Leaves smooth beneath.       =Carrion-flower, Smilax herbacea.=\n\n     6b. Leaves minutely pubescent beneath when mature\n                    =Carrion-flower, Smilax herbacea var. pulverulenta.=\n\n7a. Leaves with 5 principal veins.   =Green Brier, Smilax rotundifolia.=\n\n7b. Leaves with 7 principal veins.        =Green Brier, Smilax hispida.=\n\n     8a. Perianth-segments united into a tube (flowers axillary, late\n         spring) (Solomon's Seal) --9.\n\n     8b. Perianth-segments separate (2-8 dm. high; spring)\n         (Twisted-stalk) --10.\n\n9a. Leaves minutely pubescent beneath; filaments rough, inserted at\n    three-fourths the length of the perianth (3-8 dm. high)\n                           =Small Solomon's Seal, Polygonatum biflorum.=\n\n9b. Leaves smooth beneath; filaments smooth, inserted at the middle of\n    the perianth tube (5-15 dm. high)\n                         =Great Solomon's Seal, Polygonatum commutatum.=\n\n     10a. Leaves distinctly clasping the stem; flowers greenish-white\n                              =Twisted-stalk, Streptopus amplexifolius.=\n\n     10b. Leaves closely sessile; flowers reddish to purple --11.\n\n11a. Rootstock short and thick; berries spherical\n                                     =Twisted-stalk, Streptopus roseus.=\n\n11b. Rootstock long and slender; berries 3-angled\n                                   =Twisted-stalk, Streptopus longipes.=\n\n     12a. Perianth-segments 5-12 cm. long --13.\n\n     12b. Perianth-segments shorter than 5 cm. --19.\n\n13a. Leaves all or chiefly basal, stem-leaves bract-like or none --14.\n\n13b. Leaves chiefly or entirely on the stem --15.\n\n     14a. Leaves numerous, linear or sword-shape (flowers orange,\n          summer)                        =Day Lily, Hemerocallis fulva.=\n\n     14b. Leaves a single pair, oblong or lanceolate --21.\n\n15a. Leaves a single whorl of 3 (Wake Robin, Trillium) --22.\n\n15b. Leaves numerous (6-12 dm. high; flowers yellow, orange, or red, in\n     summer) (Lily) --16.\n\n     16a. Flowers erect --17.\n\n     16b. Flowers nodding --18.\n\n17a. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, 6-15 mm. wide, mostly whorled\n                                     =Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum.=\n\n17b. Leaves linear, 5 mm. wide or less, almost all alternate\n                        =Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum var. andinum.=\n\n     18a. Perianth-segments strongly revolute\n                                     =Turk's-cap Lily, Lilium superbum.=\n\n     18b. Perianth-segments half-recurved\n                                        =Yellow Lily, Lilium canadense.=\n\n19a. Flower solitary --20.\n\n19b. Flowers in clusters, not solitary --31.\n\n     20a. Stem with a single pair of basal leaves (Dog's-tooth Violet)\n          --21.\n\n     20b. Stem with a single whorl of 3 leaves (1-3 dm. high; spring)\n          (Wake Robin, Trillium) --22.\n\n     20c. Stem leafy (Bellwort) --29.\n\n21a. Perianth yellow       =Dog's-tooth Violet, Erythronium americanum.=\n\n21b. Perianth white, bluish, or pinkish\n                              =Dog's-tooth Violet, Erythronium albidum.=\n\n     22a. Flower sessile, red or brown --23.\n\n     22b. Flower peduncled, white or pink, rarely red --24.\n\n23a. Leaves sessile, sepals spreading    =Wake Robin, Trillium sessile.=\n\n23b. Leaves short-petioled, sepals reflexed\n                                      =Wake Robin, Trillium recurvatum.=\n\n     24a. Ovary with 6 distinct wing-like angles --25.\n\n     24b. Ovary obtusely 3-angled or lobed --28.\n\n25a. Stamens distinctly longer than the pistil --26.\n\n25b. Stamens equaling or shorter than the pistil --27.\n\n     26a. Stigmas erect or nearly so, slender\n                                    =Wake Robin, Trillium grandiflorum.=\n\n     26b. Stigmas strongly recurved or spreading\n                                         =Wake Robin, Trillium erectum.=\n\n27a. Filaments about as long as the anthers\n                                         =Wake Robin, Trillium cernuum.=\n\n27b. Filaments half as long as the anthers or shorter\n                                      =Wake Robin, Trillium declinatum.=\n\n     28a. Leaves obtuse; petals obtuse, white\n                                =Dwarf White Trillium, Trillium nivale.=\n\n     28b. Leaves acuminate; petals acute, purple-striped at base\n                                 =Painted Trillium, Trillium undulatum.=\n\n29a. Leaves sessile (3-6 dm. high; flowers yellow, spring)\n                                       =Bellwort, Oakesia sessilifolia.=\n\n29b. Leaves perfoliate (4-6 dm. high; flowers yellow, in spring) --30.\n\n     30a. Leaves minutely pubescent beneath\n                                       =Bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora.=\n\n     30b. Leaves glabrous and all glaucous\n                                        =Bellwort, Uvularia perfoliata.=\n\n31a. Stem bearing 2 whorls of 3-9 leaves (3-6 dm. high; flowers pale\n     yellow, early summer)   =Indian Cucumber-root, Medeola virginiana.=\n\n31b. Stem-leaves not whorled, or all leaves basal --32.\n\n     32a. Flowers in umbels --33.\n\n     32b. Flowers in racemes or panicles --38.\n\n33a. Plant with the odor of onions or garlic (leaves all or chiefly\n     basal; flower-stalks 2-8 dm. high, late spring or summer) --34.\n\n33b. Plant not with the odor of onions (leaves basal; flower-stalks 2-3\n     dm. high, with an umbel of 3-6 greenish-yellow flowers in late\n     spring)                            =Clintonia, Clintonia borealis.=\n\n     34a. Leaves oblong, 2-5 cm. wide, not present when the plants are\n          in bloom (greenish-white flowers)\n                                          =Wild Leek, Allium tricoccum.=\n\n     34b. Leaves linear, present with the flowers --35.\n\n35a. Umbel nodding or horizontal (petals rose-color)\n                                           =Wild Onion, Allium cernuum.=\n\n35b. Umbel erect --36.\n\n     36a. Pedicels longer than the flowers --37.\n\n     36b. Pedicels equaling or shorter than the flowers (petals\n          rose-purple)\n                     =Wild Chives, Allium schoenoprasum var. sibiricum.=\n\n37a. Leaves flattened; flowers pink to white\n                                         =Wild Onion, Allium canadense.=\n\n37b. Leaves cylindrical; flowers greenish to purple\n                                         =Field Garlic, Allium vineale.=\n\n     38a. Leaves lanceolate to ovate, not more than 8 times as long as\n          broad --39.\n\n     38b. Leaves linear or grass-like, at least 12 times as long as\n          broad --45.\n\n39a. Principal leaves all basal, stem-leaves none or bract-like --40.\n\n39b. Principal leaves on the stem --41.\n\n     40a. Flowers in a spike-like raceme (4-10 dm. high; small white\n          flowers in summer)             =Colic-root, Aletris farinosa.=\n\n     40b. Flowers in an umbel-like cluster --34b.\n\n41a. Perianth-segments 4 (1-2 dm. high; flowers white, early summer)\n                       =Wild Lily of the Valley, Maianthemum canadense.=\n\n41b. Perianth-segments 6 --42.\n\n     42a. Styles 3; flowers dioecious (3-10 dm. high; flowers white,\n          early summer)             =Blazing Star, Chamaelirium luteum.=\n\n     42b. Style 1; flowers perfect, white, in spring (False Solomon's\n          Seal) --43.\n\n43a. Flowers panicled (3-6 dm. high)\n                             =False Solomon's Seal, Smilacina racemosa.=\n\n43b. Flowers racemed --44.\n\n     44a. Leaves 2-4, usually 3 (1-2 dm. high)\n                             =False Solomon's Seal, Smilacina trifolia.=\n\n     44b. Leaves 5-12 (2-5 dm. high)\n                             =False Solomon's Seal, Smilacina stellata.=\n\n45a. Flowers bright blue; perianth-segments united (2-3 dm. high,\n     spring)                       =Grape Hyacinth, Muscari botryoides.=\n\n45b. Flowers blue, greenish, yellowish, or white; perianth-segments\n     separate --46.\n\n     46a. Flowers 1 cm. wide, or smaller (white or greenish, in racemes,\n          late spring or summer) (False Asphodel) --47.\n\n     46b. Flowers 1.5 cm. wide, or larger --48.\n\n47a. Stem glabrous (2 dm. high or less)\n                                  =False Asphodel, Tofieldia palustris.=\n                                  =False Asphodel, Tofieldia glutinosa.=\n\n47b. Stem viscid-pubescent (1-5 dm. high)\n\n     48a. Perianth-segments with 2 glands near the base (3-8 dm. high;\n          greenish-white panicled flowers in summer)\n                                     =Zygadenus, Zygadenus chloranthus.=\n\n     48b. Perianth-segments without glands --49.\n\n49a. Plant 3-5 dm. tall; flowers blue or nearly white, in long racemes\n     (early summer)                 =Wild Hyacinth, Camassia esculenta.=\n\n49b. Plant 1-3 dm. tall; flowers greenish-white, in short corymb-like\n     racemes (spring)      =Star of Bethlehem, Ornithogalum umbellatum.=\n\n\n\n\nDIOSCOREACEAE, the Yam Family\n\nTwining herbs with net-veined leaves and greenish or white flowers in\npanicles or racemes.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; leaves ovate-cordate; flowers in summer\n                                          =Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa.=\n\n\n\n\nAMARYLLIDACEAE, the Amaryllis Family\n\nPlants with linear basal leaves, and perfect flowers, with 6-parted\nperianth, inferior ovary, and 6 stamens.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; 1-2 dm. high; flowers yellow, 1 cm. wide, in\nspring                                    =Star Grass, Hypoxis hirsuta.=\n\n\n\n\nIRIDACEAE, the Iris Family\n\nHerbs, with 6-parted perianth, inferior ovary, and 3 stamens.\n\n\n1a. Flowers blue, 5 cm. wide or larger --2.\n\n1b. Flowers about 1 cm. wide (blue or white, from a spathe terminating a\n    2-edged stem 2-5 dm. high, spring and early summer) (Blue-eyed\n    Grass) --3.\n\n     2a. Flowering stems 4-8 dm. high (early summer)\n                                           =Blue Flag, Iris versicolor.=\n\n     2b. Flowering stems 2 dm. or less high (spring)\n                                           =Dwarf Iris, Iris lacustris.=\n\n3a. Spathes terminal, sessile --4.\n\n3b. Spathes long-peduncled, axillary --8.\n\n     4a. Spathe single --5.\n\n     4b. Spathes 2 on each flowering stem --7.\n\n5a. Pedicels much longer than the inner (shorter) bract\n                             =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium mucronatum.=\n\n5b. Pedicels equaling or barely exceeding the inner bract --6.\n\n     6a. Capsule brown; common species\n                          =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium angustifolium.=\n\n     6b. Capsule green or yellowish; rare species\n                               =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium montanum.=\n\n7a. Leaves folded lengthwise; stems narrowly winged\n                                =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium hastile.=\n\n7b. Leaves flat; stem broadly winged, 2-3 mm. wide\n                                =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium albidum.=\n\n     8a. Capsules pale straw-color or whitish --9.\n\n     8b. Capsules brown, or tinged with purple --10.\n\n9a. Plant with straight fibrous bristles at base; pedicels long-exserted\n                              =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium farwellii.=\n\n9b. Plants not bristly at base; pedicels barely exserted\n                               =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium strictum.=\n\n     10a. Pedicels scarcely exceeding the inner bract --6a.\n\n     10b. Pedicels much exceeding the inner bract --11.\n\n11a. Stem 2-6 mm. wide; bracts 1.5-2 cm. long\n                              =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium gramineum.=\n\n11b. Stem 1-2 mm. wide; bracts 1-1.5 cm. long\n                             =Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium apiculatum.=\n\n\n\n\nORCHIDACEAE, the Orchis Family\n\nHerbs, with irregular flowers, one petal, the lip, differing from the\nothers in size and shape, inferior ovary, and one or two stamens\nadherent to the style.\n\n\n1a. Flowers in a spike-like obviously twisted raceme; small, yellowish\n    or greenish-white, in late summer and autumn (except 4a) (Ladies'\n    Tresses) --2.\n\n1b. Flowers solitary or in clusters, but never in a twisted raceme --5.\n\n     2a. Flowers in 1 row        =Ladies' Tresses, Spiranthes gracilis.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in several rows --3.\n\n3a. Lip constricted near the apex\n                            =Ladies' Tresses, Spiranthes romanzoftiana.=\n\n3b. Lip not constricted --4.\n\n     4a. Lip yellow; flowers in spring and early summer\n                                   =Ladies' Tresses, Spiranthes lucida.=\n\n     4b. Lip white                 =Ladies' Tresses, Spiranthes cernua.=\n\n5a. Brown, purple, or yellow plants, without green color, with\n    scale-like leaves (1-4 dm. high; summer) (Coral Root) --6.\n\n5b. Plants with normal green color --9.\n\n     6a. Lip white, not spotted     =Coral Root, Corallorrhiza trifida.=\n\n     6b. Lip white, spotted with red --7.\n\n7a. Lip distinctly 3-lobed         =Coral Root, Corallorrhiza maculata.=\n\n7b. Lip entire, or barely toothed --8.\n\n     8a. Flower, exclusive of ovary, 4 mm. long\n                                =Coral Root, Corallorrhiza odontorhiza.=\n\n     8b. Flower about 10 mm. long.  =Coral Root, Corallorrhiza striata.=\n\n9a. Leaf 1 or none at flowering time --10.\n\n9b. Leaves a single pair, basal, or opposite on the stem; never\n    alternate on the stem --19.\n\n9c. Leaves several, all basal, prominently net-veined, and frequently\n    blotched with white (scape 1-4 dm. high; flowers whitish, pubescent,\n    in summer) (Rattlesnake Plantain) --26.\n\n9d. Leaves 2 or more, on the stem --28.\n\n     10a. Foliage leaf absent or undeveloped at flowering time, or\n          merely persisting through the winter from the previous year\n          --11.\n\n     10b. Foliage leaf present at flowering time --12.\n\n11a. Flower rose-purple, 3-5 cm. long, solitary or two (1-3 dm. high,\n     early summer)                         =Arethusa, Arethusa bulbosa.=\n\n11b. Flowers purplish-green, in racemes, with a spur 2 cm. long\n                                 =Crane-fly Orchis, Tipularia discolor.=\n\n11c. Flowers yellowish, purple tinged, in racemes; spur none (3-4 dm.\n     high, early summer).               =Putty Root, Aplectrum hyemale.=\n\n     12a. Leaf linear or linear-lanceolate --13.\n\n     12b. Leaf of a broader shape --14.\n\n13a. Flower solitary or two; leaf just below the flower --11a.\n\n13b. Flowers in a loose raceme, sometimes only 2; leaf basal\n                                      =Calopogon, Calopogon pulchellus.=\n\n     14a. Flowers greenish, yellowish, or white --15.\n\n     14b. Flowers pink to purple, often variegated --17.\n\n15a. Flowers 6-10 mm. wide, with a spur about the same length (1-4 dm.\n     high, summer) (Rein Orchis) --35.\n\n15b. Flowers 5 mm. wide or less; spur none (1-2 dm. high; summer)\n     (Adder's Mouth) --16.\n\n     16a. Pedicels less than 5 mm. long; lip broadest below the middle\n                               =Adder's Mouth, Microstylis monophyllos.=\n\n     16b. Pedicels more than 5 mm. long; lip broadest near the apex\n                                  =Adder's Mouth, Microstylis unifolia.=\n\n17a. Flowers spicate; lip distinctly 3-lobed (1-2 dm. high; early\n     summer) --24.\n\n17b. Flowers solitary or two --18.\n\n     18a. Leaf on the stem, lanceolate to ovate --34a.\n\n     18b. Leaf basal, round-ovate (2 dm. high or less; early summer)\n                                             =Calypso, Calypso bulbosa.=\n\n19a. Leaves opposite and sessile near the middle of the stem (1-3 dm.\n     high; flowers in summer) (Tway-blade) --20.\n\n19b. Leaves basal --21.\n\n     20a. Lip deeply 2-cleft (flowers purplish)\n                                          =Tway-blade, Listera cordata.=\n\n     20b. Lip wedge-shape, with 2 round shallow lobes (flowers\n          greenish-yellow)        =Tway-blade, Listera convallarioides.=\n\n21a. Lip an inflated sac about 4 cm. long --29d.\n\n21b. Lip not sac-like --22.\n\n     22a. Flower with a spur 15-50 mm. long --23.\n\n     22b. Flower not spurred (1-2 dm. high; early summer) (Tway-blade)\n          --25.\n\n23a. Flowers purple or magenta, or with white markings --24.\n\n23b. Flowers greenish, yellowish, or white (1-4 dm. high; summer) (Rein\n     Orchis) --36.\n\n     24a. Leaf 1 (1-2 dm. high; early summer)\n                             =Round-leaved Orchis, Orchis rotundifolia.=\n\n     24b. Leaves 2 (-20 cm. high; late spring)\n                                     =Showy Orchis, Orchis spectabilis.=\n\n25a. Lip about 10 mm. long, purple     =Tway-blade, Liparis liliifolia.=\n\n25b. Lip about 5 mm. long, yellowish-green\n                                         =Tway-blade, Liparis loeselii.=\n\n     26a. Perianth 8-10 mm. long; lip with elongated point\n                            =Rattlesnake Plantain, Epipactis decipiens.=\n\n     26b. Perianth 4-6 mm. long; lip sack-like --27.\n\n27a. Raceme loosely flowered, one-sided\n                =Rattlesnake Plantain, Epipactis repens var. ophioides.=\n\n27b. Raceme closely flowered, not one-sided\n                            =Rattlesnake Plantain, Epipactis pubescens.=\n\n     28a. Lip conspicuously sack-like, inflated (late spring and early\n          summer) (Lady's Slipper) --29.\n\n     28b. Lip not sack-like nor inflated --32.\n\n29a. Lip white (1-3 dm. high)\n                           =White Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium candidum.=\n\n29b. Lip yellow (2-7 dm. high) --30.\n\n29c. Lip white, with crimson or purple markings --31.\n\n29d. Lip pink (1-4 dm. high, late spring)\n                          =Stemless Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium acaule.=\n\n     30a. Lip 2-3 cm. long.\n                 =Small Yellow Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium parviflorum.=\n\n     30b. Lip 3.5-5 cm. long\n  =Large Yellow Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens.=\n\n31a. Lip 2 cm. long or less; sepals separate (1.5-3 dm. high)\n                     =Ram's Head Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium arietinum.=\n\n31b. Lip 3 cm. long or more; the 2 lower sepals united\n                           =Showy Lady's Slipper, Cypripedium hirsutum.=\n\n     32a. Flowers solitary in the axils, or solitary and terminal; not\n          spurred --33.\n\n     32b. Flowers in terminal racemes, spurred --38.\n\n33a. Leaves a whorl of 5 (2-3 dm. high; petals greenish; late summer)\n                                =Whorled Pogonia, Pogonia verticillata.=\n\n33b. Leaves alternate --34.\n\n     34a. Leaves lanceolate or narrowly ovate, 2-8 cm. long, narrowed at\n          base; flower terminal (1-4 dm. high; flowers pink purple,\n          early summer)          =Snake Mouth, Pogonia ophioglossoides.=\n\n     34b. Leaves ovate, 1-2 cm. long, clasping; flowers axillary (5-20\n          cm. high; flowers purple, summer)\n                               =Nodding Pogonia, Pogonia trianthophora.=\n\n35a. Leaf basal; spur nearly straight\n                                      =Rein Orchis, Habenaria obtusata.=\n\n35b. Leaf on the stem; spur strongly curved\n                                    =Rein Orchis, Habenaria clavellata.=\n\n     36a. Flower-stalk without bracts below the raceme; flowers\n          yellowish-green              =Rein Orchis, Habenaria hookeri.=\n\n     36b. Flower-stalk bearing bracts below the raceme; flowers\n          greenish-white --37.\n\n37a. Spur 15-25 mm. long            =Rein Orchis, Habenaria orbiculata.=\n\n37b. Spur 30-50 mm. long           =Rein Orchis, Habenaria macrophylla.=\n\n     38a. Lip fringed (Fringed Orchis) --43.\n\n     38b. Lip not fringed (Rein Orchis) --39.\n\n39a. Lip with 2-3 evident teeth at apex --40.\n\n39b. Lip without apical teeth --41.\n\n     40a. Stem-leaves 3 or more      =Rein Orchis, Habenaria bracteata.=\n\n     40b. Stem-leaves 2 --35b.\n\n41a. Flowers white                    =Rein Orchis, Habenaria dilatata.=\n\n41b. Flowers greenish-yellow --42.\n\n     42a. Lip lanceolate, tapering toward the apex\n                                    =Rein Orchis, Habenaria hyperborea.=\n\n     42b. Lip oblong, truncate at the apex\n                                         =Rein Orchis, Habenaria flava.=\n\n43a. Lip deeply 3-lobed, toothed or fringed --44.\n\n43b. Lip not 3-lobed, but deeply fringed --46.\n\n     44a. Flowers purple    =Purple Fringed Orchis, Habenaria psycodes.=\n\n     44b. Flowers white or nearly so --45.\n\n45a. Spur 3 cm. long or more\n                         =Prairie Fringed Orchis, Habenaria leucophaea.=\n\n45b. Spur 1-1.5 cm. long      =Ragged Fringed Orchis, Habenaria lacera.=\n\n     46a. Flowers yellow    =Yellow Fringed Orchis, Habenaria ciliaris.=\n\n     46b. Flowers white\n                      =White Fringed Orchis, Habenaria blephariglottis.=\n\n\n\n\nPIPERACEAE, the Pepper Family\n\nHerbaceous plants with alternate leaves, and flowers without either\ncalyx or corolla.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, a marsh plant with heart-shape leaves and\nslender racemes of white flowers\n                                      =Lizard's Tail, Saururus cernuus.=\n\n\n\n\nSALICACEAE, the Willow Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with dioecious flowers in catkins.\n\n\n1a. Leaves less than twice as long as broad, on petioles 3 cm. long or\n    more --2.\n\n1b. Leaves more than twice as long as broad, on petioles 2.5 cm. long or\n    less. (The genus Salix, or Willow, contains about 30 species in\n    Michigan, of which only the commoner are mentioned here. For the\n    others the Manuals should be consulted.) --8.\n\n     2a. Petioles strongly flattened laterally --3.\n\n     2b. Petioles not flattened laterally --6.\n\n3a. Leaves broadly ovate or nearly circular --4.\n\n3b. Leaves broadly triangular or deltoid in shape --5.\n\n     4a. Leaves coarsely toothed\n                           =Large-toothed Aspen, Populus grandidentata.=\n\n     4b. Leaves finely crenulate or serrate\n                                   =Quaking Aspen, Populus tremuloides.=\n\n5a. Tree with narrow spire-shape crown\n                          =Lombardy Poplar, Populus nigra var. italica.=\n\n5b. Tree with spreading crown\n                                        =Cottonwood, Populus deltoides.=\n\n     6a. Lower side of leaf densely tomentose\n                                           =White Poplar, Populus alba.=\n\n     6b. Lower side of leaf glabrous or nearly so --7.\n\n7a. Petioles glabrous              =Balsam Poplar, Populus balsamifera.=\n\n7b. Petioles ciliate                =Balm of Gilead, Populus candicans.=\n\n     8a. Trees --9.\n\n     8b. Shrubs --13.\n\n9a. Petioles without glands --10.\n\n9b. Petioles with glands --11.\n\n     10a. Petiole short (about 5 mm.), broad and flat\n                                            =Black Willow, Salix nigra.=\n\n     10b. Petiole slender, about 10-20 mm. long\n                              =Peach-leaved Willow, Salix amygdaloides.=\n\n11a. Leaves green beneath\n                                         =Crack Willow, Salix fragilis.=\n\n11b. Leaves pale beneath --12.\n\n     12a. Branches and twigs conspicuously drooping\n                                     =Weeping Willow, Salix babylonica.=\n\n     12b. Branches and twigs not conspicuously drooping, yellow\n                             =Yellow Willow, Salix alba var. vitellina.=\n\n13a. Shrubs of bogs --14.\n\n13b. Plants of sand-dunes along the Great Lakes --15.\n\n13c. Plants of dry upland hills --16.\n\n13d. Plants of wet ground, river-banks, and swamps --17.\n\n     14a. Leaves densely white-tomentose beneath\n                                                =Willow, Salix candida.=\n\n     14b. Leaves pale beneath but not tomentose\n                                              =Willow, Salix serissima.=\n\n     14c. Leaves glabrous and green beneath\n                                           =Willow, Salix pedicellaris.=\n\n15a. Leaves linear                           =Willow, Salix longifolia.=\n\n15b. Leaves ovate-lanceolate, tomentose beneath\n                                              =Willow, Salix syrticola.=\n\n15c. Leaves ovate-lanceolate, glabrous\n                                           =Willow, Salix glaucophylla.=\n\n     16a. Leaves about 3 times as long as broad\n                                               =Willow, Salix rostrata.=\n\n     16b. Leaves narrower, nearly sessile\n                                                =Willow, Salix tristis.=\n\n     16c. Leaves narrower, distinctly petioled\n                                                =Willow, Salix humilis.=\n\n17a. Leaves linear or nearly so              =Willow, Salix longifolia.=\n\n17b. Leaves shining                              =Willow, Salix lucida.=\n\n17c. Leaves silky                               =Willow, Salix sericea.=\n\n17d. Leaves not as in the preceding 3 species --18.\n\n     18a. Leaves rounded at base                =Willow, Salix cordata.=\n\n     18b. Leaves acute at base --19.\n\n19a. Leaves finely serrulate                 =Willow, Salix petiolaris.=\n\n19b. Leaves remotely serrate or nearly entire\n                                               =Willow, Salix discolor.=\n\n\n\n\nMYRICACEAE, the Sweet Gale Family\n\nShrubs, with monoecious or dioecious flowers in catkins, and aromatic\nfoliage.\n\n\n1a. Leaves pinnately lobed            =Sweet Fern, Myrica asplenifolia.=\n\n1b. Leaves merely serrate --2.\n\n     2a. Shrub of sandy soil, shore of Lake Erie\n                                        =Bayberry, Myrica carolinensis.=\n\n     2b. Shrub of bogs and shores, northern half of state\n                                              =Sweet Gale, Myrica gale.=\n\n\n\n\nJUGLANDACEAE, the Walnut Family\n\nTrees with alternate pinnately compound leaves and flowers in catkins.\n\n\n1a. Leaflets 11-23; pith divided by partitions into chambers --2.\n\n1b. Leaflets 5-11; pith not partitioned (Hickory) --3.\n\n     2a. Pith brown; bark with flat longitudinal ridges\n                                           =Butternut, Juglans cinerea.=\n\n     2b. Pith cream-color; bark of trunk without flat ridges\n                                          =Black Walnut, Juglans nigra.=\n\n3a. Bark of the trunk essentially smooth, not deeply furrowed or shaggy\n    --4.\n\n3b. Bark of the trunk deeply furrowed or shaggy --6.\n\n     4a. Leaflets glabrous beneath; buds greenish --5.\n\n     4b. Leaflets somewhat pubescent beneath; buds bright yellow\n                                        =Bitter Nut, Carya cordiformis.=\n\n5a. Twigs hairy               =Small-fruited Hickory, Carya microcarpa.=\n\n5b. Twigs smooth                         =Pignut Hickory, Carya glabra.=\n\n     6a. Twigs and leaves both pubescent --7.\n\n     6b. Twigs nearly smooth; leaves smooth beneath\n                                       =Shag-bark Hickory, Carya ovata.=\n\n7a. Twigs brownish; buds densely hairy\n                                       =Mocker-nut Hickory, Carya alba.=\n\n7b. Twigs orange; buds very slightly hairy\n                                    =King-nut Hickory, Carya laciniosa.=\n\n\n\n\nBETULACEAE, the Birch Family\n\nTrees or shrubs with alternate simple leaves and inconspicuous\nmonoecious flowers, the staminate flowers in catkins, and the pistillate\nin catkins or small clusters.\n\n\n1a. Trees, with white or yellowish bark exfoliating in thin papery\nplates or scales --2.\n\n1b. Tree or shrub, with smooth, dark gray bark; trunk fluted with\nprominent longitudinal ridges          =Hornbeam, Carpinus caroliniana.=\n\n1c. Trees or shrubs; the bark more or less roughened, but not\n    exfoliating; trunk not fluted --3.\n\n     2a. Bark white or chalky\n                             =Paper Birch, Betula alba var. papyrifera.=\n\n     2b. Bark yellowish                    =Yellow Birch, Betula lutea.=\n\n3a. Shrubs, with leaves 4 cm. long or less --4.\n\n3b. Shrubs or trees, with leaves 5 cm. long or more --5.\n\n     4a. Twigs glandular-warty         =Dwarf Birch, Betula glandulosa.=\n\n     4b. Twigs not glandular               =Swamp Birch, Betula pumila.=\n\n5a. Twigs and bark with the odor of wintergreen\n                                            =Sweet Birch, Betula lenta.=\n\n5b. Twigs and bark without odor of wintergreen --6.\n\n     6a. Fruit clusters woody, persistent on the plant for a long time\n         --7.\n\n     6b. Fruit clusters herbaceous, dropping in late autumn --9.\n\n7a. Leaves rusty or whitish beneath, and pubescent at least on the veins\n                                         =Speckled Alder, Alnus incana.=\n\n7b. Leaves green beneath, and either pubescent or smooth --8.\n\n     8a. Leaves broadest at or below the middle\n                                         =Mountain Alder, Alnus crispa.=\n\n     8b. Leaves broadest above the middle\n                                           =Smooth Alder, Alnus rugosa.=\n\n9a. Tree; fruit a cluster of bladder-like sacs each containing a small\n    achene                                =Ironwood, Ostrya virginiana.=\n\n9b. Shrubs; fruit a nut within a close-fitting involucre --10.\n\n     10a. Involucre of 2 broad bracts, almost separate and not much\n          longer than the fruit              =Hazel, Corylus americana.=\n\n     10b. Involucre of united bracts, prolonged into a bristly beak\n          beyond the fruit             =Beaked Hazel, Corylus rostrata.=\n\n\n\n\nFAGACEAE, the Beech Family\n\nTrees (or 1 species shrubby), with alternate simple leaves and\nmonoecious flowers, the staminate flowers in catkins, and the pistillate\nsolitary or in small clusters. Fruit a nut (or acorn) enclosed in a cup\nor bur.\n\n\n1a. Leaves serrate with numerous sharp-pointed teeth --2.\n\n1b. Leaves serrate, lobed, or entire, but never serrate with\n    sharp-pointed teeth; fruit an acorn; pith 5-angled in the young\n    twigs (Oak) --3.\n\n     2a. Bark gray, smooth; buds 3-4 times longer than wide; nut\n         triangular                          =Beech, Fagus grandifolia.=\n\n     2b. Bark rough; buds relatively thicker; nut rounded\n                                           =Chestnut, Castanea dentata.=\n\n3a. Leaves entire, except for a bristle at the tip\n                                      =Shingle Oak, Quercus imbricaria.=\n\n3b. Leaves toothed or lobed, the points bristle-tipped --4.\n\n3c. Leaves toothed or lobed, the points without bristles --10.\n\n     4a. Leaves entire below the middle, with a few shallow lobes beyond\n                                  =Black Jack Oak, Quercus marilandica.=\n\n     4b. Leaves deeply lobed throughout --5.\n\n5a. Cup of the acorn saucer-shape, covering less than one-third of the\n    acorn --6.\n\n5b. Cup of the acorn hemispherical or top-shape, covering one-third or\n    more of the acorn --8.\n\n     6a. Length of the lateral leaf-lobes less than one-third the width\n     of the leaf; acorn cup 2-2.5 cm. wide\n                                               =Red Oak, Quercus rubra.=\n\n     6b. Length of the lateral leaf-lobes more than one-third the width\n         of the leaf --7.\n\n7a. Acorn depressed-globose, about 1 cm. in diameter\n                                           =Pin Oak, Quercus palustris.=\n\n7b. Acorn ovoid, 1.5-2 cm. thick     =Schneck's Oak, Quercus schneckii.=\n\n     8a. Leaves pubescent beneath         =Black Oak, Quercus velutina.=\n\n     8b. Leaves glabrous beneath --9.\n\n9a. Buds glabrous; inner bark of the trunk yellow\n                                    =Hill's Oak, Quercus ellipsoidalis.=\n\n9b. Buds pubescent beyond the middle; inner bark of trunk red\n                                        =Scarlet Oak, Quercus coccinea.=\n\n     10a. Leaves deeply pinnately lobed --11.\n\n     10b. Leaves crenate, dentate, or sinuate, not lobed --12.\n\n11a. Leaf divided nearly to the middle by a pair of deep lateral lobes\n     near the middle of the leaf; acorn more than half covered by the\n     cup                                  =Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa.=\n\n11b. Leaf without a median pair of deeper lobes; acorn about one-fourth\n     covered by the cup                       =White Oak, Quercus alba.=\n\n     12a. Leaves broadest at or near the middle, with numerous (8-13)\n          sharp coarse teeth on each side\n                                     =Yellow Oak, Quercus muhlenbergii.=\n\n     12b. Leaves broadest above the middle, with a few shallow, rounded\n          or subacute teeth (7 or less on each side) --13.\n\n13a. Large tree; leaves densely white-tomentose beneath; acorn on a\n     stalk 3-10 cm. long             =Swamp White Oak, Quercus bicolor.=\n\n13b. Shrub; leaves thinly white-tomentose beneath; acorn sessile or\n     nearly so                           =Scrub Oak, Quercus prinoides.=\n\n\n\n\nURTICACEAE, the Nettle Family\n\nHerbs or trees, with small inconspicuous apetalous flowers.\n\n\n1a. Trees or tall shrubs --2.\n\n1b. Herbs --7.\n\n     2a. Leaves oblong-ovate to lanceolate, serrate --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves broadly ovate to rotund, some of them lobed (Mulberry)\n         --6.\n\n3a. Leaves thick, coarsely and doubly serrate, broadest near the middle\n    (Elm) --4.\n\n3b. Leaves thin, simply serrate, broadest distinctly below the middle\n                                       =Hackberry, Celtis occidentalis.=\n\n     4a. Some of the branches with flat corky wings; leaves smooth above\n                                             =Cork Elm, Ulmus racemosa.=\n\n     4b. Branches without corky wings; leaves more or less rough above\n         --5.\n\n5a. Petioles and axillary buds glabrous    =White Elm, Ulmus americana.=\n\n5b. Petioles and axillary buds pubescent with rusty hairs\n                                            =Slippery Elm, Ulmus fulva.=\n\n     6a. Leaves rough above                 =Red Mulberry, Morus rubra.=\n\n     6b. Leaves smooth above               =White Mulberry, Morus alba.=\n\n7a. Leaves alternate --8.\n\n7b. Leaves opposite --9.\n\n     8a. Leaves 2-5 cm. long, stems pubescent\n                                  =Pellitory, Parietaria pennsylvanica.=\n\n     8b. Leaves 8-20 cm. long; stem armed with stinging hairs\n                                     =Wood Nettle, Laportea canadensis.=\n\n9a. Twining plant; leaves serrate or cleft       =Hop, Humulus lupulus.=\n\n9b. Erect plant; leaves palmately compound      =Hemp, Cannabis sativa.=\n\n9c. Erect plants; leaves not lobed or compound --10.\n\n     10a. Stems armed with stinging hairs --11.\n\n     10b. Stems glabrous or rough, but not with stinging hairs --12.\n\n11a. Leaves ovate, with a heart-shape base\n                                       =Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica.=\n\n11b. Leaves lanceolate or ovate-lanceolate, not heart-shape at base\n                                      =Slender Nettle, Urtica gracilis.=\n\n     12a. Stems glabrous, pellucid\n                                              =Clearweed, Pilea pumila.=\n\n     12b. Stems rough, opaque      =False Nettle, Boehmeria cylindrica.=\n\n\n\n\nSANTALACEAE, the Sandalwood Family\n\nLow herbs with alternate entire leaves and terminal clusters of small\ngreenish-white bell-shape flowers without petals in spring and early\nsummer.\n\n\n1a. Inflorescence of several-flowered clusters terminating the stem and\n    in the upper axils                  =Toad-flax, Comandra umbellata.=\n\n1b. Inflorescence of axillary clusters of 1-5 flowers\n                                           =Toad-flax, Comandra livida.=\n\n\n\n\nLORANTHACEAE, the Mistletoe Family\n\nParasitic plants, attached to the branches of trees.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, a dwarf brown plant 5-20 mm. long, with minute\nscale-like leaves, growing on the branches of Black Spruce\n                               =Dwarf Mistletoe, Arceuthobium pusillum.=\n\n\n\n\nARISTOLOCHIACEAE, the Birthwort Family\n\nFlowers greenish-brown or reddish-brown, at or near the ground, with\ninferior 6-celled ovary.\n\n\n1a. Leaves alternate, on the stem; flowers on a basal scaly branch (1-4\n    dm. high; summer)    =Virginia Snakeroot, Aristolochia serpentaria.=\n\n1b. Leaves a single basal pair, bearing 1 short-stalked flower between\n    them (spring) (Wild Ginger) --2.\n\n     2a. Lobes of the perianth ending in a tubular portion 5-8 mm. long\n                                        =Wild Ginger, Asarum canadense.=\n\n     2b. Lobes of the perianth ending in a tubular portion over 1 cm.\n         long           =Wild Ginger, Asarum canadense var. acuminatum.=\n\n     2c. Lobes of the perianth triangular, not tubular at the end\n                          =Wild Ginger, Asarum canadense var. reflexum.=\n\n\n\n\nPOLYGONACEAE, the Buckwheat Family\n\nHerbs with alternate entire leaves, stipules surrounding the stem above\nthe base of each leaf, and small green, white or pink flowers without\npetals.\n\n\n1a. Erect or ascending or prostrate or floating plants --2.\n\n1b. Scrambling or climbing plants, clinging by sharp recurved prickles\n    on the 4-angled stems (flowers greenish or pink, summer)\n    (Tear-thumb) --32.\n\n1c. Twining vines (flowers white or greenish, summer) --33.\n\n     2a. Sepals 6, the 3 inner ones enlarging in fruit and surrounding\n         the achenes; flowers in panicles --3.\n\n     2b. Sepals 4 or 5 (occasional flowers may be found with 6 sepals,\n         but the flowers are not in panicles) (summer) --13.\n\n3a. Leaves arrow-shape or halberd-shape, with 2 basal lobes (Sorrel)\n    --4.\n\n3b. Leaves without basal lobes (Dock) --5.\n\n     4a. Leaves halberd-shape, the basal lobes directed sidewise\n                                         =Red Sorrel, Rumex acetosella.=\n\n     4b. Leaves arrow-shape, the basal lobes directed backward\n                                          =Green Sorrel, Rumex acetosa.=\n\n5a. The projecting wings of the fruiting calyx (known as valves) with\n    sharp slender teeth               =Bitter Dock, Rumex obtusifolius.=\n\n5b. Valves entire or finely dentate, but without sharp slender teeth\n    --6.\n\n     6a. Pedicels straight, thickened toward the end, all regularly\n         deflexed, 3-4 times longer than the fruiting calyx\n                                      =Swamp Dock, Rumex verticillatus.=\n\n     6b. Pedicels slender, flexuous, spreading --7.\n\n7a. Leaves flat or nearly so --8.\n\n7b. Leaves with strongly crisped or wavy-curled margins; plants usually\n    of cultivated grounds or waste places (5-10 dm., summer) --12.\n\n     8a. With grain-like tubercles on all 3 valves of the fruit --9.\n\n     8b. With grain-like tubercles on only one valve, or entirely\n         lacking --10.\n\n9a. Valves broadly cordate, finely toothed\n                                         =Water Dock, Rumex brittanica.=\n\n9b. Valves triangular-ovate, entire or nearly so\n                                                =Dock, Rumex mexicanus.=\n\n     10a. Valves oblong                 =Bloody Dock, Rumex sanguineus.=\n\n     10b. Valves broadly heart-shape --11.\n\n11a. Grain-like tubercle less than half as long as the valve\n                                       =Patience Dock, Rumex patientia.=\n\n11b. Grain-like tubercle more than half as long as the valve\n                                          =Tall Dock, Rumex altissimus.=\n\n     12a. The grain-like tubercle on the valves of the fruit broadly\n          ellipsoid, with rounded apex       =Sour Dock, Rumex crispus.=\n\n     12b. Tubercle ovoid with tapering apex\n                                           =Sour Dock, Rumex elongatus.=\n\n13a. Flowers inconspicuous, in small axillary clusters; leaves jointed\n     at the base (Knotweed) --14.\n\n13b. Flowers more or less conspicuous, in obvious spikes or racemes\n     which terminate the stems or branches, or arise from the axils of\n     the upper leaves --18.\n\n     14a. Leaves sharply folded lengthwise (1-4 dm. tall)\n                                            =Knotweed, Polygonum tenue.=\n\n     14b. Leaves flat or nearly so --15.\n\n15a. The small sepals pink or white at the margin (stems prostrate or\n     ascending) --16.\n\n15b. Sepals greenish or yellowish throughout (stems erect or ascending)\n     --17.\n\n     16a. Leaves thin; common weed of dooryards and gardens\n                                        =Knotweed, Polygonum aviculare.=\n\n     16b. Leaves thick and fleshy; a plant of sandy shores\n                         =Knotweed, Polygonum aviculare var. littorale.=\n\n17a. Leaves narrowly lanceolate or linear-oblong; rare species\n                                     =Knotweed, Polygonum ramosissimum.=\n\n17b. Leaves broadly oblong, oval, or elliptical; common weed of yards\n     and gardens                          =Knotweed, Polygonum erectum.=\n\n     18a. Leaves broadly triangular (3-7 dm. high; flowers white)\n                                      =Buckwheat, Fagopyrum esculentum.=\n\n     18b. Leaves from linear to ovate or oblong --19.\n\n19a. Sepals 4; flowers in very long and slender spike-like racemes (4-10\n     dm. high)                        =Knotweed, Polygonum virginianum.=\n\n19b. Sepals 5; flowers in spikes or racemes --20.\n\n     20a. Flowers on slender pedicels, forming a loose raceme; leaves\n          linear, jointed at the base (1-3 dm. high; flowers pink or\n          white; chiefly near the Great Lakes)\n                                    =Jointweed, Polygonella articulata.=\n\n     20b. Flowers sessile or nearly so, forming a spike or spike-like\n          raceme --21.\n\n21a. Stipular sheaths at the base of the leaves ciliate at their upper\n     margin --22.\n\n21b. Stipular sheaths not ciliate at the upper margin --28.\n\n     22a. Sheaths with spreading borders --23.\n\n     22b. Sheaths without a spreading border, appressed to the stem\n          (Smartweed) --24.\n\n23a. Leaves ovate, acuminate; stem erect (1-2 m. high; flowers pink)\n                                =Prince's Feather, Polygonum orientate.=\n\n23b. Leaves oblong, obtuse or subacute; spreading or ascending plant of\n     wet soil  =Water Smartweed, Polygonum amphibium var. hartwrightii.=\n\n     24a. Peduncles with glandular hairs (5-15 dm. high)\n                                          =Smartweed, Polygonum careyi.=\n\n     24b. Peduncles not glandular (1-8 dm. high) (Smartweed) --25.\n\n25a. Sepals beset with minute black dots --26.\n\n25b. Sepals white, pink, or red, not black-dotted --27.\n\n     26a. Racemes drooping or nodding at the tip; achene dull-\n                                      =Smartweed, Polygonum hydropiper.=\n\n     26b. Racemes erect; achene smooth and shining\n                                            =Smartweed, Polygonum acre.=\n\n27a. Sheaths smooth; leaves usually with a dark spot near the base\n                                      =Smartweed, Polygonum persicaria.=\n\n27b. Sheaths hairy; leaves not dark-spotted\n                                 =Smartweed, Polygonum hydropiperoides.=\n\n     28a. Leaves obtuse or somewhat acute at the apex --29.\n\n     28b. Leaves acuminate at the apex (5-15 dm. high; flowers white to\n          pink) (Smartweed) --30.\n\n29a. Stem unbranched, erect, bearing a single terminal raceme (5-30 cm.\n     high; flowers pink)                 =Bistort, Polygonum viviparum.=\n\n29b. Stem branched, submerged in water or creeping on muddy shores\n     (flowers pink)              =Water Smartweed, Polygonum amphibium.=\n\n     30a. Raceme single or two; leaves broadly ovate-lanceolate, about 3\n          times as long as wide     =Smartweed, Polygonum muhlenbergii.=\n\n     30b. Racemes numerous; leaves lanceolate, 4-6 times as long as wide\n          --31.\n\n31a. Racemes drooping or nodding at the tip\n                                   =Smartweed, Polygonum lapathifolium.=\n\n31b. Racemes erect                =Smartweed, Polygonum pennsylvanicum.=\n\n     32a. Leaves arrow-shape, the basal lobes pointing backward\n                                     =Tear-thumb, Polygonum sagittatum.=\n\n     32b. Leaves halberd-shape, the basal lobes pointing sidewise\n                                      =Tear-thumb, Polygonum arifolium.=\n\n33a. The three outer sepals becoming conspicuously winged in fruit\n     (False Buckwheat) --34.\n\n33b. The sepals all unchanged in fruit, except in size (Black Bindweed)\n     --35.\n\n     34a. Wings of the fruit with wavy-curled margins\n                                  =False Buckwheat, Polygonum scandens.=\n\n     34b. Wings of the fruit flat\n                                 =False Buckwheat, Polygonum dumetorum.=\n\n35a. Leaf-sheaths with a ring of bristles at the base\n                                   =Black Bindweed, Polygonum cilinode.=\n\n35b. Leaf-sheaths without a ring of bristles\n                                =Black Bindweed, Polygonum convolvulus.=\n\n\n\n\nCHENOPODIACEAE, the Goosefoot Family\n\nHerbs, with inconspicuous greenish or reddish flowers without petals, in\nsummer.\n\n\n1a. Leaves linear or nearly so, entire --2.\n\n1b. Leaves of a broader shape, usually toothed or lobed --5.\n\n     2a. Leaves rather stiff, narrowly linear or thread-like, with\n         spine-like tips\n                        =Russian Thistle, Salsola kali var. tenuifolia.=\n\n     2b. Leaves soft, not spine-like --3.\n\n3a. Widely branched, rather diffuse, 1-5 dm. tall; plant of the shore of\n    the Great Lakes               =Bug-seed, Corispermum hyssopifolium.=\n\n3b. Erect plants with ascending branches --4.\n\n     4a. Leaves glabrous (3-6 dm. tall)\n                                  =Goosefoot, Chenopodium leptophyllum.=\n\n     4b. Leaves minutely ciliate on the margin (bushy branched, 5-10 dm.\n         tall)                                =Kochia, Kochia scoparia.=\n\n5a. Principal leaves with a broad truncate, rounded, or hastate base\n    --6.\n\n5b. Principal leaves narrowed to the base --12.\n\n     6a. Leaves broadly ovate, with 1-4 large sharp projecting teeth on\n         each side                    =Goosefoot, Chenopodium hybridum.=\n\n     6b. Leaves hastate or triangular-ovate, entire or with many teeth\n         --7.\n\n7a. Leaves entire or merely undulate --8.\n\n7b. Leaves sharply or sinuately toothed --9.\n\n     8a. Stem erect, simple or sparingly branched\n                          =Good King Henry, Chenopodium bonus-henricus.=\n\n     8b. Stem diffuse or ascending, freely branched\n                                              =Orache, Atriplex patula.=\n\n9a. Flowers in small heads, in the axils or in terminal spikes; leaves\n    sinuately toothed or nearly entire\n                              =Strawberry Blite, Chenopodium capitatum.=\n\n9b. Flowers in terminal panicles; leaves sharply toothed (Goosefoot)\n    --10.\n\n     10a. Panicles short, not as long as the subtending leaves\n                                        =Goosefoot, Chenopodium murale.=\n\n     10b. Panicles long, exceeding the subtending leaves --11.\n\n11a. Calyx green                       =Goosefoot, Chenopodium urbicum.=\n\n11b. Calyx red                          =Goosefoot, Chenopodium rubrum.=\n\n     12a. Foliage glandular and strongly aromatic --13.\n\n     12b. Foliage not glandular nor aromatic; sometimes ill-scented\n          --15.\n\n13a. Flowers in large loose open spreading panicles; leaves deeply\n     pinnatifid                     =Jerusalem Oak, Chenopodium botrys.=\n\n13b. Flowers clustered in slender axillary or terminal spikes --14.\n\n     14a. Spikes dense, leafy   =Mexican Tea, Chenopodium ambrosioides.=\n\n     14b. Spikes open, nearly leafless\n               =Wormseed, Chenopodium ambrosioides var. anthelminticum.=\n\n15a. Stem erect, 5-20 dm. tall; leaves frequently white-mealy\n                                   =Lamb's Quarters, Chenopodium album.=\n\n15b. Stem prostrate or ascending, succulent; leaves glaucous-white\n     beneath                           =Goosefoot, Chenopodium glaucum.=\n\n15c. Stem widely and diffusely branched; leaves green, soon deciduous\n                                 =Cycloloma, Cycloloma atriplicifolium.=\n\n\n\n\nAMARANTHACEAE, the Amaranth Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate leaves, and inconspicuous greenish or reddish\nflowers without petals, which are axillary or in dense clusters,\nblooming in summer.\n\n\n1a. Flower-clusters axillary --2.\n\n1b. Flower-clusters in terminal spikes or panicles, sometimes also\n    axillary --3.\n\n     2a. Plant prostrate or decumbent; seed about 1.5 mm. broad\n                                        =Pigweed, Amaranthus blitoides.=\n\n     2b. Plant erect or ascending, widely branched; seeds about 1 mm.\n         broad (3-10 dm. high)     =Tumble Weed, Amaranthus graecizans.=\n\n3a. Principal leaves with a pair of spines at their base\n                                 =Thorny Amaranth, Amaranthus spinosus.=\n\n3b. Spines none at the base of the leaves --4.\n\n     4a. Weedy plants of cultivated or waste ground; flowers monoecious\n         or polygamous; pistillate flowers with a calyx (Pigweed) --5.\n\n     4b. Plants of swamps or stream-banks; flowers dioecious; pistillate\n         flowers without calyx (Water Hemp) --7.\n\n5a. Spikes short, 1-8 cm. long, crowded in dense ovoid panicles; the\n    terminal spike not conspicuously elongated beyond the appressed or\n    ascending lower ones              =Pigweed, Amaranthus retroflexus.=\n\n5b. Spikes slender, 1-12 cm. long; the terminal spike greatly exceeding\n    the short inconspicuous divergent lower ones --6.\n\n     6a. Bracts subulate, sharply awned  =Pigweed, Amaranthus hybridus.=\n\n     6b. Bracts merely acuminate      =Pigweed, Amaranthus paniculatus.=\n\n7a. Flowers in leafy spikes, or the lower in separate clusters\n                                       =Water Hemp, Acnida tuberculata.=\n\n7b. Flowers in separate distinct clusters\n                          =Water Hemp, Acnida tuberculata var. subnuda.=\n\n\n\n\nPHYTOLACCACEAE, the Pokeweed Family\n\nHerbs with alternate entire leaves, small flowers without petals, and a\nmany-celled ovary.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 1-2 m. high, with numerous racemes of whitish\nflowers, in late summer, followed by dark-purple berries\n                                        =Pokeweed, Phytolacca decandra.=\n\n\n\n\nNYCTAGINACEAE, the Four-o'Clock Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite entire leaves and flowers in small clusters\nsurrounded by a broad open calyx-like involucre; the true calyx \nlike a corolla; petals none (4-8 dm. high; flowers purple, in summer).\n\n\n1a. Leaves lanceolate or narrower, sessile\n                                    =Umbrella-wort, Oxybaphus hirsutus.=\n\n1b. Leaves ovate, petioled\n                                 =Umbrella-wort, Oxybaphus nyctagineus.=\n\n\n\n\nILLECEBRACEAE, the Knotwort Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite entire leaves, and minute flowers without petals.\n(Prostrate spreading or freely branched plants, 3 dm. high or less;\nflowers in summer.)\n\n\n1a. Stipules none; leaves slightly connate at base, subulate\n                                           =Knawel, Scleranthus annuus.=\n\n1b. Stipules present, but small; leaves elliptical or oval (Forked\n    Chickweed) --2.\n\n     2a. Stems pubescent; internodes seldom more than 1 cm. long\n                               =Forked Chickweed, Anychia polygonoides.=\n\n     2b. Stems smooth; internodes about 2 cm. long\n                                 =Forked Chickweed, Anychia canadensis.=\n\n\n\n\nAIZOACEAE, the Carpet-weed Family\n\nProstrate herbs, with whorled leaves and small whitish axillary flowers\nwithout petals, in summer.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan             =Carpet-weed, Mollugo verticillata.=\n\n\n\n\nCARYOPHYLLACEAE, the Pink Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite or whorled entire leaves, and stems frequently\nswollen at the nodes. Sepals 4 or 5; petals separate, as many as the\nsepals, or rarely none; stamens twice as many as the petals in plants\nwith conspicuous flowers, sometimes fewer in those with small flowers;\novary 1-celled, with the ovules on a central axis, and with 2-5 styles.\n\n\n1a. Calyx spreading, of separate sepals; flowers 15 mm. wide or less;\n    petals sometimes none --2.\n\n1b. Calyx tubular, of united sepals; flowers in many species more than\n    15 mm. wide; petals always present --22.\n\n     2a. Stipules present --3.\n\n     2b. Stipules none --4.\n\n3a. Leaves opposite; flowers pink (about 1 dm. high; summer)\n                                      =Sand Spurrey, Spergularia rubra.=\n\n3b. Leaves whorled; flowers white (1-5 dm. high; leaves linear; summer)\n                                           =Spurrey, Spergula arvensis.=\n\n     4a. Leaves subulate or thread-like --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves linear to ovate --7.\n\n5a. Leaves opposite (1 dm. high or less; flowers white, summer)\n                                         =Pearlwort, Sagina procumbens.=\n\n5b. Leaves fascicled in the axils --6.\n\n     6a. Styles 4 or 5 (1 dm. high; terminal white flowers 5 mm. wide,\n         in summer)                          =Pearlwort, Sagina nodosa.=\n\n     6b. Styles 3 (1-4 dm. high; flowers white, nearly 1 cm. wide,\n         summer)                         =Stitchwort, Arenaria stricta.=\n\n7a. Petals entire (3 dm. high or less; flowers white, in summer)\n    (Stitchwort) --8.\n\n7b. Petals notched or 2-cleft at the end, or none --11.\n\n     8a. Principal leaves 1 cm. long or less --9.\n\n     8b. Principal leaves 1.5 cm. long or more --10.\n\n9a. Petals half as long as the sepals\n                                     =Stitchwort, Arenaria leptoclados.=\n\n9b. Petals almost as long as the sepals\n                                   =Stitchwort, Arenaria serpyllifolia.=\n\n10a. Leaves oblong-oval, obtuse.     =Stitchwort, Arenaria lateriflora.=\n\n10b. Leaves lanceolate, acute.       =Stitchwort, Arenaria macrophylla.=\n\n11a. Capsule splitting by valves at maturity; styles usually 3\n     (Chickweed) --12.\n\n11b. Capsule opening by terminal teeth at maturity; styles usually 5\n     (tufted or matted plants, 1-5 dm. high; flowers white, in spring\n     and summer) (Mouse-ear Chickweed) --18.\n\n     12a. Petals distinctly shorter than the sepals, or none --13.\n\n     12b. Petals as long as the sepals, or longer --15.\n\n13a. Leaves ovate (1-3 dm. high; flowers white, all summer)\n                                           =Chickweed, Stellaria media.=\n\n13b. Leaves lanceolate to oblong (in water or wet places, 1-4 dm. high;\n     flowers white, in summer) --14.\n\n     14a. Flowers in a leafy terminal branching cluster\n                                        =Chickweed, Stellaria borealis.=\n\n     14b. Flowers in a lateral cluster with minute bracts\n                                       =Chickweed, Stellaria uliginosa.=\n\n15a. Flowers in clusters with leaf-like bracts, or axillary and solitary\n     (in water or wet places; 1-3 dm. high; flowers white, summer)\n                                     =Chickweed, Stellaria crassifolia.=\n\n15b. Flowers in clusters with scale-like bracts --16.\n\n     16a. Leaves distinctly linear; cymes lateral; a common species in\n          marshes (2-5 dm. high; flowers white, early summer)\n                                      =Chickweed, Stellaria longifolia.=\n\n     16b. Leaves distinctly broadest near the base; flower-cluster\n          terminal --17.\n\n17a. Pedicels erect; clusters usually few-flowered; in extreme northern\n     part of the state only (1-3 dm. high; flowers white, summer)\n                                        =Chickweed, Stellaria longipes.=\n\n17b. Pedicels spreading; clusters open, many-flowered (2-6 dm. high;\n     flowers white, in summer)          =Chickweed, Stellaria graminea.=\n\n     18a. Petals distinctly longer than the sepals --19.\n\n     18b. Petals as long as the sepals, or shorter than them --21.\n\n19a. Flowers much less than 1 cm. wide\n                                =Mouse-ear Chickweed, Cerastium nutans.=\n\n19b. Flowers more than 1 cm. wide --20.\n\n     20a. Stem-leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate\n                               =Mouse-ear Chickweed, Cerastium arvense.=\n\n     20b. Stem-leaves oblong\n            =Mouse-ear Chickweed, Cerastium arvense var. oblongifolium.=\n\n21a. Bracts green; pedicels short and inflorescence crowded\n                              =Mouse-ear Chickweed, Cerastium viscosum.=\n\n21b. Bracts with transparent white margins; pedicels longer than the\n     calyx and inflorescence open\n                              =Mouse-ear Chickweed, Cerastium vulgatum.=\n\n     22a. Styles 5 --23.\n\n     22b. Styles 3 (3-10 dm. high; flowers in summer) --25.\n\n     22c. Styles 2 --29.\n\n23a. Calyx-teeth much longer than the calyx-tube (erect, 4-10 dm. high;\n     flowers large, red, late summer)\n                                      =Corn Cockle, Agrostemma githago.=\n\n23b. Calyx-teeth shorter than the calyx-tube (4-10 dm. high; flowers in\n     summer) --24.\n\n     24a. Flowers crimson             =Mullein Pink, Lychnis coronaria.=\n\n     24b. Flowers white or pink           =White Campion, Lychnis alba.=\n\n25a. Flowers night-blooming, always wilted during the day\n                                          =Catchfly, Silene noctiflora.=\n\n25b. Flowers open during the day --26.\n\n     26a. Flowers 6 mm. wide or less, white or pink\n                                          =Catchfly, Silene antirrhina.=\n\n     26b. Flowers 1-2 cm. wide, white to pink or purple --27.\n\n     26c. Flowers 2 cm. wide or more, crimson\n                                          =Fire Pink, Silene virginica.=\n\n27a. Principal leaves in whorls of 4\n                                      =Starry Campion, Silene stellata.=\n\n27b. Leaves opposite --28.\n\n     28a. Calyx globular, much inflated or bladder-like\n                                    =Bladder Campion, Silene latifolia.=\n\n     28b. Calyx club-shape, not inflated\n                               =Sweet William Catchfly, Silene armeria.=\n\n29a. Leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate, 5 mm. wide or less (flowers\n     pink or white, in summer) --30.\n\n29b. Leaves lanceolate or ovate (flowers pink, white, or red, in summer)\n     --32.\n\n30a. Flowers in terminal clusters; leaves hairy (2-4 dm. high)\n                                      =Deptford Pink, Dianthus armeria.=\n\n30b. Flowers solitary at the ends of long pedicels --31.\n\n31a. Flowers 3-4 mm. wide (1-2 dm. high)\n                                       =Gypsophyll, Gypsophila muralis.=\n\n31b. Flowers 1 cm. wide or more (1-5 dm. high)\n                                      =Meadow Pink, Dianthus deltoides.=\n\n     32a. Flowers less than 1 cm. broad --33.\n\n     32b. Flowers more than 1 cm. broad --34.\n\n33a. Flowers white, in large panicles (4-7 dm. high)\n                                 =Baby's Breath, Gypsophila paniculata.=\n\n33b. Flowers pale red, in loose clusters (4-10 dm. high)\n                                          =Cowherb, Saponaria vaccaria.=\n\n     34a. Leaves with 3-5 prominent veins (4-7 dm. high)\n                                      =Soapwort, Saponaria officinalis.=\n\n     34b. Leaves with one mid-vein (3-6 dm. high)\n                                     =Sweet William, Dianthus barbatus.=\n\n\n\n\nPORTULACACEAE, the Purslane Family\n\nHerbs with opposite or alternate leaves and regular flowers with 2\nsepals, 5 petals, and a 1-celled ovary with 2 or 3 styles.\n\n\n1a. Leaves a single pair on each stem (1-2 dm. high; flowers pink, in\n    racemes in early spring) (Spring Beauty) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves numerous (prostrate or spreading; flowers in summer) --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves lance-ovate to oblong, not more than six times as long\n         as wide                 =Spring Beauty, Claytonia caroliniana.=\n\n     2b. Leaves linear or linear-lanceolate, more than six times as long\n         as wide                   =Spring Beauty, Claytonia virginica.=\n\n3a. Flowers yellow, about 5 mm. wide     =Purslane, Portulaca oleracea.=\n\n3b. Flowers 2-5 cm. wide             =Portulaca, Portulaca grandiflora.=\n\n\n\n\nCERATOPHYLLACEAE, the Hornwort Family\n\nSubmerged aquatics, with whorled, finely dissected leaves and\ninconspicuous flowers with neither calyx nor corolla.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan              =Hornwort, Ceratophyllum demersum.=\n\n\n\n\nNYMPHAEACEAE, the Water Lily Family\n\nAquatic plants, with usually large and floating leaves which are round\nor elliptical and palmately veined.\n\n\n1a. Floating and emersed leaves centrally peltate --2.\n\n1b. Leaves rounded but not peltate, with a deep sinus --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves round, 3 dm. in diameter or more; flowers very large,\n         pale yellow                             =Lotus, Nelumbo lutea.=\n\n     2b. Leaves oval, 5-15 cm. long; flowers small, purple\n                                     =Water Shield, Brasenia schreberi.=\n\n3a. Flowers yellow (Pond Lily) --4.\n\n3b. Flowers white or tinged with pink (Water Lily) --5.\n\n     4a. Leaves more than 1 dm. long       =Pond Lily, Nymphaea advena.=\n\n     4b. Leaves less than 1 dm. long  =Pond Lily, Nymphaea microphylla.=\n\n5a. Flowers very fragrant; leaves purplish beneath\n                                         =Water Lily, Castalia odorata.=\n\n5b. Flowers not fragrant; leaves green beneath\n                                        =Water Lily, Castalia tuberosa.=\n\n\n\n\nRANUNCULACEAE, the Crowfoot Family\n\nHerbs with alternate (rarely opposite) leaves, acrid watery juice,\nseparate sepals and petals, numerous stamens, and several or many\n(rarely only 1) simple pistils. Petals present or absent, in the latter\ncase the sepals are usually petal-like in appearance.\n\n\n1a. Climbing plants with opposite leaves (flowers in late summer)\n    (Virgin's Bower) --2.\n\n1b. Aquatic plants with dissected submerged leaves (flowers in late\n    spring and summer) (Water Crowfoot) --3.\n\n1c. Terrestrial or mud plants, not agreeing with 1a or 1b --6.\n\n     2a. Flowers white, 2-3 cm. wide\n                                  =Virgin's Bower, Clematis virginiana.=\n\n     2b. Flowers pink-purple, 5-8 cm. wide\n                               =Virgin's Bower, Clematis verticillaris.=\n\n3a. Flowers white --4.\n\n3b. Flowers yellow --5.\n\n     4a. Leaves rigid, not collapsing when removed from the water\n                                =Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus circinatus.=\n\n     4b. Leaves soft, collapsing when removed from the water\n                =Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus aquatilis var. capillaceus.=\n\n5a. Submerged leaves divided into hair-like segments\n                            =Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus delphinifolius.=\n\n5b. Submerged leaves palmately divided into linear lobes\n                                   =Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus purshii.=\n\n     6a. Flowers blue, irregular, with one spur (4-8 dm. high, summer)\n                                          =Larkspur, Delphinium ajacis.=\n\n     6b. The five petals each prolonged into a spur; flowers showy (4-8\n         dm. tall) (Columbine) --7.\n\n     6c. Flowers regular, without spurs --8.\n\n7a. Spurs nearly straight; flowers scarlet and yellow (spring)\n                                 =Wild Columbine, Aquilegia canadensis.=\n\n7b. Spurs strongly incurved; flowers blue or white (spring, early\n    summer)                             =Columbine, Aquilegia vulgaris.=\n\n     8a. Flowers yellow --9.\n\n     8b. Flowers of various colors, but never yellow --28.\n\n9a. Petals none; sepals petal-like; leaves crenate or dentate (2-4 dm.\n    high, flowers in early spring)          =Cowslip, Caltha palustris.=\n\n9b. Petals small; sepals petal-like; leaves deeply palmately lobed (4-6\n    dm. tall; flowers in late spring)    =Globe-flower, Trollius laxus.=\n\n9c. Petals yellow; sepals green or yellowish --10.\n\n     10a. Leaves linear to narrowly oblong, entire or with minute teeth\n          (flowers 10-15 mm. wide, in summer) --11.\n\n     10b. Leaves broader, some or all of them lobed or divided, or\n          cordate-ovate and not lobed --12.\n\n11a. Stems ascending (4-8 dm. high), rooting at the lower joints; fruits\n     pointed with a long slender beak\n                                     =Spearwort, Ranunculus laxicaulis.=\n\n11b. Stems prostrate and trailing, rooting at the joints; fruits tipped\n     with a minute short beak\n                          =Spearwort, Ranunculus flammula var. reptans.=\n\n     12a. Basal leaves, or most of them, merely serrate or crenate, and\n          not obviously lobed --13.\n\n     12b. All the leaves lobed or divided --16.\n\n13a. Stem-leaves resembling the basal ones, and not lobed (1-2 dm. high;\n     summer)                 =Sea-side Crowfoot, Ranunculus cymbalaria.=\n\n13b. Stem-leaves deeply divided into oblong or linear segments --14.\n\n     14a. Flowers 1.5 cm. wide or more (1-3 dm. high; spring)\n                                    =Buttercup, Ranunculus rhomboideus.=\n\n     14b. Flowers 1 cm. wide or less (2-5 dm. high; spring) --15.\n\n15a. Foliage glabrous or minutely pubescent; basal leaves cordate\n                        =Small-flowered Crowfoot, Ranunculus abortivus.=\n\n15b. Foliage villous; basal leaves barely cordate or not at all\n                       =Small-flowered Crowfoot, Ranunculus micranthus.=\n\n     16a. Stem erect or essentially so --17.\n\n     16b. Stem prostrate, creeping, or ascending. Early in spring\n          stems may be found which appear almost erect. Common\n          spring-flowering buttercups are all classified here --22.\n\n17a. Flowers 2 cm. broad or larger (Buttercup) --18.\n\n17b. Flowers 1 cm. broad or smaller --19.\n\n     18a. Terminal lobe of leaf stalked (2-5 dm. high, early summer)\n                                       =Buttercup, Ranunculus bulbosus.=\n\n     18b. Terminal lobe of leaf sessile (5-10 dm. high; all summer)\n                                          =Buttercup, Ranunculus acris.=\n\n19a. Plant glabrous, succulent; stem hollow (1-5 dm. high; spring and\n     summer)                   =Cursed Crowfoot, Ranunculus sceleratus.=\n\n19b. Plant pubescent (Buttercup) --20.\n\n     20a. Fruits tipped with a prominent recurved beak; plant of shady\n          woods (2-6 dm. high; flowers in late spring)\n                                     =Buttercup, Ranunculus recurvatus.=\n\n     20b. Fruits tipped with a straight or slightly curved beak; plants\n          of marshes or wet soil (3-6 dm. high; flowers in summer) --21.\n\n21a. Fruits in a short-cylindric head on a conical receptacle\n                                 =Buttercup, Ranunculus pennsylvanicus.=\n\n21b. Fruits in a globose or short-ovoid head, on an obovoid receptacle\n                                       =Buttercup, Ranunculus macounii.=\n\n     22a. Leaves dissected into numerous linear or narrowly wedge-shape\n          divisions; plants growing in water or very wet places (late\n          spring and summer)\n                            =Water Crowfoot, Ranunculus delphinifolius.=\n\n     22b. Leaves palmately lobed, the terminal division not definitely\n          stalked --23.\n\n     22c. Leaves compound, some or all of the divisions on definite\n          stalks (Buttercup) --24.\n\n23a. Stem-leaves numerous (1-2 dm. tall; late spring and summer)\n                                         =Crowfoot, Ranunculus purshii.=\n\n23b. Stem-leaves one or none, the principal leaves all basal (about 1\n     dm. high; flowers in summer)    =Buttercup, Ranunculus lapponicus.=\n\n     24a. Style short, obviously curved --25.\n\n     24b. Style long and slender, straight or nearly so (common\n          spring-flowering buttercups, 2-5 dm. high) --26.\n\n25a. Stems creeping; flowers 2 cm. wide or more (spring)\n                                         =Buttercup, Ranunculus repens.=\n\n25b. Stems ascending; flowers 1.5 cm. wide or less (3-6 dm. high;\n     summer)                           =Buttercup, Ranunculus macounii.=\n\n     26a. The two lateral divisions of the leaf sessile or nearly so\n                                   =Buttercup, Ranunculus fascicularis.=\n\n     26b. The two lateral divisions of the leaf on long stalks --27.\n\n27a. Roots fibrous; plants of wet soil\n                                =Buttercup, Ranunculus septentrionalis.=\n\n27b. Roots thickened; plants of dry woods or thickets\n                                       =Buttercup, Ranunculus hispidus.=\n\n     28a. Leaves dissected into numerous narrowly linear acute divisions\n          (4-7 dm. high; flowers large, bluish, in summer)\n                                    =Love-in-a-mist, Nigella damascena.=\n\n     28b. Leaves lobed or divided, but the divisions not separated by\n          definite stalks --29.\n\n     28c. Leaves truly compound, all their divisions separated by\n          distinct stalks --39.\n\n29a. Leaves all basal, their lobes (usually 3) entire (1-2 dm. high;\n     flowers pink-purple, in earliest spring) (Hepatica) --30.\n\n29b. Lobes of the leaf serrate or incised --31.\n\n     30a. Lobes of the leaf obtuse or rounded\n                                           =Hepatica, Hepatica triloba.=\n\n     30b. Lobes of the leaf acute        =Hepatica, Hepatica acutiloba.=\n\n31a. Petals none; sepals 3, usually falling away as soon as the flower\n     opens (2-4 dm. high; flowers greenish-white, in spring)\n                                    =Golden Seal, Hydrastis canadensis.=\n\n31b. Petals none; sepals petal-like, 4 or more (Anemone) --32.\n\n31c. Petals present, but much smaller than the 5 petal-like sepals --38.\n\n     32a. Stem-leaves sessile or nearly so --33.\n\n     32b. Stem-leaves on definite petioles --35.\n\n33a. Ovary tipped with a long slender hairy style; flowers bluish-purple\n     (1-4 dm. high; early spring)\n                      =Pasque Flower, Anemone patens var. wolfgangiana.=\n\n33b. Ovary with a short style, densely woolly; flowers red, greenish, or\n     white (1-4 dm. high; late spring and summer) --34.\n\n33c. Ovary tipped with a short style, glabrous or nearly so; flowers\n     white (4-7 dm. high; late spring and early summer)\n                                          =Anemone, Anemone canadensis.=\n\n     34a. Stem 1-flowered, sepals white\n                                          =Anemone, Anemone parviflora.=\n\n     34b. Stem 3-flowered; sepals usually red\n                                           =Anemone, Anemone multifida.=\n\n35a. Achenes densely woolly; flowers appearing in summer --36.\n\n35b. Achenes merely pubescent; stems 1-flowered; woodland species\n     blooming in early spring (1-2 dm. high; flowers white)\n                                   =Wood Anemone, Anemone quinquefolia.=\n\n     36a. Segments of the leaf broadly wedge-shape or ovate; flowers\n          white (4-8 dm. high) --37.\n\n     36b. Segments of the leaf linear-oblong; flower red, greenish, or\n          white; plants growing on the shores of the Great Lakes\n                                           =Anemone, Anemone multifida.=\n\n37a. Segments of the basal leaves wedge-lanceolate; head of fruit\n     cylindric                            =Anemone, Anemone cylindrica.=\n\n37b. Segments of the basal leaves ovate-lanceolate; head of fruit ovoid\n     or oblong                            =Anemone, Anemone virginiana.=\n\n     38a. Stem-leaves present --9b.\n\n     38b. Leaves all basal (1-2 dm. high; leaves 3-divided; flowers\n          white, in early summer)        =Gold-thread, Coptis trifolia.=\n\n39a. Flowers numerous, in branching panicles (Meadow Rue) --40.\n\n39b. Flowers numerous, in racemes --43.\n\n39c. Flowers solitary or few, in loose clusters; woodland plants\n     blooming in early spring (1-3 dm. high; flowers white to purple)\n     --45.\n\n     40a. Blooming in spring; stem-leaves with obvious petioles (3-7 dm.\n          high; flowers white or greenish)\n                                       =Meadow Rue, Thalictrum dioicum.=\n\n     40b. Blooming in late spring or summer, stem-leaves sessile or\n          nearly so (8-15 dm. high; flowers white) --41.\n\n41a. Filaments club-shape, approximately as wide as the anther\n                                     =Meadow Rue, Thalictrum polygamum.=\n\n41b. Filaments slender or thread-like --42.\n\n     42a. Leaves minutely pubescent beneath, but not glandular\n                                    =Meadow Rue, Thalictrum dasycarpum.=\n\n     42b. Leaves minutely glandular beneath\n                                     =Meadow Rue, Thalictrum revolutum.=\n\n43a. Racemes slender, 10-90 cm. long (8-15 dm. high; flowers white, in\n     summer)                             =Bugbane, Cimicifuga racemosa.=\n\n43b. Racemes short and stout, 3-8 cm. long (4-8 dm. high; flowers white,\n     in late spring) (Baneberry) --44.\n\n     44a. Berries white; pedicels strongly thickened at maturity\n                                               =Baneberry, Actaea alba.=\n\n     44b. Berries red; pedicels slender       =Baneberry, Actaea rubra.=\n\n45a. Flowers white; stem-leaves alternate\n                                        =Isopyrum, Isopyrum biternatum.=\n\n45b. Flowers white to pink or purplish; stem-leaves whorled\n                                =Rue Anemone, Anemonella thalictroides.=\n\n\n\n\nMAGNOLIACEAE, the Magnolia Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with alternate leaves, and large, frequently showy\nflowers.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, with broad 4-lobed leaves and greenish-yellow\nflowers in late spring            =Tulip Tree, Liriodendron tulipifera.=\n\n\n\n\nANONACEAE, the Custard Apple Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with alternate simple entire leaves, 3 sepals, and 6\npetals.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; tall shrub or small tree, with obovate leaves\nand large dull-purple flowers in spring        =Papaw, Asimina triloba.=\n\n\n\n\nMENISPERMACEAE, the Moonseed Family\n\nWoody climbers, with alternate leaves, 6-8 petals, and numerous stamens.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, with 5-7-angled leaves which are peltate near\nthe edge, and small white flowers in early summer\n                                      =Moonseed, Menispermum canadense.=\n\n\n\n\nBERBERIDACEAE, the Barberry Family\n\nShrubs or herbs; petals 6 or more; stamens 6-18, frequently opening by\ntwo terminal lids; pistil 1.\n\n\n1a. Leaves simple --2.\n\n1b. Leaves compound --3.\n\n     2a. Stem shrubby (flowers yellow, in racemes, in spring)\n                                          =Barberry, Berberis vulgaris.=\n\n     2b. Stem herbaceous, with a single pair of palmately lobed leaves\n         (4-6 dm. tall; flower white, solitary, terminal, in spring)\n                                      =May Apple, Podophyllum peltatum.=\n\n3a. Leaves all basal; leaflets 2 (2-4 dm. high; the flower-stalks\n    bearing solitary white flowers in spring)\n                                      =Twin-leaf, Jeffersonia diphylla.=\n\n3b. The stem-leaf ternately compound, with numerous leaflets (4-8 dm.\n    high; with yellowish-green clustered flowers in spring)\n                              =Blue Cohosh, Caulophyllum thalictroides.=\n\n\n\n\nLAURACEAE, the Laurel Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with aromatic taste or odor, and alternate simple\nleaves; flowers small, imperfect, the anthers opening by lids.\n\n\n1a. Freely branched shrub; leaves obovate-oblong, entire (flowers\n    yellow, in early spring, before the leaves)\n                                        =Spice Bush, Benzoin aestivale.=\n\n1b. Tree or tall shrub; some or all of the leaves 2-3-lobed (flowers\n    greenish-yellow, appearing with the leaves)\n                                     =Sassafras, Sassafras variifolium.=\n\n\n\n\nPAPAVERACEAE, the Poppy Family\n\nHerbs with milky or  juice, regular flowers, 2 sepals, 4, 6, or 8\npetals, numerous stamens, and a 1-celled ovary.\n\n\n1a. Leaves palmately lobed; flower 2.5-5 cm. wide, with 8 petals or more\n    (leaf basal; flower white, in early spring)\n                                    =Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis.=\n\n1b. Leaves pinnately toothed or lobed; flower 7-10 cm. wide, with 4-6\n    petals (4-8 cm. high; leaves clasping; summer)\n                                            =Poppy, Papaver somniferum.=\n\n1c. Leaves divided pinnately to the mid-rib into several toothed or\n    lobed segments; flower 2.5 cm. broad or less (3-5 cm. high; flowers\n    yellow) --2.\n\n     2a. Flowers in clusters of 2-4, about 3 cm. wide (spring)\n                               =Celandine Poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in umbels of 3-8, about 1.5 cm. wide\n                                         =Celandine, Chelidonium majus.=\n\n\n\n\nFUMARIACEAE, the Fumitory Family\n\nHerbs with watery juice, compound or dissected leaves, and irregular\nflowers; sepals 2, small; petals 4, in two pairs, and one or both of the\nouter pair spurred at the base; stamens 6.\n\n\n1a. Both outer petals spurred or sack-like at the base --2.\n\n1b. One outer petal spurred or sack-like at the base --4.\n\n     2a. A climbing vine with flowers in panicles (white or pinkish\n         flowers in summer)        =Climbing Fumitory, Adlumia fungosa.=\n\n     2b. Low herbs (2-4 cm.) with basal leaves and white or pinkish\n         flowers in racemes (early spring) --3.\n\n3a. Spurs of the corolla triangular, divergent\n                             =Dutchman's Breeches, Dicentra cucullaria.=\n\n3b. Spurs of the corolla short and rounded\n                                   =Squirrel Corn, Dicentra canadensis.=\n\n     4a. Flowers about 5 mm. long, pink-purple tipped with red (3-8 dm.\n         high; summer)                  =Fumitory, Fumaria officinalis.=\n\n     4b. Flowers 10 mm. long or more, yellow, at least at the tip (2-6\n         dm. high) (Corydalis) --5.\n\n5a. Flowers yellow throughout (spring)    =Corydalis, Corydalis aurea.=\n\n5b. Flowers pink, tipped with yellow (summer).\n                                    =Corydalis, Corydalis sempervirens.=\n\n\n\n\nCRUCIFERAE, the Mustard Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate, frequently lobed or dissected leaves, and regular\nflowers, usually in racemes; sepals and petals each 4, stamens 6, 4 long\nand 2 short (or rarely 2 only), ovary 1.\n\n\n1a. Petals yellow or yellowish --2.\n\n1b. Petals white, pink, or purple, never yellow --29.\n\n     2a. Leaves simple, entire or dentate, never lobed --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves deeply lobed or compound (the bracteal leaves, at or\n         near the flower-clusters, may be simple and unlobed) --10.\n\n3a. Leaves clasping the stem --4.\n\n3b. Leaves not clasping at base --6.\n\n     4a. Clasping base and apex of leaf obtuse or rounded; pod very long\n         and slender (3-8 dm. high; summer)\n                                     =Hare's Ear, Conringia orientalis.=\n\n     4b. Clasping base and apex of leaf acute; pod obovoid (3-7 dm.\n         high; early summer) (False Flax) --5.\n\n5a. Stem and leaves glabrous              =False Flax, Camelina sativa.=\n\n5b. Leaves and usually the stem pubescent\n                                      =False Flax, Camelina microcarpa.=\n\n     6a. Flowers about 2 mm. wide (1-3 dm. high; flowers in summer) --7.\n\n     6b. Flowers 5 mm. wide or more (2-6 dm. high; flowers in summer)\n         --8.\n\n7a. Leaves about twice as long as broad, widest near or below the middle\n                                        =Whitlow Grass, Draba nemorosa.=\n\n7b. Leaves 3-5 times as long as broad, widest above the middle\n                                   =Yellow Alyssum, Alyssum alyssoides.=\n\n     8a. Leaves lanceolate, gradually tapering to the base; flowers\n         about 15 mm. wide            =Sand Rocket, Diplotaxis muralis.=\n\n     8b. Leaves ovate, acute at base; flowers about 15 mm. wide --22a.\n\n     8c. Leaves entire or minutely toothed; flowers 5-10 mm. wide --9.\n\n9a. Pods 25 mm. long or less, on slender pedicels about 8 mm. long\n                           =Worm-seed Mustard, Erysimum cheiranthoides.=\n\n9b. Pods 20 mm. long or more, on stout pedicels about 4 mm. long\n                              =Worm-seed Mustard, Erysimum parviflorum.=\n\n     10a. Leaves bipinnate or dissected into very numerous divisions\n          (3-8 dm. high; flowers in summer) --11.\n\n     10b. Leaves simply pinnate --13.\n\n11a. Flowers about 5 mm. broad; pods about 20 mm. long by 1 mm. broad\n                                       =Herb Sophia, Sisymbrium sophia.=\n\n11b. Flowers about 3 mm. broad; pods about 8 mm. long by 2 mm. wide\n     (Tansy Mustard) --12.\n\n     12a. Stems gray with a close fine pubescence\n                                  =Tansy Mustard, Sisymbrium canescens.=\n\n     12b. Stems green\n                =Tansy Mustard, Sisymbrium canescens var. brachycarpon.=\n\n13a. Pod short, not more than 3 times as long as wide (coarse plants,\n     preferring wet or sandy ground; flowers in summer) (Yellow Cress)\n     --14.\n\n13b. Pod elongated, more than 4 times as long as wide --17.\n\n     14a. Stems creeping, with erect or ascending branches; flowers\n          about 8 mm. wide          =Yellow Cress, Radicula sylvestris.=\n\n     14b. Stems erect or ascending (3-10 dm. high); flowers about 4 mm.\n          wide --15.\n\n15a. Pods about twice as long as the pedicels\n                                        =Yellow Cress, Radicula obtusa.=\n\n15b. Pods about as long as the pedicels, or shorter than them --16.\n\n     16a. Plant glabrous or minutely pubescent\n                                     =Yellow Cress, Radicula palustris.=\n\n     16b. Plant hirsute =Yellow Cress, Radicula palustris var. hispida.=\n\n17a. Petals 7 mm. long or more; pod terminating in a conspicuous beak\n     (coarse, weedy plants, 3-12 dm. high, blooming in summer) --18.\n\n17b. Petals of smaller size; pod not terminating in a conspicuous beak\n     --24.\n\n     18a. Upper stem-leaves clasping at the base\n                                        =Rutabaga, Brassica campestris.=\n\n     18b. Upper stem-leaves not clasping --19.\n\n19a. Pod tipped with a slender cylindrical beak whose base is much\n     narrower than the pod --20.\n\n19b. Pod gradually narrowed at its tip into a stout, flattened or angled\n     beak --22.\n\n     20a. Leaves oblanceolate, rather regularly pinnatifid, the terminal\n         segment about the same size as the lateral ones\n                                      =Sand Rocket, Diplotaxis muralis.=\n\n     20b. Leaves broad, irregularly pinnatifid especially below the\n          middle, with a large terminal segment --21.\n\n21a. Beak of pod 3-4 mm. long           =Black Mustard, Brassica nigra.=\n\n21b. Beak of pod 5 mm. long or more   =Indian Mustard, Brassica juncea.=\n\n     22a. Leaves dentate or lobed         =Charlock, Brassica arvensis.=\n\n     22b. Leaves deeply pinnatifid --23.\n\n23a. Pod dehiscent when ripe by two valves, tipped with a flat or angled\n     beak                                =White Mustard, Brassica alba.=\n\n23b. Pod indehiscent, with spongy cross-partitions between the seeds,\n     tipped with a conical beak    =Wild Radish, Raphanus raphanistrum.=\n\n     24a. Terminal segment of the principal leaves much larger than the\n          lateral segments; flowers in spring and summer --25.\n\n     24b. Terminal segment of the principal leaves equaling or smaller\n          than the lateral ones (5-10 dm. high; pods very long and\n          slender; flowers in summer)\n                                    =Sisymbrium, Sisymbrium altissimum.=\n\n25a. Flowers about 3 mm. wide; pods erect and closely appressed to the\n     stem (3-9 dm. high; weed blooming in summer) (Hedge Mustard) --26.\n\n25b. Flowers about 7 mm. wide; pods spreading or ascending (3-6 dm.\n     high; flowers in spring) (Winter Cress) --27.\n\n     26a. Pods pubescent         =Hedge Mustard, Sisymbrium officinale.=\n\n     26b. Pods glabrous\n                 =Hedge Mustard, Sisymbrium officinale var. leiocarpum.=\n\n27a. Lateral leaf-segments 5-8 pairs on the principal leaves\n                                         =Winter Cress, Barbarea verna.=\n\n27b. Lateral leaf-segments 1-4 pairs on the principal leaves --28.\n\n     28a. Flowers bright yellow, in racemes; pods spreading or ascending\n                                      =Winter Cress, Barbarea vulgaris.=\n\n     28b. Flowers pale yellow, in corymb-like clusters; pods erect and\n          somewhat appressed           =Winter Cress, Barbarea stricta.=\n\n29a. Principal stem-leaves compound or deeply lobed (the uppermost or\n     bracteal leaves may be simple) --30.\n\n29b. Principal stem-leaves entire, dentate, serrate, or sometimes\n     shallowly lobed or none (the basal leaves, at the surface of the\n     ground, may be deeply lobed or compound) --42.\n\n     30a. Leaves ternately divided or compound (2-5 dm. high; flowers in\n          spring) (Toothwort) --31.\n\n     30b. Leaves pinnately divided or compound --33.\n\n     31a. Leaf-segments lanceolate or narrowly oblong\n                                        =Toothwort, Dentaria laciniata.=\n\n31b. Leaf-segments ovate or ovate-oblong --32.\n\n     32a. Stem-leaves 2, opposite or nearly opposite\n                                         =Toothwort, Dentaria diphylla.=\n\n     32b. Stem-leaves 2-5, alternate\n                                           =Toothwort, Dentaria maxima.=\n\n33a. Plants growing in water, or in mud near water (spring and summer)\n     --34.\n\n33b. Plants of dry or moist soil --35.\n\n     34a. Aerial leaves distinctly compound, with 3-11 leaflets\n                           =Water Cress, Radicula nasturtium-aquaticum.=\n\n     34b. Aerial leaves merely serrate to pinnatifid; the submerged\n          leaves, if present, dissected\n                                        =Lake Cress, Radicula aquatica.=\n\n35a. Flowers 5 mm. broad, or less --36.\n\n35b. Flowers 6 mm. broad, or more --39.\n\n     36a. Stem-leaves irregularly pinnatifid or lobed; pod about as\n          broad as long (2-4 dm. high; flowers in summer)\n                                       =Garden Cress, Lepidium sativum.=\n\n     36b. Stem-leaves distinctly pinnatifid, with 3-6 pairs of lateral\n          segments (spring) (Bitter Cress) --37.\n\n37a. Leaves chiefly basal, pubescent on the upper side (1-3 dm. tall)\n                                      =Bitter Cress, Cardamine hirsuta.=\n\n37b. Stem-leaves conspicuous, glabrous on the upper side --38.\n\n     38a. Plant of dry soil; flowers about 3 mm. wide (1-4 dm. high)\n                                   =Bitter Cress, Cardamine parviflora.=\n\n     38b. Plant of moist or wet soil; flowers about 5 mm. wide (2-8 dm.\n          high)                 =Bitter Cress, Cardamine pennsylvanica.=\n\n39a. Leaves irregularly pinnatifid or lobed, not segmented into\n     definitely paired divisions (coarse plants 4-8 dm. high; flowers\n     in summer) --40.\n\n39b. Leaves deeply segmented into 3-10 pairs of divisions --41.\n\n     40a. Flowers pink or white from the first\n                                             =Radish, Raphanus sativus.=\n\n     40b. Flowers yellow at first, turning white with age\n                                   =Wild Radish, Raphanus raphanistrum.=\n\n41a. Flowers pink or white, appearing in spring (2-5 dm. high)\n                                   =Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratensis.=\n\n41b. Flowers yellowish or cream-color; a weed blooming in summer (5-10\n     dm. high)                      =Sisymbrium, Sisymbrium altissimum.=\n\n     42a. A fleshy, much-branched plant of the shores of the Great\n          Lakes, with a pod transversely divided into two joints\n          (2-3 dm. high; summer)          =Sea Rocket, Cakile edentula.=\n\n     42b. Pod not transversely divided into two joints --43.\n\n43a. Pod short, its length not more than 3 times its diameter --44.\n\n43b. Pod long and slender, its length more than 3 times its diameter\n     --55.\n\n     44a. Pods not conspicuously flattened, thick and plump, about\n          circular in cross-section (flowers in summer) --45.\n\n     44b. Pods distinctly flat --46.\n\n45a. A plant escaped from cultivation in dry or moist soil, with very\n     large basal leaves (5-10 dm. high)\n                                     =Horse Radish, Radicula armoracia.=\n\n45b. A plant of water or very wet soil, the largest leaves seldom more\n     than 15 cm. long (1-5 dm. tall)    =Lake Cress, Radicula aquatica.=\n\n     46a. Stem-leaves clasping the stem by an auricled base --47.\n\n     46b. Stem-leaves sessile or petioled, not clasping, or none --49.\n\n47a. Stem and leaves glabrous or pubescent; pod very flat and circular,\n     about 10 mm. wide (1-5 dm. tall; early summer)\n                                         =Penny Cress, Thlaspi arvense.=\n\n47b. Stem and leaves glabrous or pubescent; pod not more than 5 mm. wide\n     (1-6 dm. high; spring and early summer) --48.\n\n     48a. Pods broadly ovate          =Field Cress, Lepidium campestre.=\n\n     48b. Pods triangular, or slightly indented at the apex\n                            =Shepherd's Purse, Capsella bursa-pastoris.=\n\n49a. Pods about circular, or a very little longer than broad --50.\n\n49b. Pods ovoid or oblong, broadest near the middle, and distinctly\n     longer than wide (Whitlow Grass) --53.\n\n     50a. Leaves entire (1-3 dm. high; flowers in summer)\n                                   =Yellow Alyssum, Alyssum alyssoides.=\n\n     50b. Leaves serrate (2-6 dm. high; flowers in summer) --51.\n\n51a. Stamens 6                         =Garden Cress, Lepidium sativum.=\n\n51b. Stamens 2 (Pepper Grass) --52.\n\n     52a. Petals present            =Pepper Grass, Lepidium virginicum.=\n\n     52b. Petals none                 =Pepper Grass, Lepidium apetalum.=\n\n53a. Petals deeply 2-cleft (about 1 dm. high; early spring)\n                                           =Whitlow Grass, Draba verna.=\n\n53b. Petals entire or barely notched at the tip --54.\n\n     54a. Leaves all or chiefly at or near the base (about 1 dm. high;\n          spring)                    =Whitlow Grass, Draba caroliniana.=\n\n     54b. Stems leafy up to the flowers (1-5 dm. high; summer)\n                                       =Whitlow Grass, Draba arabisans.=\n\n55a. Stem-leaves cordate or sagittate at the base and sessile, forming a\n     more or less clasping leaf (3-10 dm. high) (Rock Cress) --56.\n\n55b. Stem-leaves sessile or somewhat petioled, but not clasping --63.\n\n     56a. Seeds in 2 rows in each cavity of the pod (early summer) --57.\n\n     56b. Seeds in 1 row in each cavity of the pod --59.\n\n57a. Calyx pubescent; the pods reflexed =Rock Cress, Arabis holboellii.=\n\n57b. Calyx glabrous; the pods spreading or ascending --58.\n\n     58a. Basal leaves densely pubescent\n                                       =Rock Cress, Arabis brachycarpa.=\n\n     58b. Basal leaves smooth or nearly so\n                                        =Rock Cress, Arabis drummondii.=\n\n59a. Petals conspicuous, about twice as long as the calyx, or longer;\n     straight, erect, mostly unbranched plants --60.\n\n59b. Petals inconspicuous, equaling or but little longer than the calyx\n     --61.\n\n     60a. Pods 3-4 cm. long, ascending (summer)\n                                            =Rock Cress, Arabis patens.=\n\n     60b. Pods 8-10 cm. long, recurved (late spring)\n                                         =Rock Cress, Arabis laevigata.=\n\n61a. Pods widely spreading; stem usually sparingly branched near the\n     base (spring)                         =Rock Cress, Arabis dentata.=\n\n61b. Pods erect or appressed; stem usually unbranched (summer) --62.\n\n     62a. Stem-leaves and stem smooth and glaucous\n                                            =Rock Cress, Arabis glabra.=\n\n     62b. Stem-leaves and stem almost always pubescent, and never\n          glaucous                         =Rock Cress, Arabis hirsuta.=\n\n63a. Principal stem-leaves 7-10 cm. long, or more --64.\n\n63b. Principal stem-leaves 2-5 cm. long --65.\n\n     64a. Leaves lanceolate or oblong; flowers 10 mm. wide or less (3-7\n          dm. high; summer)             =Rock Cress, Arabis canadensis.=\n\n     64b. Leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate; flowers 15-20 mm. wide (5-8\n          dm. high; late spring and summer)\n                                   =Dame's Rocket, Hesperis matronalis.=\n\n65a. Basal leaves ovate to orbicular or cordate, not more than twice as\n     long as broad (1-3 dm. high; spring) (Bitter Cress) --66.\n\n65b. Basal leaves oblong, lanceolate, or oblanceolate, at least 3 times\n     as long as broad (1-3 dm. high) --67.\n\n     66a. Flowers purple or rose color\n                                   =Bitter Cress, Cardamine douglassii.=\n\n     66b. Flowers white               =Bitter Cress, Cardamine bulbosa.=\n\n67a. Basal leaves pinnatifid (spring and summer)\n                                            =Rock Cress, Arabis lyrata.=\n\n67b. Basal leaves entire or toothed --68.\n\n     68a. Leaves narrowly oblanceolate; rare plant occurring from\n          Mackinac northward (summer)       =Rock Cress, Braya humilis.=\n\n     68b. Leaves obovate or oblong; an introduced weed (spring)\n                                =Mouse-ear Cress, Sisymbrium thalianum.=\n\n\n\n\nCAPPARIDACEAE, the Caper Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate compound leaves, 4 petals, and 6 or more stamens,\nwhich are about equal in length; fruit a 1-celled pod.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, stamens about 11; leaflets 3 (2-4 dm. high;\nflowers yellowish, in summer)       =Clammy-weed, Polanisia graveolens.=\n\n\n\n\nRESEDACEAE, the Mignonette Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate leaves and terminal racemes of small yellowish\nflowers; sepals 6, petals 6, stamens numerous.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, with divided leaves and irregularly cleft\npetals, blooming in summer            =Yellow Mignonette, Reseda lutea.=\n\n\n\n\nSARRACENIACEAE, the Pitcher Plant Family\n\nInsectivorous plants, with hollow, pitcher-shaped leaves, and large\npurple flowers at the ends of naked stems.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, growing in bogs and blooming in late spring\n                                   =Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea.=\n\n\n\n\nDROSERACEAE, the Sundew Family\n\nInsectivorous herbs, with a rosette of basal leaves bearing gland-tipped\nbristles on their upper surface, and with slender racemes of small white\nflowers in summer; inhabitants of bogs and swamps (2 dm. high, or less).\n\n\n1a. Leaf-blade about as long as wide     =Sundew, Drosera rotundifolia.=\n\n1b. Leaf-blade about 2-3 times as long as wide\n                                           =Sundew, Drosera longifolia.=\n\n1c. Leaf-blade about 5-8 times as long as wide\n                                              =Sundew, Drosera anglica.=\n\n1d. Leaf-blade narrowly linear, about 10 times as long as wide\n                                             =Sundew, Drosera linearis.=\n\n\n\n\nPODOSTEMACEAE, the River Weed Family\n\nSmall submerged aquatics, growing attached to stones in running water,\nwith dissected leaves and minute flowers.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan          =River Weed, Podostemum ceratophyllum.=\n\n\n\n\nCRASSULACEAE, the Orpine Family\n\nHerbs, with usually alternate leaves; the sepals, petals, and pistils\neach 4 or 5, or in one species the petals none, and the stamens as many\nor twice as many as the sepals.\n\n\n1a. Leaves entire (Stonecrop) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves toothed --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves 3-5 mm. long, very thick and fleshy (tufted plants about\n         1 dm. high, with yellow flowers in summer)\n                                                =Stonecrop, Sedum acre.=\n\n     2b. Leaves 10-30 mm. long, flat (tufted plants 1-2 dm. high;\n         flowers white, in spring)          =Stonecrop, Sedum ternatum.=\n\n3a. Petals present, purple (2-5 dm. high; summer)\n                                       =Live-for-ever, Sedum purpureum.=\n\n3b. Petals none (3-6 dm. high; summer)\n                                  =Ditch Stonecrop, Penthorum sedoides.=\n\n\n\n\nSAXIFRAGACEAE, the Saxifrage Family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, with alternate or opposite leaves; petals and sepals\neach 5, or the petals none; stamens 5 or 10; styles or stigmas 2-4.\n\n\n1a. Shrubs with lobed leaves (3-15 dm. high; flowers in late spring)\n    --2.\n\n1b. Herbs --12.\n\n     2a. Stems thorny --3.\n\n     2b. Stems not thorny (Currant) --8.\n\n3a. Flowers and fruits in racemes       =Swamp Currant, Ribes lacustre.=\n\n3b. Flowers and fruit in short clusters (Gooseberry) --4.\n\n     4a. Ovary and fruit prickly and bristly\n                                          =Gooseberry, Ribes cynosbati.=\n\n     4b. Ovary and fruit smooth, or sometimes a little glandular --5.\n\n5a. Stamens equaling the ovate calyx-lobes in length, or a very little\n    longer --6.\n\n5b. Stamens distinctly longer than the linear calyx-lobes --7.\n\n     6a. Leaves glabrous beneath, or nearly so\n                                     =Gooseberry, Ribes oxyacanthoides.=\n\n     6b. Leaves softly pubescent beneath\n                      =Gooseberry, Ribes oxyacanthoides var. calcicola.=\n\n7a. Flowers, including the stamens, about 15 mm. long\n                                            =Gooseberry, Ribes gracile.=\n\n7b. Flowers, including the stamens, about 8 mm. long\n                                      =Gooseberry, Ribes rotundifolium.=\n\n     8a. Calyx prolonged above the ovary into a tube which is longer\n         than the sepals --9.\n\n     8b. Calyx-tube shorter than the ovary or none --10.\n\n9a. Flowers greenish-yellow, inconspicuous; calyx-tube narrowly\n    bell-shape                          =Black Currant, Ribes floridum.=\n\n9b. Flowers bright yellow, conspicuous; calyx-tube narrow, with\n    spreading lobes                      =Golden Currant, Ribes aureum.=\n\n     10a. Ovary and berry bristly with glandular hairs\n                                      =Skunk Currant, Ribes prostratum.=\n\n     10b. Ovary and fruit smooth, or with sessile glands --11.\n\n11a. Leaves dotted beneath with resinous glands\n                                     =Black Currant, Ribes hudsonianum.=\n\n11b. Leaves glabrous or pubescent beneath, without resinous glands\n                                            =Red Currant, Ribes triste.=\n\n     12a. Flowers minute, yellowish, without petals, in the axils of the\n          leaves (1-2 dm. high; flowers in spring)\n                          =Golden Saxifrage, Chrysosplenium americanum.=\n\n     12b. Flowers large, solitary, terminating erect stalks (leaves\n          mostly basal; flowers white, in late summer; flower-stalks\n          1-5 dm. high) (Grass-of-Parnassus) --13.\n\n     12c. Flowers in terminal racemes, panicles, or clusters --15.\n\n13a. Flowers less than 2 cm. wide; leaves narrowed to the base\n                             =Grass-of-Parnassus, Parnassia parviflora.=\n\n13b. Flowers 2-3.5 cm. wide; leaves rounded or cordate at the base --14.\n\n     14a. A 3-cleft scale at the base of each petal\n                            =Grass-of-Parnassus, Parnassia caroliniana.=\n\n     14b. A many-cleft (9-15) scale at the base of each petal\n                              =Grass-of-Parnassus, Parnassia palustris.=\n\n15a. Leaves linear to oblanceolate, 3 times as long as broad, or more,\n     and pinnately veined (Saxifrage) --16.\n\n15b. Leaves broadly ovate to nearly circular, frequently cordate at the\n     base, and always palmately veined or lobed --20.\n\n     16a. Leaves basal; the flower-stalk bearing no leaves except small\n          ones at the base of its branches --17.\n\n     16b. Flower-stalk leafy below (1-3 dm. high; flowers yellow,\n          summer) --18.\n\n17a. Petals white; sepals erect; leaves conspicuously toothed, 3-10 cm.\n     long (1-3 dm. high; spring)    =Saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis.=\n\n17b. Petals greenish; sepals reflexed; leaves minutely toothed or\n     entire, 10-30 cm. long (5-10 dm. high; spring)\n                                   =Saxifrage, Saxifraga pennsylvanica.=\n\n     18a. Leaves with 3 sharp teeth at the apex\n                                    =Saxifrage, Saxifraga tricuspidata.=\n\n     18b. Leaves with numerous teeth or entire --19.\n\n19a. Leaves linear, chiefly on the stem\n                                        =Saxifrage, Saxifraga aizoides.=\n\n19b. Leaves spatulate, chiefly in a basal rosette\n                                          =Saxifrage, Saxifraga aizoon.=\n\n     20a. Stamens 5 (leaves mostly basal; flowers greenish or purplish\n          in late spring, on stalks 5-10 dm. high) (Alum Root) --21.\n\n     20b. Stamens 10 (flowers white, in spring) --23.\n\n21a. Flowers regular                    =Alum Root, Heuchera americana.=\n\n21b. Flowers irregular, the calyx oblique, longer on the upper side than\n     on the lower --22.\n\n     22a. Stamens projecting beyond the calyx\n                                    =Alum Root, Heuchera hirsuticaulis.=\n\n     22b. Stamens not projecting beyond the calyx\n                                          =Alum Root, Heuchera hispida.=\n\n23a. Stem-leaves alternate or none --24.\n\n23b. Stem with a pair of opposite leaves (2-4 dm. high)\n                                       =Bishop's Cap, Mitella diphylla.=\n\n     24a. Petals deeply fringed (1-2 dm. high)\n                                           =Bishop's Cap, Mitella nuda.=\n\n     24b. Petals entire (1-3 dm. high)\n                                 =False Mitrewort, Tiarella cordifolia.=\n\n\n\n\nHAMAMELIDACEAE, the Witch Hazel Family\n\nShrubs, with alternate simple leaves; sepals, petals, and stamens each\n4; ovary 2-lobed.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan; tall shrub with obovate leaves and yellow\nflowers appearing late in autumn    =Witch Hazel, Hamamelis virginiana.=\n\n\n\n\nPLATANACEAE, the Plane Tree Family\n\nTrees, with broad, palmately veined and lobed leaves, and minute flowers\nin dense spherical heads.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan               =Sycamore, Platanus occidentalis.=\n\n\n\n\nROSACEAE, the Rose Family\n\nTrees, herbs, or shrubs, with alternate, frequently compound leaves;\npetals and sepals usually 5, stamens numerous, pistils 1 to many;\nreceptacle expanded into a saucer-shape or cup-shape organ, bearing the\nsepals, petals, and stamens at its margin, the pistils at its center,\nand resembling a calyx-tube or flattened calyx.\n\n\n1a. Shrubs or trees --2.\n\n1b. Herbaceous plants --48.\n\n     2a. Leaves compound --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves simple --24.\n\n3a. Flowers in large panicles or corymbs, each flower 5-10 mm. across;\n    leaflets 7 or more --4.\n\n3b. Flowers solitary or in small clusters, each flower usually 20-80 mm.\n    wide; leaflets frequently only 3 or 5 --7.\n\n     4a. Flowers in a pyramidal or oblong panicle, the ovaries superior\n         (1-2 m. high; flowers white, in summer) --70b.\n\n     4b. Flowers in rounded or hemispheric clusters, the ovary inferior\n         --5.\n\n5a. Leaves pubescent on the lower surface\n                                          =Rowan Tree, Pyrus aucuparia.=\n\n5b. Leaves glabrous beneath when mature (small trees; flowers white, in\n    early summer or late spring) (Mountain Ash) --6.\n\n     6a. Leaves acuminate at the apex   =Mountain Ash, Pyrus americana.=\n\n     6b. Leaves obtuse or acute at the apex\n                                       =Mountain Ash, Pyrus sitchensis.=\n\n7a. Flowers yellow (5-10 dm. high; summer)\n                                     =Cinquefoil, Potentilla fruticosa.=\n\n7b. Flowers pink or red, rarely white, 4-10 cm. across (shrubs, 5-15 dm.\n    high, or climbing; stems usually thorny; flowers in early summer)\n    (Rose) --8.\n\n7c. Flowers white, 1-3 cm. across (4-20 dm. high; flowers in late\n    spring) --16.\n\n     8a. Leaflets on most of the leaves 3; styles cohering in a column\n         which protrudes from among the stamens\n                                         =Climbing Rose, Rosa setigera.=\n\n     8b. Leaflets 5-11; styles not cohering in a protruding column --9.\n\n9a. Sepals persistent on the fruit after flowering --10.\n\n9b. Sepals soon deciduous from the young fruit after flowering --14.\n\n     10a. A pair of spines below each leaf larger than the other spines\n          --11.\n\n     10b. Spines all alike in size or nearly so, or absent completely\n          --12.\n\n11a. Sepals entire                            =Wild Rose, Rosa woodsii.=\n\n11b. Sepals pinnatifid                          =Dog Rose, Rosa canina.=\n\n     12a. Stems with few thorns or none at all =Wild Rose, Rosa blanda.=\n\n     12b. Stems prickly --13.\n\n13a. Fruit somewhat pear-shape, narrowed toward the base.\n                                           =Wild Rose, Rosa acicularis.=\n\n13b. Fruit globose, rounded at the base\n                         =Wild Rose, Rosa acicularis var. bourgeauiana.=\n\n     14a. The pair of spines at the base of each leaf straight or nearly\n          so                                  =Wild Rose, Rosa humilis.=\n\n     14b. The pair of spines at the base of each leaf distinctly\n          recurved or hooked --15.\n\n15a. Leaves densely glandular-pubescent beneath\n                                          =Sweetbrier, Rosa rubiginosa.=\n\n15b. Leaves glabrous or minutely pubescent  =Swamp Rose, Rosa carolina.=\n\n     16a. Stems trailing or creeping --17.\n\n     16b. Stems erect, ascending, or arched --19.\n\n17a. Stems distinctly shrubby and thorny (Dewberry) --18.\n\n17b. Stems almost herbaceous, without thorns\n                                     =Dwarf Raspberry, Rubus triflorus.=\n\n     18a. Leaves thin, dull above; fruit black, large and juicy\n                                             =Dewberry, Rubus villosus.=\n\n     18b. Leaves firm or thick, shining above; fruit reddish, small,\n          consisting of a few sour drupelets\n                                       =Swamp Dewberry, Rubus hispidus.=\n\n19a. Ripe fruit dropping away from the white receptacle or core;\n     terminal leaflet of each leaf with a long stalk, while the lateral\n     leaflets are sessile or nearly so (Raspberry) --20.\n\n19b. Ripe fruit and receptacle or core dropping together; all the\n     leaflets on stalks which are approximately equal in length\n     (Blackberry) --22.\n\n     20a. Stem very glaucous with a whitish or bluish waxy deposit;\n          fruit black             =Black Raspberry, Rubus occidentalis.=\n\n     20b. Stem not glaucous; fruit red --21.\n\n21a. Calyx velvety-pubescent              =Red Raspberry, Rubus idaeus.=\n\n21b. Calyx bristly-hispid\n                      =Red Raspberry, Rubus idaeus var. aculeatissimus.=\n\n     22a. Pedicels with gland-tipped hairs, but no prickles\n                                     =Blackberry, Rubus allegheniensis.=\n\n     22b. Pedicels with prickles          =Blackberry, Rubus nigricans.=\n\n     22c. Pedicels with neither prickles nor gland-tipped hairs --23.\n\n23a. Leaves downy beneath                 =Blackberry, Rubus frondosus.=\n\n23b. Leaves smooth beneath               =Blackberry, Rubus canadensis.=\n\n     24a. Ovaries 1 or more, superior (attached to the surface of the\n          receptacle, but not concealed within it or united to it) --25.\n\n     24b. Ovary 1, inferior (permanently enclosed within the receptacle,\n          with only the styles protruding) --38.\n\n25a. Ovaries more than 1 --26.\n\n25b. Ovary 1 --30.\n\n     26a. Leaves serrate --27.\n\n     26b. Leaves lobed --28.\n\n27a. Leaves glabrous or very nearly so (8-20 dm. high; flowers white or\n     pinkish, summer)               =Meadow-sweet, Spiraea salicifolia.=\n\n27b. Leaves closely pubescent beneath (5-15 dm. high; flowers pink,\n     summer)                              =Hardhack, Spiraea tomentosa.=\n\n     28a. Flowers showy, purple or white, 3-4 cm. broad --29.\n\n     28b. Flowers white, about 1 cm. wide (1-3 m. high; flowers in early\n          summer)                   =Ninebark, Physocarpus opulifolius.=\n\n29a. Flowers purple               =Flowering Raspberry, Rubus odoratus.=\n\n29b. Flowers white                     =Salmonberry, Rubus parviflorus.=\n\n     30a. Flowers in racemes (trees or tall shrubs; flowers white, in\n          late spring) --31.\n\n     30b. Flowers in small umbels or corymbs (flowers white, in spring)\n          --32.\n\n31a. Leaves oblong, the points of their teeth incurved\n                                        =Black Cherry, Prunus serotina.=\n\n31b. Leaves obovate, the points of their teeth spreading\n                                      =Choke Cherry, Prunus virginiana.=\n\n     32a. Flowers about 1 cm. wide --33.\n\n     32b. Flowers about 1.5-2.5 cm. wide --36.\n\n33a. Low shrubs, with the spatulate or oblong leaves widest above the\n     middle --34.\n\n33b. Erect tall shrubs or small trees, with the leaves widest below the\n     middle --35.\n\n     34a. An erect shrub (5-10 dm. high)\n                                   =Appalachian Cherry, Prunus cuneata.=\n\n     34b. A prostrate or ascending shrub (3-15 dm. high)\n                                           =Sand Cherry, Prunus pumila.=\n\n35a. Leaves very broadly ovate, almost as wide as long (small tree)\n                                      =Perfumed Cherry, Prunus mahaleb.=\n\n35b. Leaves oblong-lanceolate, about 3 times as long as broad (shrub or\n     small tree, 2-10 m. high)       =Pin Cherry, Prunus pennsylvanica.=\n\n     36a. Sepals glandular-serrate (tall shrub or small tree)\n                                              =Wild Plum, Prunus nigra.=\n\n     36b. Sepals entire --37.\n\n37a. Leaves with sharp teeth, frequently bristle-tipped; a native\n     species (tall shrub or small tree, frequently growing in thickets)\n                                          =Wild Plum, Prunus americana.=\n\n37b. Leaves with obtuse teeth; a species escaped from cultivation\n     (widely branched tree)                    =Cherry, Prunus cerasus.=\n\n     38a. Trees, in cultivation or escaped from cultivation near roads\n          or dwellings, with showy flowers 2.5-5 cm. across, edible\n          fruits, and no thorns (spring) --39.\n\n     38b. Native species, trees or shrubs, growing in woods, fields, or\n          thickets; frequently with thorns (spring) --40.\n\n39a. Leaves finely serrulate or entire           =Pear, Pyrus communis.=\n\n39b. Leaves coarsely serrate or somewhat lobed     =Apple, Pyrus malus.=\n\n     40a. Shrubs or small trees, without thorns --42.\n\n     40b. Bushy trees or shrubs, with thorns or stiff thorn-like\n          branches, and with flowers generally 1.5-2.5 cm. across --41.\n\n41a. Flowers pink, very fragrant           =Wild Crab, Pyrus coronaria.=\n\n41b. Flowers white (Hawthorn, the genus Crataegus). Several species of\n     this genus occur in the state, for the identification of which the\n     Manual must be used.\n\n     42a. Mid-vein glandular above (shrubs 1-3 m. tall; flowers white or\n          pink) (Chokeberry) --43.\n\n     42b. Mid-vein not glandular (shrubs or trees, 1-10 m. tall; flowers\n          white) (Juneberry) --44.\n\n43a. Leaves glabrous beneath            =Chokeberry, Pyrus melanocarpa.=\n\n43b. Leaves tomentose beneath\n                      =Chokeberry, Pyrus arbutifolia var. atropurpurea.=\n\n     44a. Petals 15-25 mm. long --45.\n\n     44b. Petals 5-12 mm. long --46.\n\n45a. Mature leaves glabrous         =Juneberry, Amelanchier canadensis.=\n\n45b. Mature leaves pubescent beneath\n                    =Juneberry, Amelanchier canadensis var. botryapium.=\n\n     46a. Flowers in racemes --47.\n\n     46b. Flowers solitary, or in small clusters of 2-4\n                                    =Juneberry, Amelanchier oligocarpa.=\n\n47a. Leaves coarsely dentate, with about 1 tooth for each lateral vein\n                                       =Juneberry, Amelanchier spicata.=\n\n47b. Leaves finely serrate, with about 2-3 teeth for each lateral vein\n                                  =Juneberry, Amelanchier oblongifolia.=\n\n     48a. Flowers yellow --49.\n\n     48b. Flowers white, pink, purple, or rose, never yellow --63.\n\n49a. Plant with basal trifoliate leaves, resembling strawberry (1-3 dm.\n     high; late spring)   =Barren Strawberry, Waldsteinia fragarioides.=\n\n49b. Plants with leafy stems --50.\n\n     50a. Flowers solitary in the axils of foliage leaves, on long\n          peduncles (trailing or creeping plants; flowers in late spring\n          and summer) --51.\n\n     50b. Flowers in narrow terminal spike-like racemes (3-8 dm. high;\n          summer) (Agrimony) --52.\n\n     50c. Flowers in irregular or spreading clusters --55.\n\n51a. Leaflets 5                    =Five-finger, Potentilla canadensis.=\n\n51b. Leaflets 7-25                   =Silver Weed, Potentilla anserina.=\n\n     52a. Principal leaflets more than 3 times (about 3-1\/2) as long as\n          wide                         =Agrimony, Agrimonia parviflora.=\n\n     52b. Principal leaflets less than 3 times (about 2-1\/2) as long as\n          wide --53.\n\n53a. Leaves nearly glabrous beneath, or with scattered spreading hairs\n                                      =Agrimony, Agrimonia gryposepala.=\n\n53b. Leaves softly pubescent beneath --54.\n\n     54a. Leaves distinctly glandular beneath\n                                          =Agrimony, Agrimonia striata.=\n\n     54b. Leaves not glandular beneath     =Agrimony, Agrimonia mollis.=\n\n55a. Principal leaves palmately compound with 5-7 leaflets (Cinquefoil)\n     --56.\n\n55b. Principal stem-leaves with 3 leaflets, or pinnately compound with\n     several leaflets --58.\n\n     56a. Leaves silvery-white beneath, laciniately toothed (1-4 dm.\n          high; late spring and summer)\n                              =Silvery Cinquefoil, Potentilla argentea.=\n\n     56b. Leaves not silvery-white beneath (3-10 dm. high; summer)\n          --57.\n\n57a. Terminal leaflet more than 3 times as long as wide\n                                         =Cinquefoil, Potentilla recta.=\n\n57b. Terminal leaflet less than 3 times as long as wide\n                                     =Cinquefoil, Potentilla intermedia=\n\n     58a. Flowers about 4 mm. wide (2-6 dm. high; spring)\n                                            =Spring Avens, Geum vernum.=\n\n     58b. Flowers 6 mm. wide, or wider --59.\n\n59a. Principal leaves with lobed leaflets, of which the terminal is the\n     largest; leaf-axis bearing also some small leaflets between those\n     of usual size (4-12 dm. high; late spring and summer) (Avens) --60.\n\n59b. Principal leaves with toothed or pinnately cleft leaflets, the\n     lateral ones about equaling the terminal one in size, and without\n     any small scattered leaflets (3-8 dm. tall; summer) (Cinquefoil)\n     --61.\n\n     60a. Terminal leaflet cordate at base   =Avens, Geum macrophyllum.=\n\n     60b. Terminal leaflet wedge-shape or acute at base\n                                                 =Avens, Geum strictum.=\n\n61a. Leaflets 3                  =Cinquefoil, Potentilla monspeliensis.=\n\n61b. Leaflets 5-15 --62.\n\n     62a. Leaflets crenate            =Cinquefoil, Potentilla paradoxa.=\n\n     62b. Leaflets deeply incised\n                                 =Cinquefoil, Potentilla pennsylvanica.=\n\n63a. Leaves all basal, the flowers on leafless stalks --64.\n\n63b. Stem-leaves present --66.\n\n     64a. Leaves simple (1-2 dm. high; summer)\n                                          =Dalibarda, Dalibarda repens.=\n\n     64b. Leaves trifoliate (1-2 dm. high; spring) (Strawberry) --65.\n\n65a. Leaflets thick and firm, the petioles and pedicels pubescent with\n     spreading or ascending hairs; fruit subglobose, the achenes\n     embedded in pits on its surface\n                                      =Strawberry, Fragaria virginiana.=\n\n65b. Leaflets thin, the petioles and pedicels nearly glabrous or with\n     appressed hairs; fruit conic, the achenes on its surface\n                                  =Wood Strawberry, Fragaria americana.=\n\n     66a. Leaves pinnate with numerous leaflets --67.\n\n     66b. Stem-leaves with 3-5 leaflets --72.\n\n67a. Leaflets laciniate or deeply lobed (flowers pink or purple, early\n     summer) --68.\n\n67b. Leaflets merely toothed --69.\n\n     68a. Stem-leaves few, small and opposite (2-4 dm. tall)\n                                         =Purple Avens, Geum triflorum.=\n\n     68b. Stem-leaves large and alternate (5-20 dm. tall)\n                              =Queen of the Prairie, Filipendula rubra.=\n\n69a. Individual flowers small, not exceeding 6 mm. across, in large\n     clusters or spikes --70.\n\n69b. Individual flowers more than 10 mm. wide, in few-flowered clusters\n     (Cinquefoil) --71.\n\n     70a. Flowers in dense spikes (5-15 dm. high; late summer)\n                                       =Burnet, Sanguisorba canadensis.=\n\n     70b. Flowers in panicles           =Sorbaria, Sorbaria sorbifolia.=\n\n71a. Flowers red or purple (3-6 dm. high; summer)\n                               =Marsh Cinquefoil, Potentilla palustris.=\n\n71b. Flowers white (5-10 dm. high; early summer)\n                                        =Cinquefoil, Potentilla arguta.=\n\n     72a. Pistils 5 (5-10 dm. high; flowers white or pink, early summer)\n          --73.\n\n     72b. Pistils 10, in a ring (flowers pink or purple) --68b.\n\n     72c. Pistils numerous, in a head or close group --74.\n\n73a. Stipules linear or subulate, 5-8 mm. long\n                                   =Bowman's Root, Gillenia trifoliata.=\n\n73b. Stipules leaf-like, 10-25 mm. long, serrate\n                                  =American Ipecac, Gillenia stipulata.=\n\n     74a. Flowers red or purple --75.\n\n     74b. Flowers white --76.\n\n75a. Leaflets sharply and irregularly toothed or lobed; petals erect,\n     narrowed at the base (3-9 dm. high; early summer)\n                                            =Purple Avens, Geum rivale.=\n\n75b. Leaflets finely and regularly toothed, oblong; petals spreading\n     --71a.\n\n     76a. Leaflets entire below, 3-toothed at the apex (1-3 dm. high;\n          summer)                   =Cinquefoil, Potentilla tridentata.=\n\n     76b. Leaflets toothed all around the margin --77.\n\n77a. Leaves all trifoliate (2-5 dm. high; late spring) --17b.\n\n77b. Some of the upper leaves merely lobed or dentate (5-8 dm. high)\n     (Avens) --78.\n\n     78a. Stem bristly-hairy (early summer)   =Avens, Geum virginianum.=\n\n     78b. Stem softly and finely pubescent (summer)\n                                                =Avens, Geum canadense.=\n\n\n\n\nLEGUMINOSAE, the Pulse Family\n\nTrees, shrubs, or herbs, with alternate compound (except 3 species with\nsimple) leaves and stipules; flowers usually irregular (except in a few\nspecies), with a large upper petal and 4 smaller ones, the 2 lower\nenclosing the stamens and pistil; stamens almost always 10, and\ngenerally united by their filaments; pistil 1, simple, ripening into a\npod.\n\n\n1a. Shrubs or trees --2.\n\n1b. Herbs, twining, but without tendrils --9.\n\n1c. Herbs; the leaves, or some of them, tipped with tendrils --12.\n\n1d. Herbs, not climbing or twining; tendrils none --21.\n\n     2a. Leaves simple --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves compound --4.\n\n3a. Leaves broadly cordate (tall shrub or small tree; flowers pink,\n    early spring)                           =Redbud, Cercis canadensis.=\n\n3b. Leaves lanceolate or elliptical (3-6 dm. high; flowers yellow,\n    summer)                       =Dyer's Greenweed, Genista tinctoria.=\n\n     4a. Twigs or branches thorny --5.\n\n     4b. Thorns none --7.\n\n5a. Thorns branched, scattered on the stem (tall tree; flowers greenish,\n    early summer)                 =Honey Locust, Gleditsia triacanthos.=\n\n5b. Thorns unbranched, a pair of them at the base of each leaf (late\n    spring) --6.\n\n     6a. Branches glabrous or nearly so (tree; flowers white)\n                                  =Black Locust, Robinia pseudo-acacia.=\n\n     6b. Branches glandular-pubescent (tall shrub; flowers pinkish)\n                                       =Clammy Locust, Robinia viscosa.=\n\n     6c. Branches bristly (shrub. 1-3 m. high; flowers pink)\n                                      =Bristly Locust, Robinia hispida.=\n\n7a. Trees; leaves 2-3-pinnate (flowers greenish-white, spring)\n                             =Kentucky Coffee-tree, Gymnocladus dioica.=\n\n7b. Low shrubs; leaves once-pinnate (3-6 dm. high; summer) --8.\n\n     8a. Flowers bright-blue, each with a single petal\n                                        =Lead Plant, Amorpha canescens.=\n\n     8b. Flowers yellowish and pink-purple, petals 5 --26a.\n\n9a. Leaflets 5-7; flowers in racemes (purplish, late summer)\n                                            =Wild Bean, Apios tuberosa.=\n\n9b. Leaflets 3 (flowers greenish, purple, or white, late summer) --10.\n\n     10a. Flowers in small capitate clusters; lower 2 petals strongly\n          incurved                   =Wild Bean, Strophostyles helvola.=\n\n     10b. Flowers in racemes (Hog Peanut) --11.\n\n11a. Stem pubescent or glabrate; leaflets seldom more than 5 cm. long\n                                       =Hog Peanut, Amphicarpa monoica.=\n\n11b. Stem villous with retrorse hairs; leaflets usually longer than 5 cm.\n                                      =Hog Peanut, Amphicarpa pitcheri.=\n\n     12a. Style with a tuft of hairs at the apex; lateral petals of the\n          corolla adherent to the lower ones as far as the middle;\n          stipules less than 10 mm. long, and usually less than\n          one-fourth the length of the lower leaflets (spring and\n          summer) (Vetch) --13.\n\n     12b. Style hairy along the inner side; lateral petals of the\n          corolla free from the lower ones or adherent only at the\n          very base; stipules more than 8 mm. long and usually\n          one-third or more the length of the lower leaflets (late\n          spring and summer) --17.\n\n13a. Flowers axillary, sessile or nearly so (flowers purple) --14.\n\n13b. Flowers in peduncled racemes --15.\n\n     14a. Upper leaves oblong-obovate, truncate or notched, and\n          mucronate at the apex            =Spring Vetch, Vicia sativa.=\n\n     14b. Upper leaves lance-linear, sharply acute\n                                     =Common Vetch, Vicia angustifolia.=\n\n15a. Flowers 15-20 mm. long, 4-8 in a cluster (flowers purple)\n                                               =Vetch, Vicia americana.=\n\n15b. Flowers 8-12 mm. long --16.\n\n     16a. Racemes one-sided; flowers blue         =Vetch, Vicia cracca.=\n\n     16b. Racemes loosely flowered, not one-sided; flowers whitish, the\n          lower petals tipped with blue      =Vetch, Vicia caroliniana.=\n\n17a. Flowers yellowish-white          =Vetchling, Lathyrus ochroleucus.=\n\n17b. Flowers purple --18.\n\n     18a. Stipules nearly regularly halberd-shape, almost as large as\n          the leaflets                  =Beach Pea, Lathyrus maritimus.=\n\n     18b. Stipules half-sagittate, apparently attached laterally near\n          the middle --19.\n\n19a. Leaflets 4-8 pairs, ovate; racemes with 10 or more flowers\n                                           =Wild Pea, Lathyrus venosus.=\n\n19b. Leaflets 2-4 pairs, linear to oblong or elliptical; racemes with\n     2-9 flowers (Marsh Pea) --20.\n\n     20a. Stems with a membranous wing on the margins\n                                        =Marsh Pea, Lathyrus palustris.=\n\n     20b. Stems angled, but not winged\n                       =Marsh Pea, Lathyrus palustris var. myrtifolius.=\n\n21a. Leaves simple (2-3 dm. high; flowers yellow, summer)\n                                     =Rattlebox, Crotalaria sagittalis.=\n\n21b. Leaves palmately compound; leaflets 7-11 (3-6 dm. high; flowers\n     blue, late spring)                      =Lupine, Lupinus perennis.=\n\n21c. Leaves pinnately compound; leaflets 5 to many --22.\n\n21d. Leaves compound; leaflets 3 --28.\n\n     22a. Leaflets 5; flowers rose-purple in a spike-like head (5-8 dm.\n          high, late summer)   =Prairie Clover, Petalostemum purpureum.=\n\n     22b. Leaflets more than 5 --23.\n\n23a. Flowers bright-blue, in a dense spike (3-6 dm. high; summer) --8a.\n\n23b. Flowers bright-yellow; stamens not united (summer) --24.\n\n23c. Flowers white, cream-color, or yellowish, or marked with purple\n     --26.\n\n     24a. Leaflets linear-oblong, 2 cm. long or less; stamens 5 or 10\n          (3-6 dm. high) (Partridge Pea) --25.\n\n     24b. Leaflets lanceolate-oblong, 2-5 cm. long; 7 stamens with\n          normal anthers and 3 with imperfect anthers (8-15 dm. high)\n                                       =Wild Senna, Cassia marilandica.=\n\n25a. Anthers 10; flowers 2-4 cm. wide\n                                   =Partridge Pea, Cassia chamaecrista.=\n\n25b. Anthers 5; flowers 5-10 mm. wide\n                                      =Partridge Pea, Cassia nictitans.=\n\n     26a. Silky-hairy with whitish hairs; flowers marked with purple\n          (3-5 dm. high; summer)     =Goat's Rue, Tephrosia virginiana.=\n\n     26b. Glabrous or nearly so (summer) (Milk Vetch) --27.\n\n27a. Flowers greenish cream-color (4-10 dm. high)\n                                    =Milk Vetch, Astragalus canadensis.=\n\n27b. Flowers white (3-5 dm. high)    =Milk Vetch, Astragalus neglectus.=\n\n     28a. Flowers in heads, umbels, or short dense spikes --29.\n\n     28b. Flowers in loose racemes or panicles --42.\n\n29a. Flowers bright-yellow; decumbent or ascending plants (spring and\n     summer) --30.\n\n29b. Flowers white, cream, purple, or red; never yellow --34.\n\n     30a. Whole flower only about 2 mm. long; pod coiled --31.\n\n     30b. Flowers larger, each one 3-6 mm. long; pod straight (1-4 dm.\n          high) (Hop Clover) --32.\n\n31a. Flowers numerous in each head    =Black Medick, Medicago lupulina.=\n\n31b. Flowers in clusters of 2 --20       =Bur Clover, Medicago hispida.=\n\n     32a. Stipules linear              =Hop Clover, Trifolium agrarium.=\n\n     32b. Stipules ovate --33.\n\n33a. Heads densely flowered; flowers 20 or more; upper petal striate\n     when dry                        =Hop Clover, Trifolium procumbens.=\n\n33b. Heads loosely flowered; flowers usually 10 or fewer; upper petal\n     scarcely striate or not at all      =Hop Clover, Trifolium dubium.=\n\n     34a. Leaves palmately compound, the 3 leaflets all from the same\n          point (late spring and summer) (Clover) --35.\n\n     34b. Leaves pinnately compound, the terminal leaflet on a distinct\n          stalk --39.\n\n35a. Individual flowers sessile, or on very short pedicels --36.\n\n35b. Individual flowers distinctly pedicelled --37.\n\n     36a. Heads oblong, on distinct peduncles; calyx longer than the\n          corolla (flowers nearly white; 1-4 dm. tall)\n                                      =Stone Clover, Trifolium arvense.=\n\n     36b. Heads nearly globose, almost sessile, closely subtended by the\n          leaves; corolla longer than the calyx (2-8 dm. high; flowers\n          red-purple)                  =Red Clover, Trifolium pratense.=\n\n37a. Stems prostrate or creeping; heads long-peduncled, arising from the\n     creeping branches (flower-stalks 1-2 dm. high; flowers white)\n                                       =White Clover, Trifolium repens.=\n\n37b. Some or all of the stems erect; heads arising from the leafy stems\n     (flowers white or pink) --38.\n\n     38a. Plants with long basal runners; flowers 10-13 mm. long (2-3\n          dm. high)            =Buffalo Clover, Trifolium stoloniferum.=\n\n     38b. Basal runners none; flowers 6-8 mm. long (3-8 dm. high)\n                                    =Alsike Clover, Trifolium hybridum.=\n\n39a. Prostrate; leaflets broadly ovate; flowers 3-10 in a cluster --10a.\n\n39b. Erect; leaflets broadest near the middle; flowers numerous (5-12\n     dm. high; flowers yellowish-white, late summer) (Bush Clover) --40.\n\n     40a. Leaflets less than twice as long as broad\n                                         =Bush Clover, Lespedeza hirta.=\n\n     40b. Leaflets more than twice as long as broad --41.\n\n41a. Leaflets linear, 5 mm. wide or less; heads with obvious peduncles\n                                  =Bush Clover, Lespedeza angustifolia.=\n\n41b. Leaflets narrowly elliptical, the principal ones more than 5 mm.\n     wide; heads sessile or nearly so\n                                      =Bush Clover, Lespedeza capitata.=\n\n     42a. Leaflets finely toothed --43.\n\n     42b. Leaflets entire --44.\n\n43a. Flowers violet or blue (3-6 dm. high; summer)\n                                             =Alfalfa, Medicago sativa.=\n\n43b. Flowers yellow (1-2 m. high; summer)\n                           =Yellow Sweet Clover, Melilotus officinalis.=\n\n43c. Flowers white (1-3 m. high; summer)\n                                   =White Sweet Clover, Melilotus alba.=\n\n     44a. Flowers yellow (5-10 dm. high; summer)\n                                      =Wild Indigo, Baptisia tinctoria.=\n\n     44b. Flowers white, the leaflets all from the same point (5-10 dm.\n          high; summer)               =Wild Indigo, Baptisia leucantha.=\n\n     44c. Flowers blue, purple, or pink (rarely white, and then the\n          terminal leaflet stalked) --45.\n\n45a. Racemes arising from the base of the plant, leafless (4-8 dm. high;\n     summer)                       =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium nudiflorum.=\n\n45b. Racemes terminal or a few of them axillary; leaflets generally\n     more than 3 cm. long; pod (usually to be seen at the base of the\n     raceme) transversely segmented into 2 or more joints (summer)\n     (Tick Trefoil; the genus Desmodium. Pods are usually necessary for\n     satisfactory identification) --46.\n\n45c. Racemes short, loose, chiefly axillary; leaflets generally less\n     than 3 cm. long; the short ovate or ovoid pod not transversely\n     jointed (5-10 dm. high; flowers in summer) (Bush Clover; the genus\n     Lespedeza. Reference to the Manual is recommended) --58.\n\n     46a. Leaves clustered near the summit of the stem (4-12 dm. high)\n                                 =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium grandiflorum.=\n\n     46b. Leaves scattered on the stem --47.\n\n47a. Plants prostrate; racemes panicled; leaflets nearly circular\n                                =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium rotundifolium.=\n\n47b. Plants decumbent or ascending; racemes short, simple, few-flowered;\n     stipules ovate (stems 4-8 dm. long)\n                                  =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium pauciflorum.=\n\n47c. Plants erect or ascending; racemes panicled --48.\n\n     48a. Leaflets of an oblong type, broadest at or near the middle,\n          and about 4 times as long as broad (5-10 dm. tall) --49.\n\n     48b. Leaflets of an ovate or lanceolate type, broadest below the\n          middle, and not more than 3 times as long as wide --50.\n\n49a. Stem pubescent; leaves sessile or nearly so\n                                =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium sessilifolium.=\n\n49b. Stem glabrous or nearly so; leaves obviously petioled\n                                  =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium paniculatum.=\n\n     50a. Stipules lanceolate to ovate, 1 cm. long or more (6-15 dm.\n          high) --51.\n\n     50b. Stipules narrowly lanceolate or subulate, less than 1 cm. long\n          --54.\n\n51a. Stems glabrous or minutely pubescent; leaves acuminate --52.\n\n51b. Stems hispid or densely pubescent; leaves ovate or\n     ovate-lanceolate, obtuse or barely acute --53.\n\n     52a. Leaves glabrous on both sides\n                                   =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium bracteosum.=\n\n     52b. Leaves rough above, hairy beneath\n                  =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium bracteosum var. longifolium.=\n\n53a. Leaflets broadly ovate         =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium canescens.=\n\n53b. Leaflets ovate-lanceolate     =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium illinoense.=\n\n     54a. Flowers 10-12 mm. long (1-2 m. high)\n                                    =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium canadense.=\n\n     54b. Flowers 5-8 mm. long (5-8 dm. tall) --55.\n\n     54c. Flowers 3-4 mm. long (4-8 dm. tall) --56.\n\n55a. Leaflets broadly ovate      =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium viridiflorum.=\n\n55b. Leaflets oblong-ovate           =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium dillenii.=\n\n     56a. Leaflets 3-5 cm. long, oblong-ovate, scabrous above\n                                      =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium rigidum.=\n\n     56b. Leaflets 1-2.5 cm. long, broadly ovate or oval, not scabrous\n          above --57.\n\n57a. Stem and leaves glabrous or very nearly so\n                                 =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium marilandicum.=\n\n57b. Stem and leaves conspicuously pubescent\n                                      =Tick Trefoil, Desmodium obtusum.=\n\n     58a. Flower-clusters sessile, or on peduncles shorter than the\n          subtending leaves --59.\n\n     58b. Flower-clusters, or many of them, on peduncles longer than the\n          leaves --61.\n\n59a. Leaves linear-oblong            =Bush Clover, Lespedeza virginica.=\n\n59b. Leaves ovate or oval --60.\n\n     60a. Leaves and stem velvety or downy\n                                        =Bush Clover, Lespedeza stuvei.=\n\n     60b. Leaves and stem glabrous, or with close appressed pubescence\n                                    =Bush Clover, Lespedeza frutescens.=\n\n61a. Leaves ovate or broadly elliptical; corolla conspicuously exceeding\n     the calyx --62.\n\n61b. Leaves linear-oblong; calyx about as long as the corolla\n                                      =Bush Clover, Lespedeza manniana.=\n\n     62a. Stem erect or ascending --63.\n\n     62b. Stem trailing; peduncles much exceeding the leaves\n                                    =Bush Clover, Lespedeza procumbens.=\n\n63a. Villous-pubescent; inflorescence dense; some peduncles shorter than\n     the leaves                      =Bush Clover, Lespedeza nuttallii.=\n\n63b. Slightly pubescent or glabrous; inflorescence loose, on peduncles\n     much longer than the leaves      =Bush Clover, Lespedeza violacea.=\n\n\n\n\nLINACEAE, the Flax Family\n\nHerbs with simple leaves, and regular flowers, having 5 sepals, 5 yellow\nor blue petals, 5 stamens, and 5 styles.\n\n\n1a. Flowers blue (3-6 dm. high; summer)    =Flax, Linum usitatissimum.=\n\n1b. Flowers yellow (3-8 dm. high; summer) (Wild Flax) --2.\n\n     2a. Middle stem-leaves below the branches opposite\n                                            =Wild Flax, Linum striatum.=\n\n     2b. Middle stem-leaves below the branches alternate --3.\n\n3a. Leaves narrowly lanceolate to linear, 1-4 mm. wide --4.\n\n3b. Leaves oblanceolate to oblong, 4-6 mm. wide\n                                         =Wild Flax, Linum virginianum.=\n\n     4a. Leaves entire                        =Wild Flax, Linum medium.=\n\n     4b. Upper leaves glandular-ciliate     =Wild Flax, Linum sulcatum.=\n\n\n\n\nOXALIDACEAE, the Wood Sorrel Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate or basal compound leaves with 3 reverse\nheart-shaped leaflets; sepals, petals, and styles each 5; stamens 10.\n(Wood Sorrel)\n\n\n1a. Leaves all basal; flowers white to pink-purple (1-2 dm. high; late\n    spring) --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves present; flowers yellow (1-5 dm. high; spring and\n    summer) --3.\n\n     2a. Flower-stalks bearing a single flower\n                                       =Wood Sorrel, Oxalis acetosella.=\n\n     2b. Flower-stalks bearing an umbel of several flowers\n                                         =Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea.=\n\n3a. Stem prostrate and creeping Wood Sorrel, Oxalis repens.\n\n3b. Stem erect or ascending --4.\n\n     4a. Pedicels with spreading pubescence\n                                      =Wood Sorrel, Oxalis corniculata.=\n\n     4b. Pedicels with appressed pubescence\n                                          =Wood Sorrel, Oxalis stricta.=\n\n\n\n\nGERANIACEAE, the Geranium Family\n\nHerbs, with deeply lobed or divided leaves; flowers regular, with 5\nsepals, 5 petals, 5 or 10 stamens, and a 5-celled ovary.\n\n\n1a. Anthers 5 (spreading or ascending plants, 2-4 dm. high; flowers pink\n    or purple, spring and summer) --2.\n\n1b. Anthers 10 --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves pinnately dissected  =Stork's-bill, Erodium cicutarium.=\n\n     2b. Leaves palmately divided into cuneate lobes\n                                     =Crane's-bill, Geranium pusillum.=\n\n3a. Leaves ternately divided, the lobes pinnatifid (2-4 dm. high;\n    flowers purple, late spring and summer)\n                                    =Herb Robert, Geranium robertianum.=\n\n3b. Leaves palmately 3-11-lobed --4.\n\n     4a. Petals 12 mm. long or more (3-6 dm. high; flowers pale purple,\n         spring)                    =Wild Geranium, Geranium maculatum.=\n\n     4b. Petals less than 10 mm. long (Crane's-bill) --5.\n\n5a. Seed-bearing portion of the pistil smooth, glabrous or nearly so\n    (low spreading plant; flowers purple, late spring and summer)\n                                    =Crane's-bill, Geranium columbinum.=\n\n5b. Seed-bearing portion of the pistil transversely wrinkled (widely\n    branching. 1-3 dm. tall; flowers purple, summer)\n                                         =Crane's-bill, Geranium molle.=\n\n5c. Seed-bearing portion of the pistil pubescent (widely branching. 1-5\n    dm. tall) --6.\n\n     6a. Leaves divided almost to the base (flowers pinkish or white,\n         spring and summer) --7.\n\n     6b. Leaves divided one-half to two-thirds the way to the base\n         (flowers purple, summer)\n                                 =Crane's-bill, Geranium rotundifolium.=\n\n7a. Petals white or pale pink; flowers in compact clusters\n                                  =Crane's-bill, Geranium carolinianum.=\n\n7b. Petals pink-purple; flowers in loose clusters\n                                    =Crane's-bill, Geranium bicknellii.=\n\n\n\n\nRUTACEAE, the Rue Family\n\nShrubs or low trees, with compound leaves frequently dotted with\ntranslucent glands; flowers small, greenish-white, with 3-5 sepals,\npetals, and stamens.\n\n\n1a. Leaflets 5-9; stems thorny    =Prickly Ash, Zanthoxylum americanum.=\n\n1b. Leaflets 3; stems not thorny          =Hop Tree, Ptelea trifoliata.=\n\n\n\n\nSIMARUBACEAE, the Quassia Family\n\nTrees, with pinnately compound leaves and small greenish-yellow flowers\nin large panicles in early summer, ripening into winged fruits.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, escaped from cultivation chiefly in towns\n                                 =Tree of Heaven, Ailanthus glandulosa.=\n\n\n\n\nPOLYGALACEAE, the Milkwort Family\n\nSmall herbs, with alternate or whorled simple leaves, and small\nirregular flowers; sepals 5, petals 3, stamens 6 or 8, more or less\nunited with each other and with the petals.\n\n\n1a. All of the leaves alternate --2.\n\n1b. Some or all of the leaves in whorls (1-4 dm. high; flowers greenish,\n    purple, or white; summer) (Milkwort) --6.\n\n     2a. Flowers few, loosely clustered, 15-20 mm. long (1-3 dm. high;\n         flowers purple; early summer)\n                           =Flowering Wintergreen, Polygala paucifolia.=\n\n     2b. Flowers numerous, in a spike or raceme --3.\n\n3a. Stem-leaves minute, linear-subulate; stem slender, erect, 3-7 dm.\n    high (flowers pink; summer)          =Milkwort, Polygala incarnata.=\n\n3b. Stem-leaves narrowly oblong or broader; stem generally 1-4 dm. high\n    --4.\n\n     4a. Flowers in a short thick obtuse very dense spike (flowers\n         greenish or purple; summer)     =Milkwort, Polygala sanguinea.=\n\n     4b. Flowers in a slender tapering spike --5.\n\n     4c. Flowers in a raceme; plants with subterranean flowers also\n         (flowers purple; early summer)   =Milkwort, Polygala polygama.=\n\n5a. Leaves linear or nearly so (flowers purple; summer) --7b.\n\n5b. Leaves lanceolate or oblong-lanceolate, 2-6 cm. long (flowers white;\n    late spring)                    =Seneca Snakeroot, Polygala senega.=\n\n5c. Leaves ovate to ovate-lanceolate (flowers white; late spring)\n                     =Seneca Snakeroot, Polygala senega var. latifolia.=\n\n     6a. Spike oval, thick, obtuse        =Milkwort, Polygala cruciata.=\n\n     6b. Spike acute --7.\n\n7a. Spike densely flowered, 1-2 cm. long\n                                      =Milkwort, Polygala verticillata.=\n\n7b. Spike loosely flowered, 2-5 cm. long\n                         =Milkwort, Polygala verticillata var. ambigua.=\n\n\n\n\nEUPHORBIACEAE, the Spurge Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate, opposite, or whorled leaves and usually milky\njuice. Flowers small or minute and inconspicuous, without petals and\nfrequently without calyx. In our commoner species, several staminate\nflowers, each consisting of a single stamen only, and one pistillate\nflower, consisting of a single pedicelled 3-lobed ovary only, are\nincluded within a 4-5-lobed involucre, which is sometimes  and\nresembles a calyx or corolla.\n\n\n1a. Stem-leaves alternate; inflorescence axillary; flowers with calyx\n    and several stamens (3-8 dm. tall; flowers greenish or purplish;\n    summer) (Three-seeded Mercury) --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves opposite, usually inequilateral at base; flowers as\n    described for the family; apparent flowers in axillary clusters\n    (summer and autumn) (Spurge) --3.\n\n1c. Stem-leaves alternate; inflorescence a terminal umbel-like cluster,\n    with its branches subtended by opposite or whorled leaves; flowers\n    as described for the family (Spurge) --9.\n\n     2a. Leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate; flower-clusters shorter than\n         the subtending bract\n                             =Three-seeded Mercury, Acalypha virginica.=\n\n     2b. Leaves lanceolate to oblong; flower-clusters equaling or\n         exceeding the subtending bract\n                             =Three-seeded Mercury, Acalypha gracilens.=\n\n3a. Stem and foliage glabrous --4.\n\n3b. Stem and foliage more or less pubescent (stems prostrate or\n    ascending, 1-4 dm. long) --7.\n\n     4a. Erect or ascending, usually without basal branches (2-4 dm.\n         tall)                              =Spurge, Euphorbia preslii.=\n\n     4b. Prostrate or spreading, branched from the base (stems 1-4 dm.\n         long) --5.\n\n5a. Leaves entire; plants of the shores of the Great Lakes\n                                      =Spurge, Euphorbia polygonifolia.=\n\n5b. Leaves serrulate --6.\n\n     6a. Leaves broadly oblong or obovate; seeds obscurely wrinkled\n                                      =Spurge, Euphorbia serpyllifolia.=\n\n     6b. Leaves narrowly oblong; seeds with prominent transverse ridges\n                                       =Spurge, Euphorbia glyptosperma.=\n\n7a. Seeds black                             =Spurge, Euphorbia hirsuta.=\n\n7b. Seeds red --8.\n\n     8a. Leaves oblong                     =Spurge, Euphorbia maculata.=\n\n     8b. Leaves elliptical to obovate; involucre split down one side\n                                         =Spurge, Euphorbia humistrata.=\n\n9a. Flowers subtended by conspicuous petal-like white appendages (part\n    of the involucre) (4-10 dm. tall; summer)\n                                          =Spurge, Euphorbia corollata.=\n\n9b. Flowers not subtended by petal-like appendages --10.\n\n     10a. Stem-leaves below the inflorescence serrulate (2-5 dm. high;\n          summer) --11.\n\n     10b. Stem-leaves below the inflorescence entire --13.\n\n11a. Upper leaves acute                 =Spurge, Euphorbia platyphylla.=\n\n11b. Upper leaves obtuse, rounded, or notched at the apex --12.\n\n     12a. Leaves of the involucre broadly triangular-ovate, widest near\n          the base                         =Spurge, Euphorbia obtusata.=\n\n     12b. Leaves of the involucre broadly obovate to nearly circular,\n          widest near or above the middle\n                                        =Spurge, Euphorbia helioscopia.=\n\n13a. Stem-leaves narrowly linear, less than 3 mm. wide (2-4 dm. high;\n     late spring and summer)    =Cypress Spurge, Euphorbia cyparissias.=\n\n13b. Stem-leaves narrowly oblong-spatulate, more than 5 mm. wide, and\n     more than 3 times as long as wide (2-6 dm. high; summer) --14.\n\n13c. Stem-leaves obovate to nearly circular, not more than twice as long\n     as wide (1-4 dm. high) --15.\n\n     14a. Leaves at base of umbel narrow, resembling those on the stem\n                                              =Spurge, Euphorbia esula.=\n\n     14b. Leaves at base of umbel broad, resembling those of the\n          inflorescence                      =Spurge, Euphorbia lucida.=\n\n15a. Upper stem-leaves distinctly narrowed at the base; introduced\n     species of waste places (summer)        =Spurge, Euphorbia peplus.=\n\n15b. Upper stem-leaves rounded at the sessile base; native species of\n     woodlands (spring and early summer)  =Spurge, Euphorbia commutata.=\n\n\n\n\nCALLITRICHACEAE, the Water Starwort Family\n\nSmall herbs growing in water or in mud, with opposite entire leaves and\nsmall inconspicuous axillary flowers, with neither calyx nor corolla.\n(Flowers in summer).\n\n\n1a. Completely submerged; leaves all linear\n                               =Water Starwort, Callitriche autumnalis.=\n\n1b. Submerged leaves linear, emersed and floating leaves obovate\n                                =Water Starwort, Callitriche palustris.=\n\n\n\n\nEMPETRACEAE, the Crowberry Family\n\nLow evergreen shrubs, with the linear leaves completely rolled into a\ntube, and inconspicuous flowers without petals, in the axils of the\nleaves.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 1-3 dm. high; leaves less than 1 cm. long;\nflowers in summer                          =Crowberry, Empetrum nigrum.=\n\n\n\n\nLIMNANTHACEAE, the False Mermaid Family\n\nLow herbs with alternate compound leaves and minute axillary flowers;\nsepals 3, petals 3, stamens 6.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, with stems 1-3 dm. long, and flowers in late\nspring                       =False Mermaid, Floerkea proserpinacoides.=\n\n\n\n\nANACARDIACEAE, the Cashew Family\n\nShrubs or small trees, with milky or resinous juice, alternate compound\nleaves sometimes poisonous to the touch, and small clustered greenish or\nyellowish flowers.\n\n\n1a. Leaflets 7 to many (1-5 m. high) (Sumach) --2.\n\n1b. Leaflets 3-5.\n\n     2a. Axis of the leaves wing-margined between the leaflets\n                                               =Sumach, Rhus copallina.=\n\n     2b. Axis of the leaves not margined --3.\n\n3a. Leaflets entire                        =Poison Sumach, Rhus vernix.=\n\n3b. Leaflets serrate --4.\n\n     4a. Bark of the older stems glabrous         =Sumach, Rhus glabra.=\n\n     4b. Bark of the older stems densely velvety-hairy\n                                                 =Sumach, Rhus typhina.=\n\n5a. Terminal leaflet narrowed to a sessile base (5-20 dm. high)\n                                              =Sumach, Rhus canadensis.=\n\n5b. Terminal leaflet on a definite stalk, round or acute at base (3-8\n    dm. high, or climbing by hold-fast roots)\n                                       =Poison Ivy, Rhus toxicodendron.=\n\n\n\n\nAQUIFOLIACEAE, the Holly Family\n\nShrubs, with alternate simple leaves and small white or greenish\naxillary flowers in late spring and early summer; sepals, petals, and\nstamens each 4-6; fruit a berry.\n\n\n1a. Leaves entire or nearly so, 1-3 cm. long (1-2 m. tall)\n                                =Mountain Holly, Nemopanthus mucronata.=\n\n1b. Leaves sharply serrate, 5-8 cm. long (2-5 m. high) (Black Alder)\n    --2.\n\n     2a. Leaves downy on the veins beneath; fruit red\n                                       =Black Alder, Ilex verticillata.=\n\n     2b. Leaves nearly or quite glabrous; fruit orange\n                       =Black Alder, Ilex verticillata var. tenuifolia.=\n\n\n\n\nCELASTRACEAE, the Staff Tree Family\n\nShrubs with simple leaves and inconspicuous flowers; sepals and petals\neach 4 or 5, the stamens of the same number and attached to a disk which\nfills the center of the flower; fruit showy, orange and red.\n\n\n1a. Leaves alternate (climbing vine; flowers in racemes; late spring)\n                                     =Bitter-sweet, Celastrus scandens.=\n\n1b. Leaves opposite (flowers in axillary clusters) --2.\n\n     2a. Prostrate, with short erect branches; leaves broadest above the\n         middle (spring)            =Creeping Wahoo, Evonymus obovatus.=\n\n     2b. Tall shrub, with leaves broadest below or near the middle\n         (early summer)                 =Wahoo, Evonymus atropurpureus.=\n\n\n\n\nSTAPHYLEACEAE, the Bladder Nut Family\n\nShrubs with opposite trifoliate leaves and small axillary clusters of\nwhite flowers in spring; sepals, petals, and stamens each 5; ovary\n3-celled, ripening into a large inflated 3-celled pod.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan (2-5 m. high) =Bladder Nut, Staphylea trifolia.=\n\n\n\n\nACERACEAE, the Maple Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with opposite, lobed or compound leaves and\ninconspicuous flowers; sepals about 5; petals the same number, or none;\nstamens 4-12; ovary 2-lobed, ripening into a pair of winged fruits.\n\n\n1a. Leaves compound (tree; flowers appearing before the leaves)\n                                              =Box Elder, Acer negundo.=\n\n1b. Leaves simple (Maple) --2.\n\n     2a. Shrubs or small trees; leaves 3-5-lobed; the lobes with\n         regularly serrate margins (flowers greenish-yellow, appearing\n         later than the leaves) --3.\n\n     2b. Trees; leaves 3-7-lobed; margins of the lobes entire or\n         incised, but never regularly serrate --4.\n\n3a. Leaves finely and sharply serrate; twigs smooth; bark conspicuously\n    striped with white lines       =Striped Maple, Acer pennsylvanicum.=\n\n3b. Leaves coarsely and bluntly serrate; young twigs pubescent; bark not\n    striped                             =Mountain Maple, Acer spicatum.=\n\n     4a. Angles between the leaf-lobes rounded (flowers greenish-yellow,\n         appearing with the leaves) --5.\n\n     4b. Angles between the leaf-lobes acute or obtuse, but not rounded\n         (flowers purple, red, or yellowish, appearing before the\n         leaves) --6.\n\n5a. Leaves glabrous beneath, or minutely pubescent on the veins\n                                          =Sugar Maple, Acer saccharum.=\n\n5b. Leaves downy beneath      =Black Maple, Acer saccharum var. nigrum.=\n\n     6a. Middle leaf-lobe usually more than half the length of the leaf,\n         narrowed at its base; broken twigs with a strong odor\n                                       =Silver Maple, Acer saccharinum.=\n\n     6b. Middle leaf-lobe usually less than half the length of the leaf,\n         its sides parallel or broadened at the base; broken twigs\n         without strong odor                   =Red Maple, Acer rubrum.=\n\n\n\n\nSAPINDACEAE, the Soapberry Family\n\nTrees, with opposite palmately compound leaves, and showy white or\nyellowish flowers in panicles in spring; sepals 5; petals 4 or 5;\nstamens about 7; fruit a smooth brown nut.\n\n\n1a. Leaflets 7; buds viscid; corolla of 5 petals\n                               =Horse Chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum.=\n\n1b. Leaflets 5; buds smooth; corolla of 4 petals\n                                             =Buckeye, Aesculus glabra.=\n\n\n\n\nBALSAMINACEAE, the Touch-me-not Family\n\nSmooth herbs, with alternate simple leaves and showy flowers; one\npetal-like sepal prolonged into a spur; fruit explosive when ripe (5-10\ndm. high; summer).\n\n\n1a. Flowers pale-yellow, with a few red-brown spots\n                                      =Touch-me-not, Impatiens pallida.=\n\n1b. Flowers orange, thickly spotted with red-brown\n                                      =Touch-me-not, Impatiens biflora.=\n\n\n\n\nRHAMNACEAE, the Buckthorn Family\n\nShrubs, with simple leaves and small flowers in axillary or terminal\nclusters in early summer; sepals, petals, and stamens each 4 to 5, or\npetals none.\n\n\n1a. Leaves with a single mid-vein; flowers in axillary clusters,\n    greenish (Buckthorn) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves with 3-5 principal veins; flowers in dense terminal clusters,\n    white (Red-root) --3.\n\n     2a. Lateral veins 3-4 pairs (stout shrub, frequently thorny,\n         escaped from cultivation)      =Buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica.=\n\n     2b. Lateral veins 6-9 pairs (1 m. high or less; in swamps and bogs)\n                                         =Buckthorn, Rhamnus alnifolia.=\n\n3a. Leaves ovate, rounded or cordate at the base, 2-5 cm. wide or more\n    (4-8 dm. high)                     =Red-root, Ceanothus americanus.=\n\n3b. Leaves elliptical-lanceolate, 2 cm. wide or less (3-8 dm. high)\n                                           =Red-root, Ceanothus ovatus.=\n\n\n\n\nVITACEAE, the Grape Family\n\nShrubs, climbing by tendrils or hold-fast roots, with palmately lobed or\npalmately compound leaves and small greenish flowers in panicles or\nflattened clusters; petals and sepals each 4 or 5; fruit a berry.\n\n\n1a. Leaves compound (summer) (Virginia Creeper) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves simple (late spring) (Grape) --4.\n\n     2a. Branches of the tendrils chiefly ending in adhesive disks --3.\n\n     2b. Branches of the tendrils twining, or rarely with a few disks\n                                    =Virginia Creeper, Psedera vitacea.=\n\n3a. Stem and foliage glabrous\n                               =Virginia Creeper, Psedera quinquefolia.=\n\n3b. Stem and foliage pubescent, at least when young\n                  =Virginia Creeper, Psedera quinquefolia var. hirsuta.=\n\n     4a. Leaves conspicuously pubescent beneath --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves glabrous beneath when mature, or pubescent on the veins\n         only --6.\n\n     5a. A tendril or flower-cluster opposite each leaf\n                                            =Fox Grape, Vitis labrusca.=\n\n     5b. No tendril opposite each third leaf\n                                       =Summer Grape, Vitis aestivalis.=\n\n     6a. Pith continuous through the joints of the stem\n                                        =Fox Grape, Vitis rotundifolia.=\n\n     6b. Pith interrupted by the solid joints --7.\n\n7a. Leaf-lobes with rounded angles between them\n                                          =Summer Grape, Vitis bicolor.=\n\n7b. Leaf-lobes with sharp angles between them --8.\n\n     8a. Leaves coarsely toothed, unlobed or slightly 3-lobed\n                                        =Frost Grape, Vitis cordifolia.=\n\n     8b. Leaves sharply toothed, prominently lobed\n                                           =Frost Grape, Vitis vulpina.=\n\n\n\n\nTILIACEAE, the Linden Family\n\nTrees, with alternate, simple, palmately veined leaves, and clusters of\nfragrant white flowers in late spring arising from the middle of a\nleaf-like bract; sepals and petals each 5; stamens numerous, but united\ninto 5 sets.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan                     =Basswood, Tilia americana.=\n\n\n\n\nMALVACEAE, the Mallow Family\n\nHerbs with alternate leaves; sepals and petals each 5; stamens numerous,\nunited by their filaments to form a tube surrounding the styles; ovary\nmany-celled.\n\n\n1a. Flowers yellow (summer and autumn) --2.\n\n1b. Flowers pale-yellow, with a dark center (2-4 dm. high; late summer)\n                                  =Flower-of-an-hour, Hibiscus trionum.=\n\n1c. Flowers white to red or blue, never yellow --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves broadly heart-shape (10-15 dm. tall)\n                                    =Velvet Leaf, Abutilon theophrasti.=\n\n     2b. Leaves ovate-lanceolate (2-5 dm. tall)    =Sida, Sida spinosa.=\n\n3a. Calyx subtended by 6 to many bractlets which are sometimes united at\n    base (summer) --4.\n\n3b. Calyx subtended by 3 bractlets, or by none --6.\n\n     4a. Flowers 2-4 cm. wide (5-10 dm. high; flowers pink)\n                                    =Marsh Mallow, Althaea officinalis.=\n\n     4b. Flowers 7-15 cm. wide (8-15 dm. high; flowers pink to nearly\n         white) (Rose Mallow) --5.\n\n5a. Leaves densely pubescent below   =Rose Mallow, Hibiscus moscheutos.=\n\n5b. Leaves glabrous                   =Rose Mallow, Hibiscus militaris.=\n\n     6a. Petals prominently notched at the end or reverse heart-shape\n         (Mallow) --7.\n\n     6b. Petals obtuse or truncate (summer) --11.\n\n7a. Flowers 1-1.5 cm. wide --8.\n\n7b. Flowers 2-5 cm. wide (3-8 dm. high; flowers in summer) --9.\n\n     8a. Stems procumbent, prostrate, or spreading (spring, summer, and\n         autumn)                           =Mallow, Malva rotundifolia.=\n\n     8b. Stems erect (10-15 dm. high; summer)\n                                           =Mallow, Malva verticillata.=\n\n9a. Leaves with prominent but shallow lobes; flowers axillary\n                                             =Mallow, Malva sylvestris.=\n\n9b. Leaves deeply lobed or cleft; flowers in the upper axils, producing\n    a raceme-like cluster --10.\n\n     10a. Lobes of the leaf dentate or incised    =Mallow, Malva alcea.=\n\n     10b. Lobes of the leaf pinnately cleft into linear or narrowly\n          oblong divisions                     =Mallow, Malva moschata.=\n\n11a. Flowers white (1-2 m. high)  =Virginia Mallow, Sida hermaphrodita.=\n\n11b. Flowers purple or pink (3-5 dm. high, spreading)\n                                  =Poppy Mallow, Callirhoe triangulata.=\n\n\n\n\nHYPERICACEAE, the St. John's-wort Family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, with opposite entire leaves dotted with translucent\nglands; flowers usually yellow (or pink); sepals and petals each 5;\nstamens 5 to many; ovary with 3-5 styles. (St. John's-wort.)\n\n\n1a. Shrubs (4-8 dm. high; flowers yellow, summer) --2.\n\n1b. Herbs (flowers in summer) --3.\n\n     2a. Styles 5                =St. John's-wort, Hypericum kalmianum.=\n\n     2b. Styles 3               =St. John's-wort, Hypericum prolificum.=\n\n3a. Flowers pinkish, 15 mm. broad (3-5 dm. high, in swamps)\n                          =Marsh St. John's-wort, Hypericum virginicum.=\n\n3b. Flowers yellow --4.\n\n     4a. Flowers about 4 cm. wide; principal leaves 5-10 cm. long (7-15\n         dm. tall)                 =St. John's-wort, Hypericum ascyron.=\n\n     4b. Flowers 8-25 mm. wide; stamens 15 or more --5.\n\n     4c. Flowers 1-10 mm. wide; stamens 12 or fewer (1-6 dm. high) --7.\n\n5a. Petals dotted with black (4-8 dm. high) --6.\n\n5b. Petals without black dots (2-5 dm. high)\n                                =St. John's-wort, Hypericum ellipticum.=\n\n     6a. Flowers 20-25 mm. wide; leaves of an oblong type, broadest near\n         the middle             =St. John's-wort, Hypericum perforatum.=\n\n     6b. Flowers 10-15 mm. wide; leaves of an ovate type, broadest below\n         the middle              =St. John's-wort, Hypericum punctatum.=\n\n7a. Leaves minute, subulate, 1-3 mm. long\n                                     =Pineweed, Hypericum gentianoides.=\n\n7b. Leaves linear, with 1-3 principal veins, broadest near or above the\n    middle                       =St. John's-wort, Hypericum canadense.=\n\n7c. Leaves lanceolate, 4-6 times as long as broad, with 5-7 principal\n    veins                            =St. John's-wort, Hypericum majus.=\n\n7d. Leaves oblong, elliptic, or ovate, 1.5-3 times as long as broad --8.\n\n     8a. Uppermost bracts linear   =St. John's-wort, Hypericum mutilum.=\n\n     8b. Uppermost bracts resembling the leaves in shape, but smaller\n                                   =St. John's-wort, Hypericum boreale.=\n\n\n\n\nELATINACEAE, the Waterwort Family\n\nSmall marsh herbs, with opposite leaves without translucent dots, and\ninconspicuous axillary flowers. (Stems 2-5 cm. long; flowers in summer.)\n\n\nOne species in Michigan                  =Waterwort, Elatine americana.=\n\n\n\n\nCISTACEAE, the Rock-rose Family\n\nSmall herbs or shrubs, with opposite or alternate entire leaves; flowers\nregular, with 5 sepals, 3 or 5 petals, and 3 to many stamens.\n\n\n1a. Flowers yellow (early summer) --2.\n\n1b. Flowers greenish or purplish, minute, in panicles (late summer)\n    (Pinweed) --4.\n\n     2a. Leaves crowded, closely appressed to the branches; flowers\n         7 mm. wide (2-4 dm. high)\n                                    =False Heather, Hudsonia tomentosa.=\n\n     2b. Leaves spreading; flowers 15-30 mm. wide (3-6 dm. high)\n         (Frostweed) --3.\n\n3a. Petal-bearing flowers solitary\n                                    =Frostweed, Helianthemum canadense.=\n\n3b. Petal-bearing flowers few, racemose\n                                        =Frostweed, Helianthemum majus.=\n\n     4a. Stem-leaves linear, 4 or more times as long as wide --5.\n\n     4b. Stem-leaves oblong or elliptical, about 3 times as long as wide\n         (2-6 dm. tall) --8.\n\n5a. Plant pale with dense appressed pubescence (2-4 dm. high)\n                                              =Pinweed, Lechea stricta.=\n\n5b. Plant green, pubescence sparse or none --6.\n\n     6a. Leaves thread-like, seldom exceeding 1 mm. in width (1-3 dm.\n         tall)                             =Pinweed, Lechea tenuifolia.=\n\n     6b. Leaves 1-5 mm. wide (2-6 dm. high) --7.\n\n7a. Leaves on the basal shoots narrowly lanceolate\n                                           =Pinweed, Lechea intermedia.=\n\n7b. Leaves on the basal shoots oblong-elliptic, about twice as long as\n    wide                                   =Pinweed, Lechea racemulosa.=\n\n     8a. Pubescence of spreading hairs        =Pinweed, Lechea villosa.=\n\n     8b. Pubescence of appressed hairs          =Pinweed, Lechea minor.=\n\n\n\n\nVIOLACEAE, the Violet Family\n\nHerbs with simple, alternate or basal leaves, and conspicuous irregular\nflowers with a spur (except in the first species); sepals, petals, and\nstamens each 5; ovary 1-celled.\n\n\n1a. Flowers regular or nearly so, greenish-white, axillary; erect plant\n    with leafy stem (3-5 dm. high; spring)\n                                     =Green Violet, Hybanthus concolor.=\n\n1b. Flowers irregular, blue, yellow, or white, conspicuous (Violet) --2.\n\n     2a. Plant stemless, the flowers all on leafless stalks and the\n         leaves all basal (spring or early summer) --3.\n\n     2b. Stems leafy (spring and summer) --17.\n\n3a. Petals yellow             =Round-leaved Violet, Viola rotundifolia.=\n\n3b. Petals blue, violet, or white --4.\n\n     4a. Principal leaves at time of flowering deeply lobed --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves oblong, ovate, or triangular, not narrowed to the\n         petiole, and frequently sharply toothed or incised near the\n         base --7.\n\n     4c. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, tapering to the base\n                                             =Violet, Viola lanceolata.=\n\n     4d. Leaves heart-shape or kidney-shape, not lobed --8.\n\n5a. Lateral petals bearded --6.\n\n5b. Lateral petals not bearded         =Bird-foot Violet, Viola pedata.=\n\n     6a. Leaves divided to the base into linear segments\n                                   =Bird-foot Violet, Viola pedatifida.=\n\n     6b. Leaves irregularly divided into broader segments\n                                      =Hand-leaf Violet, Viola palmata.=\n\n7a. Leaves ovate-oblong, pubescent          =Violet, Viola fimbriatula.=\n\n7b. Leaves triangular-lanceolate, usually somewhat dilated at base,\n    nearly or quite glabrous                  =Violet, Viola sagittata.=\n\n     8a. Flowers violet or blue (rarely white-flowered plants are found\n         with the typical blue-flowered ones) (Blue Violets) --9.\n\n     8b. Flowers white, the 3 lower petals marked with purple (White\n         Violets) --14.\n\n9a. Lateral petals bearded --10.\n\n9b. Lateral petals beardless    =Great-spurred Violet, Viola selkirkii.=\n\n     10a. Foliage glabrous --11.\n\n     10b. Petioles and lower surface of leaves pubescent --13.\n\n11a. Beard of the lateral petals with a knob at the tip of each hair\n                                         =Blue Violet, Viola cucullata.=\n\n11b. Beard of the lateral petals not knobbed --12.\n\n     12a. Spurred petal hairy              =Wood Violet, Viola affinis.=\n\n     12b. Spurred petal glabrous      =Blue Violet, Viola papilionacea.=\n\n13a. Spurred petal villous         =Blue Violet, Viola septentrionalis.=\n\n13b. Spurred petal glabrous, or with a few scattered hairs\n                                    =Common Blue Violet, Viola sororia.=\n\n     14a. Leaf-blade obviously pubescent --15.\n\n     14b. Leaf-blade glabrous or very nearly so --16.\n\n15a. Lateral petals bearded       =Sweet White Violet, Viola incognita.=\n\n15b. Lateral petals not bearded         =White Violet, Viola renifolia.=\n\n     16a. Leaf-blades strictly glabrous\n                                    =Sweet White Violet; Viola pallens.=\n\n     16b. Leaf-blades with some minute white hairs on the upper surface\n          near the base              =Sweet White Violet, Viola blanda.=\n\n17a. Stipules large and leaf-like, deeply pinnatifid and nearly or quite\n     as long as the petioles --18.\n\n17b. Stipules small, inconspicuous, entire or toothed, and much shorter\n     than the petiole --19.\n\n     18a. Leaves serrate; flowers 1.5-2.5 cm. wide (1-3 dm. high;\n          flowers of various colors)             =<DW29>, Viola tricolor.=\n\n     18b. Upper leaves entire or nearly so; flowers about 1 cm. wide\n          (1-2 dm. high; flowers bluish-white)\n                                        =Wild <DW29>, Viola rafinesquii.=\n\n19a. Petals yellow (1-4 dm. high) (Yellow Violet) --20.\n\n19b. Petals violet, blue, or white --21.\n\n     20a. Foliage villous-pubescent    =Yellow Violet, Viola pubescens.=\n\n     20b. Foliage nearly or quite glabrous\n                                    =Yellow Violet, Viola scabriuscula.=\n\n21a. Stipules entire (2-4 dm. high)   =Canada Violet, Viola canadensis.=\n\n21b. Stipules toothed --22.\n\n     22a. Lateral petals not bearded (1-2 dm. high)\n                                  =Long-spurred Violet, Viola rostrata.=\n\n     22b. Lateral petals bearded --23.\n\n23a. Flowers white or nearly white (1-3 dm. high)\n                                           =Pale Violet, Viola striata.=\n\n23b. Flowers blue (about 1 dm. high) --24.\n\n     24a. Leaves smooth                   =Dog Violet, Viola conspersa.=\n\n     24b. Leaves pubescent                =Sand Violet, Viola arenaria.=\n\n\n\n\nCACTACEAE, the Cactus Family\n\nFleshy, jointed leafless plants, armed with numerous thorns; flowers\nlarge (5-10 cm. wide), yellow, with about 10 petals and numerous\nstamens.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan; flowers in\nsummer                              =Prickly Pear, Opuntia rafinesquii.=\n\n\n\n\nTHYMELAEACEAE, the Mezereum Family\n\nShrubs, with simple alternate entire leaves, and small yellowish flowers\nin clusters, opening before the leaves; petals none, the sepals somewhat\npetal-like.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 5-15 dm. tall, with very tough bark\n                                         =Leatherwood, Dirca palustris.=\n\n\n\n\nELAEAGNACEAE, the Oleaster Family\n\nShrubs, with opposite, silvery-pubescent, simple, entire leaves, and\nsmall clusters of inconspicuous yellow flowers in spring.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 1-2 m. high\n                                 =Buffalo Berry, Shepherdia canadensis.=\n\n\n\n\nLYTHRACEAE, the Loosestrife Family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, with opposite or alternate entire leaves; receptacle\ncup-shape or tubular, bearing the 5-7 petals and sepals at its margin,\nand the 6-12 stamens on its inner surface; ovary superior.\n\n\n1a. Stem shrubby (aquatic, stems 1-3 m. long; flowers pink, summer)\n                             =Water Loosestrife, Decodon verticillatus.=\n\n1b. Stem herbaceous (4-10 dm. high; flowers purple, summer) --2.\n\n     2a. Flowers solitary in the axils; leaves mostly alternate\n                                          =Loosestrife, Lythrum alatum.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in terminal panicles; leaves opposite or whorled\n                                       =Loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria.=\n\n\n\n\nMELASTOMACEAE, the Melastoma Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite leaves with 3-5 principal veins; receptacle\nurn-shape, bearing 4 sepals and 4 petals at its edge; stamens 8; ovary\n4-celled, superior.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 3-4 dm. high, with purple flowers in late\nsummer                                =Meadow Beauty, Rhexia virginica.=\n\n\n\n\nONAGRACEAE, the Evening Primrose Family\n\nHerbs with opposite or alternate simple leaves and regular flowers;\nsepals and petals each 4 (or 2 in one genus), stamens 8 (or 2 in one\ngenus), attached to the summit or inside of a tubular receptacle; ovary\n2-4-celled, inferior.\n\n\n1a. Aquatic plant of shallow water or muddy ground, with prostrate stem\n(flowers minute, axillary; petals small or none, summer)\n                                   =Water Purslane, Ludvigia palustris.=\n\n1b. Land plants with erect or ascending stems --2.\n\n     2a. Petals minute, greenish (3-8 dm. high; late summer)\n                                =False Loosestrife, Ludvigia polycarpa.=\n\n     2b. Petals yellow --3.\n\n     2c. Petals white, pink, purple, or red --9.\n\n3a. Sepals borne at the summit of the ovary (5-10 dm. high; summer)\n                             =False Loosestrife, Ludvigia alternifolia.=\n\n3b. Sepals borne at the summit of the slender tubular receptacle, which\n    is prolonged beyond the ovary --4.\n\n     4a. Stamens all equal in length (Evening Primrose) --5.\n\n     4b. The alternate stamens longer (3-8 dm. high; summer) (Sundrops)\n         --8.\n\n5a. Leaves deeply dentate or pinnatifid (2-5 dm. high; early summer)\n                                =Evening Primrose, Oenothera laciniata.=\n\n5b. Leaves entire or undulate or finely toothed (5-12 dm. high; summer)\n    --6.\n\n     6a. Hairs on the stem with broad reddish bases\n                                 =Evening Primrose, Oenothera muricata.=\n\n     6b. Hairs on the stem none, or without swollen bases --7.\n\n7a. Stem and foliage glabrous, or with sparse spreading hairs\n                                  =Evening Primrose, Oenothera biennis.=\n\n7b. Stem and foliage densely but closely appressed-pubescent\n                             =Evening Primrose, Oenothera rhombipetala.=\n\n     8a. Petals 5-10 mm. long              =Sundrops, Oenothera pumila.=\n\n     8b. Petals 14 mm. long or more     =Sundrops, Oenothera fruticosa.=\n\n9a. Petals 2, reverse heart-shape, stamens 2 (flowers small, white,\n    summer) (Enchanter's Nightshade) --10.\n\n9b. Petals 4; stamens 4 or 8 --12.\n\n     10a. Leaves rounded at the base, denticulate (3-8 dm. high; fruit\n          prickly)          =Enchanter's Nightshade, Circaea lutetiana.=\n\n     10b. Leaves cordate at the base --11.\n\n11a. Fruit 2-celled, bristly (2-4 dm. high)\n                           =Enchanter's Nightshade, Circaea intermedia.=\n\n11b. Fruit 1-celled, with soft hairs (delicate plant 2 dm. high, or\n     less)                     =Enchanter's Nightshade, Circaea alpina.=\n\n     12a. Petals entire (summer) --13.\n\n     12b. Petals notched at the end (flowers white or pinkish, less than\n          1 cm. broad, in summer) (Willow Herb) --15.\n\n13a. Flowers 2-3 cm. wide, purple (7-20 dm. high)\n                                    =Fireweed, Epilobium angustifolium.=\n\n13b. Flowers about 1 cm. wide --14.\n\n     14a. Flowers red (2-5 dm. high)            =Gaura, Gaura coccinea.=\n\n     14b. Flowers white, turning pink when old   =Gaura, Gaura biennis.=\n\n15a. Leaves entire, the margins usually somewhat revolute --16.\n\n15b. Leaves toothed, flat (4-9 dm. high) --18.\n\n     16a. Plant densely pubescent with spreading hairs (3-8 dm. high)\n                                         =Willow Herb, Epilobium molle.=\n\n     16b. Plant pubescent with appressed or incurved hairs --17.\n\n17a. Leaves linear, the margin revolute (3-5 dm. high)\n                                        =Willow Herb, Epilobium densum.=\n\n17b. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, not revolute (2-4 dm. high)\n                                      =Willow Herb, Epilobium palustre.=\n\n     18a. Seeds tipped with a tuft of reddish-brown hairs\n                                     =Willow Herb, Epilobium coloratum.=\n\n     18b. Seeds tipped with a tuft of white hairs\n                                   =Willow Herb, Epilobium adenocaulon.=\n\n\n\n\nHALORAGIDACEAE, the Water Milfoil Family\n\nAquatic or marsh herbs, with alternate, opposite, or whorled leaves, and\nsmall, inconspicuous terminal or axillary flowers, frequently without\npetals (summer).\n\n\n1a. Leaves none, or else very small and inconspicuous\n                                 =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum tenellum.=\n\n1b. Leaves alternate (1-4 dm. high)\n                                 =Mermaid Weed, Proserpinaca palustris.=\n\n1c. Leaves opposite or whorled --2.\n\n     2a. Leaves entire (2-4 dm. high)  =Mare's-tail, Hippuris vulgaris.=\n\n     2b. Leaves toothed or dissected (Water Milfoil) --3.\n\n3a. Flowers in the axils of foliage leaves --4.\n\n3b. Flowers in terminal spikes, subtended by bracts --5.\n\n     4a. Flowers above water, subtended by toothed or entire leaves\n                            =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum heterophyllum.=\n\n     4b. Flowers submerged, subtended by dissected leaves\n                                =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum farwellii.=\n\n5a. Flowers solitary or in pairs at each joint of the spike\n                            =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum alternifolium.=\n\n5b. Flowers several at each joint of the spike --6.\n\n     6a. Bracts deeply pinnatifid\n            =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum verticillatum var. pectinatum.=\n\n     6b. Bracts entire or toothed\n                                 =Water Milfoil, Myriophyllum spicatum.=\n\n\n\n\nARALIACEAE, the Sarsaparilla Family\n\nHerbs or thorny shrubs, with alternate or whorled leaves, and small\nflowers in umbels; sepals 5, minute; petals and stamens each 5; ovary\ninferior, with 2-5 styles, ripening into a berry.\n\n\n1a. Leaves simple, palmately lobed (thorny shrub; flowers\n    greenish-white, in panicles, in June)\n                                         =Devil's Club, Fatsia horrida.=\n\n1b. Leaves once compounded, whorled (umbel one, terminal) --2.\n\n1c. Leaves twice or thrice compounded (umbels several) --3.\n\n     2a. Leaflets sessile; flowers white, in spring (1-2 dm. high)\n                                       =Dwarf Ginseng, Panax trifolium.=\n\n     2b. Leaflets stalked; flowers greenish, in summer (2-5 dm. high)\n                                         =Ginseng, Panax quinquefolium.=\n\n3a. Stem and petioles spiny or bristly (flowers white, summer) --4.\n\n3b. Stem and petioles smooth or a little pubescent (flowers\n    greenish-white) --5.\n\n     4a. Shrubby, with stout thorns (1-3 m. high)\n                                       =Hercules' Club, Aralia spinosa.=\n\n     4b. Herbaceous, with slender bristles (4-10 dm. high)\n                                 =Bristly Sarsaparilla, Aralia hispida.=\n\n5a. Stem-leaves present; leaflets cordate at the base (8-15 dm. high;\n    summer)                                =Spikenard, Aralia racemosa.=\n\n5b. Leaf and flower-stalk arising from the ground; leaflets acute at the\n    base (2-4 dm. high; spring)  =Wild Sarsaparilla, Aralia nudicaulis.=\n\n\n\n\nUMBELLIFERAE, the Parsley Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate, usually compound leaves, the petioles dilated at\nthe base; flowers small, in umbels or heads; sepals 5, minute or even\nwanting; petals and stamens each 5; ovary inferior, with 2 styles,\nripening into a dry fruit.\n\n\n1a. Leaves simple (flowers in summer) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves compound, or at least deeply cleft --4.\n\n     2a. Leaves linear, sword-shape (4-10 dm. tall; flowers\n         greenish-white)     =Rattlesnake Master, Eryngium yuccifolium.=\n\n     2b. Leaves kidney-shape or almost circular (stems creeping, about\n         1 dm. high; flowers white) (Water Pennywort) --3.\n\n3a. Leaves peltate, attached by the center\n                               =Water Pennywort, Hydrocotyle umbellata.=\n\n3b. Leaves not peltate, attached by the margin\n                               =Water Pennywort, Hydrocotyle americana.=\n\n     4a. Flowers yellow or purple --5.\n\n     4b. Flowers white or greenish --13.\n\n5a. Leaf-segments entire (4-8 dm. high) --6.\n\n5b. Leaf-segments toothed or incised --7.\n\n     6a. Leaf-segments filiform (summer)   =Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare.=\n\n     6b. Leaf-segments ovate to lanceolate\n                               =Golden Alexander, Taenidia integerrima.=\n\n7a. Leaves pinnately compound; some of the leaflets incised or\n    pinnatifid --8.\n\n7b. Leaves ternately compound; the segments crenate or serrate --9.\n\n7c. Leaves deeply palmately cleft or divided; flowers in head-like\n    umbels --18a.\n\n     8a. Leaf-segments obtuse, rounded, or cordate at the base (6-15 dm.\n         high; summer)                 =Wild Parsnip, Pastinaca sativa.=\n\n     8b. Leaf-segments narrowed to the base (4-8 dm. high; spring)\n                                =Prairie Parsley, Polytaenia nuttallii.=\n\n9a. Terminal leaflets conspicuously stalked, their total length,\n    including stalk, at least 50% greater than the length of the lateral\n    leaflets (Meadow Parsnip) --10.\n\n9b. Terminal leaflets not conspicuously stalked, their total length,\n    including stalk, about equaling the lateral leaflets (4-8 dm. high;\n    late spring) (Golden Alexander) --12.\n\n     10a. Flowers purple (4-8 dm. high; early summer)\n                   =Meadow Parsnip, Thaspium aureum var. atropurpureum.=\n\n     10b. Flowers yellow --11.\n\n11a. Stem-leaves once-ternate; leaflets finely serrate (4-8 dm. high;\n     early summer)                    =Meadow Parsnip, Thaspium aureum.=\n\n11b. Many stem-leaves 2-3-ternate; leaflets coarsely serrate or incised\n    (6-12 dm. high; early summer)  =Meadow Parsnip, Thaspium barbinode.=\n\n     12a. Basal and lower stem-leaves 2-3-ternate\n                                        =Golden Alexander, Zizia aurea.=\n\n     12b. Basal leaves simple; stem-leaves once-ternate\n                                      =Golden Alexander, Zizia cordata.=\n\n13a. Leaves once-pinnate (or the submerged leaves decompound, if\n     present) (summer) --14.\n\n13b. Leaves ternately, palmately, or 2-3-pinnately compound --16.\n\n     14a. Leaflets mostly ovate or ovate-lanceolate, some of them\n          coarsely incised (3-9 dm. high)\n                                         =Water Parsnip, Berula erecta.=\n\n     14b. Leaflets linear to oblong, serrate to nearly entire, not\n          incised (6-15 dm. high) --15.\n\n15a. Leaflets entire, or with a few low remote teeth\n                                           =Cowbane, Oxypolis rigidior.=\n\n15b. Leaflets finely but sharply serrate\n                                    =Water Parsnip, Sium cicutaefolium.=\n\n     16a. Leaves principally basal, decompound; flowers in early spring\n          (1-2 dm. high)        =Harbinger of Spring, Erigenia bulbosa.=\n\n     16b. Leaves principally on the stem --17.\n\n17a. Leaves palmately or ternately once-compound --18.\n\n17b. Leaves 2-3 times compound or decompound --24.\n\n     18a. Flowers short-pedicelled, crowded in head-like umbels,\n          greenish; ovary bristly (4-9 dm. high; early summer) (Black\n          Snakeroot) --19.\n\n     18b. Flowers in open umbels, white --22.\n\n19a. Styles short, not projecting beyond the bristles of the mature\n     fruit --20.\n\n19b. Styles long, projecting beyond the bristles of the fruit, and\n     recurved --21.\n\n     20a. Staminate flowers on pedicels 3-4 mm. long, equaling or barely\n          exceeding the fruit    =Black Snakeroot, Sanicula trifoliata.=\n\n     20b. Staminate flowers short-pedicelled, concealed among the fruits\n                                 =Black Snakeroot, Sanicula canadensis.=\n\n21a. Fruit short-stalked, 4 mm. long or less\n                                   =Black Snakeroot, Sanicula gregaria.=\n\n21b. Fruit sessile, 6-7 mm. long\n                                =Black Snakeroot, Sanicula marilandica.=\n\n     22a. Umbel unsymmetrical, its branches irregular in length; plant\n          slender (3-8 dm. tall; early summer)\n                                    =Honewort, Cryptotaenia canadensis.=\n\n     22b. Umbel symmetrical with regular branches; plants tall and stout\n         --23.\n\n23a. Stem and leaves very pubescent (10-25 dm. high; summer)\n                                       =Cow Parsnip, Heracleum lanatum.=\n\n23b. Stem and leaves glabrous or nearly so (5-15 dm. high; early summer)\n                                   =Masterwort, Imperatoria ostruthium.=\n\n     24a. Ovary and fruit bristly (4-10 dm. high) --25.\n\n     24b. Ovary and fruit smooth or winged, never bristly --27.\n\n25a. Umbels loose, open, few-flowered; woodland plants blooming in\n     spring (Sweet Cicely) --26.\n\n25b. Umbels densely flowered; weedy plants blooming from summer to fall\n                                           =Wild Carrot, Daucus carota.=\n\n     26a. Stem villous-pubescent     =Sweet Cicely, Osmorhiza claytoni.=\n\n     26b. Stem glabrous except at the joints\n                                  =Sweet Cicely, Osmorhiza longistylis.=\n\n27a. Leaflets merely serrate (flowers in summer) --28.\n\n27b. Leaflets coarsely incised, so that the leaf appears dissected --30.\n\n     28a. Umbel densely pubescent (8-15 dm. high)\n                                           =Angelica, Angelica villosa.=\n\n     28b. Umbel smooth --29.\n\n29a. Leaf-segments broadly ovate (8-15 dm. high)\n                                      =Angelica, Angelica atropurpurea.=\n\n29b. Leaf-segments lanceolate (8-15 dm. high)\n                                       =Water Hemlock, Cicuta maculata.=\n\n29c. Leaf-segments linear (4-10 dm. high)\n                                      =Water Hemlock, Cicuta bulbifera.=\n\n     30a. Principal branches of the umbel 2-5; fruit linear-oblong;\n          woodland plants blooming in spring (2-4 dm. high)\n                                    =Chervil, Chaerophyllum procumbens.=\n\n     30b. Principal branches of the umbel 7 or more; fruit ovate to\n          broadly elliptical (summer) --31.\n\n31a. Native plants, growing in swamps (5-15 dm. high)\n                               =Hemlock Parsley, Conioselinum chinense.=\n\n31b. Introduced plants, in waste places and along roads --32.\n\n     32a. Stems conspicuously spotted with purple (5-15 dm. high)\n                                     =Poison Hemlock, Conium maculatum.=\n\n     32b. Stems not spotted with purple (2-5 dm. high)\n                                                 =Caraway, Carum carvi.=\n\n\n\n\nCORNACEAE, the Dogwood Family\n\nTrees, shrubs, or herbs, with alternate leaves and small flowers in\nrather crowded rounded or flattened clusters; sepals 4, minute; petals\nand stamens each 4; ovary inferior, ripening into a berry. In one genus\nthe flowers are minute and greenish, with 5 sepals and petals minute or\nnone.\n\n\n1a. Leaves alternate --2.\n\n1b. Leaves opposite --3.\n\n     2a. Flowers white, conspicuous, in flattened clusters (shrubs 2-4\n         m. high; flowers in late spring)\n                                         =Dogwood, Cornus alternifolia.=\n\n     2b. Flowers greenish, inconspicuous, in small axillary clusters\n         (tree; flowers in spring)          =Sour Gum, Nyssa sylvatica.=\n\n3a. Flower clusters small and dense, surrounded by a showy involucre of\n    4 bracts, resembling a corolla of 4 petals --4.\n\n3b. Flowers in open flattened clusters, without petal-like involucre\n    (shrubs 1-4 m. high; late spring) --5.\n\n     4a. Herbaceous, 3 dm. high or less (flowers in late spring)\n                                     =Dwarf Dogwood, Cornus canadensis.=\n\n     4b. Tall shrub or tree (flowers in late spring)\n                                    =Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida.=\n\n5a. Leaves distinctly pubescent beneath with woolly or spreading hairs\n    --6.\n\n5b. Leaves smooth beneath, or pubescent with short appressed hairs --9.\n\n     6a. Leaves rough above; fruit white\n                                          =Dogwood, Cornus asperifolia.=\n\n     6b. Leaves smooth or finely soft-hairy above --7.\n\n7a. Leaves at least twice as long as wide; branches brownish or purplish\n    --8.\n\n7b. Leaves less than twice as long as wide; branches greenish; fruit\n    blue                                    =Dogwood, Cornus circinata.=\n\n     8a. Branches purplish; fruit blue         =Dogwood, Cornus amomum.=\n\n     8b. Branches brownish; fruit white       =Dogwood, Cornus baileyi.=\n\n9a. Branches bright red or reddish-purple\n                                          =Dogwood, Cornus stolonifera.=\n\n9b. Branches grayish                       =Dogwood, Cornus paniculata.=\n\n\n\n\nERICACEAE, the Heath Family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, frequently with evergreen leaves; sepals 4-5; corolla\nregular, with 4-5 petals; stamens as many or twice as many; ovary\n3-10-celled, with 1 style.\n\n\n1a. Plants without green color; leafless or with scale leaves only --2.\n\n1b. Plants with green leaves --4.\n\n     2a. Flowers solitary (1-2 dm. high; summer)\n                                      =Indian Pipe, Monotropa uniflora.=\n\n     2b. Flowers in clusters --3.\n\n3a. Petals united into a bell-shape corolla (3-9 dm. high; summer)\n                                    =Pine Drops, Pterospora andromedea.=\n\n3b. Petals all separate (1-3 dm. high; summer)\n                                     =Beech Drops, Monotropa hypopitys.=\n\n     4a. Leaves all basal; herbaceous plants with terminal racemes (1-4\n         dm. high; summer) (Shin-leaf) --5.\n\n     4b. Stem-leaves present --12.\n\n5a. Style straight --6.\n\n5b. Style bent near the apex --8.\n\n     6a. Racemes one-sided, the flowers all turned in one direction\n         (flowers white or greenish-white) --7.\n\n     6b. Raceme regular, the flowers not all pointing in the same\n         direction (flowers white or pink)    =Shin-leaf, Pyrola minor.=\n\n7a. Flowers numerous in each raceme         =Shin-leaf, Pyrola secunda.=\n\n7b. Flowers only 3-7 in each raceme\n                              =Shin-leaf, Pyrola seconda var. obtusata.=\n\n     8a. Flowers pink or purple --9.\n\n     8b. Flowers white or greenish --10.\n\n9a. Leaves cordate at base               =Shin-leaf, Pyrola asarifolia.=\n\n9b. Leaves rounded at base, not cordate\n                          =Shin-leaf, Pyrola asarifolia var. incarnata.=\n\n     10a. Leaves shining on the upper side; sepals one-third as long as\n          the petals                      =Shin-leaf, Pyrola americana.=\n\n     10b. Leaves dull on the upper side; sepals one-fourth as long as\n          the petals, or a little shorter --11.\n\n11a. Leaf-blades mostly shorter than their petioles, thick and firm\n                                         =Shin-leaf, Pyrola chlorantha.=\n\n11b. Leaf-blades thin, usually longer than their petioles\n                                          =Shin-leaf, Pyrola elliptica.=\n\n     12a. Petals nearly or quite separate from each other --13.\n\n     12b. Petals united into a gamopetalous corolla, the tube of which\n          is as long as or longer than the lobes --18.\n\n13a. Leaves opposite or whorled; stems herbaceous or nearly so (summer)\n     --14.\n\n13b. Leaves alternate; stems shrubby (early summer) --16.\n\n     14a. Flowers solitary; leaves broadly ovate to nearly circular\n          (1 dm. high; flower white)\n                           =One-flowered Wintergreen, Moneses uniflora.=\n\n     14b. Flowers in clusters; leaves narrow (stems trailing, 1-3 dm.\n          high; flowers white or pinkish) --15.\n\n15a. Leaves broadest above the middle, green\n                                  =Prince's Pine, Chimaphila umbellata.=\n\n15b. Leaves broadest below the middle, spotted with white\n                             =Spotted Wintergreen, Chimaphila maculata.=\n\n     16a. Leaves 2-5 cm. long, densely woolly beneath (5-10 dm. high;\n          flowers white)            =Labrador Tea, Ledum groenlandicum.=\n\n     16b. Leaves 1-2 cm. long, pale beneath but not wholly (creeping;\n          flowers pink) (Cranberry) --17.\n\n17a. Leaves acute                      =Cranberry, Vaccinium oxycoccos.=\n\n17b. Leaves obtuse                   =Cranberry, Vaccinium macrocarpon.=\n\n     18a. Leaves opposite or whorled; corolla saucer-shape (shrubs 3-8\n          dm. high; flowers purple, summer) --19.\n\n     18b. Leaves alternate; corolla bell-shape or salver-form --20.\n\n19a. Branches and twigs cylindrical, not angled\n                                    =Sheep Laurel, Kalmia angustifolia.=\n\n19b. Branches and twigs with 2 sharp angles\n                                       =Swamp Laurel, Kalmia polifolia.=\n\n     20a. Plants prostrate, or with a few ascending branches only\n          (flowers white or pink) --21.\n\n     20b. Plants erect or ascending --23.\n\n21a. Flowers 10-20 mm. long, very fragrant (early spring)\n                                     =Trailing Arbutus, Epigaea repens.=\n\n21b. Flowers 4-5 mm. long (late spring) --22.\n\n     22a. Leaves spatulate, broadest beyond the middle\n                                   =Bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi.=\n\n     22b. Leaves oval, broadest at the middle\n                                       =Snowberry, Chiogenes hispidula.=\n\n23a. Leaves linear, white beneath, their margins strongly revolute\n     (shrub 3-8 dm. high; flowers white, late spring)\n                                 =Bog Rosemary, Andromeda glaucophylla.=\n\n23b. Leaves oblong, scurfy beneath with rusty scales (bog shrub 4-10 dm.\n     high; flowers white, in spring)\n                                 =Leatherleaf, Chamaedaphne calyculata.=\n\n23c. Leaves smooth, pubescent, or resinous beneath, but not scurfy nor\n     white --24.\n\n     24a. Low shrubs 10-15 cm. high, erect from a creeping rootstock;\n          leaves with the taste of wintergreen (flowers white or pink,\n          summer)                  =Wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens.=\n\n     24b. Bushy shrubs 3-8 dm. high; leaves dotted beneath with\n          yellowish resinous dots; ovary 10-celled (flowers\n          greenish-pink, spring)     =Huckleberry, Gaylussacia baccata.=\n\n     24c. Shrubs 1 dm. to 3 m. high; leaves not resinous-dotted beneath;\n          ovary 5-celled (flowers white or greenish-pink, spring or\n          early summer) --25.\n\n25a. Corolla bell-shape, the stamens projecting beyond it (5-15 dm.\n     high)                             =Deerberry, Vaccinium stamineum.=\n\n25b. Corolla cylindrical or urn-shape, the stamens not projecting --26.\n\n     26a. Filaments hairy (Blueberry) --27.\n\n     26b. Filaments glabrous (Bilberry) --32.\n\n27a. Low bushy shrubs, usually less than 5 dm. and never more than 1 m.\n     high --28.\n\n27b. Tall erect shrubs, 1-4 m. high --31.\n\n     28a. Foliage pubescent            =Blueberry, Vaccinium canadense.=\n\n     28b. Foliage glabrous --29.\n\n29a. Leaves pale-green and glaucous, entire or nearly so\n                                       =Blueberry, Vaccinium vacillans.=\n\n29b. Leaves bright-green, distinctly serrulate --30.\n\n     30a. Fruit blue              =Blueberry, Vaccinium pennsylvanicum.=\n\n     30b. Fruit black\n                      =Blueberry, Vaccinium pennsylvanicum var. nigrum.=\n\n31a. Leaves downy beneath; fruit black\n                                      =Blueberry, Vaccinium atrococcum.=\n\n31b. Leaves smooth or minutely pubescent beneath; fruit blue\n                                      =Blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum.=\n\n     32a. Full-grown leaves less than 2.5 cm. long; low much-branched\n          shrubs, mostly less than 5 dm. high --33.\n\n     32b. Full-grown leaves more than 2.5 cm. long; shrubs usually a\n          meter high or more --34.\n\n33a. Leaves entire; petals usually 4.\n                                       =Bilberry, Vaccinium uliginosum.=\n\n33b. Leaves finely serrulate; petals 5\n                                      =Bilberry, Vaccinium caespitosum.=\n\n     34a. Leaves serrulate, green beneath, acute; corolla globular\n                                     =Bilberry, Vaccinium membranaceum.=\n\n     34b. Leaves entire, pale beneath, obtuse; corolla ovoid\n                                      =Bilberry, Vaccinium ovalifolium.=\n\n\n\n\nPRIMULACEAE, the Primrose Family\n\nHerbs, with alternate or opposite simple leaves and regular flowers;\npetals more or less united; stamens attached one in front of each petal;\novary 1-celled with 1 style.\n\n\n1a. Leaves all basal; flowers on leafless stalks --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves present --5.\n\n     2a. Flowers nodding, the petals reflexed (3-6 dm. high; flowers\n         showy, white or pink, in spring)\n                                    =Shooting Star, Dodecatheon meadia.=\n\n     2b. Flowers erect or spreading; petals not reflexed --3.\n\n3a. Corolla not longer than the calyx; flowers small and inconspicuous\n    (1 dm. high; flowers white or pink, spring)\n                                    =Androsace, Androsace occidentalis.=\n\n3b. Corolla conspicuous, much longer than the calyx (flowers pink or\npurple, summer) (Primrose) --4.\n\n     4a. Leaves white-mealy beneath (1-4 dm. high)\n                                           =Primrose, Primula farinosa.=\n\n     4b. Leaves green beneath (2 dm. high or less)\n                                       =Primrose, Primula mistassinica.=\n\n5a. All the stem-leaves in one whorl just below the flower-cluster --6.\n\n5b. Stem-leaves several or many, scattered over the stem --7.\n\n     6a. Stem-leaves about 1 cm. long --3a.\n\n     6b. Stem-leaves 5-10 cm. long  =Star Flower, Trientalis americana.=\n\n7a. Flowers red, blue, or white (summer) --8.\n\n7b. Flowers yellow (summer) --9.\n\n     8a. Leaves opposite; flowers axillary (stems spreading, 1-4 dm.\n         long; flowers blue or red)     =Pimpernel, Anagallis arvensis.=\n\n     8b. Leaves alternate; flowers racemose (1-4 dm. high; flowers\n         minute, white)          =Water Pimpernel, Samolus floribundus.=\n\n9a. Stem creeping                    =Moneywort, Lysimachia nummularia.=\n\n9b. Stem erect (Loosestrife) --10.\n\n     10a. Flowers in dense spike-like racemes (3-8 dm. high)\n                                  =Loosestrife, Lysimachia thyrsiflora.=\n\n     10b. Flowers axillary or racemose (3-9 dm. high) --11.\n\n11a. Corolla dotted or streaked with purple or brown; leaves punctate\n     with dark spots --12.\n\n11b. Corolla plain yellow; leaves not dark-dotted --14.\n\n     12a. Flowers in racemes --13.\n\n     12b. Flowers all axillary    =Loosestrife, Lysimachia quadrifolia.=\n\n13a. Flowers all in racemes; leaves opposite or some of them alternate\n                                   =Loosestrife, Lysimachia terrestris.=\n\n13b. The lowest flowers axillary; leaves opposite or whorled\n                                     =Loosestrife, Lysimachia producta.=\n\n     14a. Leaves ovate, on slender ciliate petioles\n                                     =Loosestrife, Steironema ciliatum.=\n\n     14b. Leaves lanceolate, sessile or short-petioled, pinnately veined\n                                  =Loosestrife, Steironema lanceolatum.=\n\n     14c. Leaves linear, with one mid-vein\n                                 =Loosestrife, Steironema quadriflorum.=\n\n\n\n\nOLEACEAE, the Olive Family\n\nTrees or shrubs, with opposite leaves and regular flowers; sepals 4, or\ncalyx none; petals 4, united, or none; stamens usually 2; ovary\n2-celled, superior.\n\n\n1a. Leaves simple (shrub 2-5 m. high; flowers blue or white, in showy\n    clusters in spring)                       =Lilac, Syringa vulgaris.=\n\n1b. Leaves compound (trees; flowers greenish, inconspicuous, in spring)\n    (Ash) --2.\n\n     2a. Lateral leaflets sessile           =Black Ash, Fraxinus nigra.=\n\n     2b. Lateral leaflets stalked --3.\n\n3a. Twigs sharply 4-angled           =Blue Ash, Fraxinus quadrangulata.=\n\n3b. Twigs not distinctly angled --4.\n\n     4a. Leaves pubescent beneath     =Red Ash, Fraxinus pennsylvanica.=\n\n     4b. Leaves glabrous beneath --5.\n\n5a. Leaves pale-green beneath, obscurely serrulate\n                                        =White Ash, Fraxinus americana.=\n\n5b. Leaves bright-green beneath, sharply serrulate\n                    =Green Ash, Fraxinus pennsylvanica var. lanceolata.=\n\n\n\n\nGENTIANACEAE, the Gentian Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite or basal, entire, usually simple leaves and regular\nflowers; sepals, petals, and stamens equal in number, 4-12; ovary\nsuperior, 1-celled.\n\n\n1a. Leaves reduced to small scales (1-4 dm. high; flowers small,\n    greenish-yellow, in summer)          =Bartonia, Bartonia virginica.=\n\n1b. Leaves rounded, floating (flowers white, summer)\n                                 =Floating Heart, Nymphoides lacunosum.=\n\n1c. Leaves compound (2-4 dm. high; flowers white or bluish, early\n    summer)                           =Buckbean, Menyanthes trifoliata.=\n\n1d. Leaves simple, whorled (1-2 m. high; flowers yellowish-white,\n    summer)                   =American Columbo, Frasera caroliniensis.=\n\n1e. Leaves simple, opposite --2.\n\n     2a. Corolla rotate, with spreading lobes, 2-4 cm. broad, pink (5-8 dm.\n          high; summer)                 =Rose Pink, Sabbatia angularis.=\n\n     2b. Corolla bell-shape, each petal with a spur at the base,\n         purplish or white, and not over 1 cm. long (1-4 dm. high;\n         summer)                     =Spurred Gentian, Halenia deflexa.=\n\n     2c. Corolla bell-shape, tubular, funnel-form, or salver-form, not\n         spurred --3.\n\n3a. Corolla-lobes fringed (flowers bright-blue) (Fringed Gentian) --4.\n\n3b. Corolla-lobes entire --5.\n\n     4a. Leaves lanceolate (2-8 dm. high; autumn)\n                                    =Fringed Gentian, Gentiana crinita.=\n\n     4b. Leaves linear (1-4 dm. high; late summer)\n                                    =Fringed Gentian, Gentiana procera.=\n\n5a. Corolla 2 cm. long or a little less --6.\n\n5b. Corolla 2.5-5 cm. long (late summer and autumn) (Gentian) --7.\n\n     6a. Upper leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate (2-4 dm. high;\n         flowers pink-purple, late summer)\n                                      =Centaury, Centaurium umbellatum.=\n\n     6b. Upper leaves ovate, with several principal veins (1-5 dm. high;\n         flowers blue, late summer and autumn)\n                                       =Gentian, Gentiana quinquefolia.=\n\n7a. Calyx-lobes rough or ciliate at the margin (flowers blue, or rarely\n    white) --8.\n\n7b. Calyx-lobes smooth (2-8 dm. high) --10.\n\n     8a. Corolla-lobes spreading; leaves narrowly lanceolate,\n         indistinctly veined (2-5 dm. high)\n                                           =Gentian, Gentiana puberula.=\n\n     8b. Corolla-lobes erect or incurved; leaves ovate to\n         ovate-lanceolate, with 3-7 principal veins (3-6 dm. high) --9.\n\n9a. Calyx-lobes equaling or exceeding the calyx-tube\n                                          =Gentian, Gentiana saponaria.=\n\n9b. Calyx-lobes shorter than the calyx-tube\n                                          =Gentian, Gentiana andrewsii.=\n\n     10a. Leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate, somewhat cordate at base\n          (flowers greenish-white or yellowish-white)\n                                            =Gentian, Gentiana flavida.=\n\n     10b. Leaves narrowly lanceolate or nearly linear, not cordate\n          (flowers blue)                   =Gentian, Gentiana linearis.=\n\n\n\n\nAPOCYNACEAE, the Dogbane Family\n\nHerbs, with opposite simple entire leaves and regular flowers; sepals,\npetals, and stamens each 5; petals united; stamens attached to the\ncorolla; ovaries 2, with a single style or stigma.\n\n\n1a. Plant creeping or trailing; flowers blue, axillary, 2-3 cm. broad\n    (spring)                                  =Periwinkle, Vinca minor.=\n\n1b. Plant erect or essentially so; flowers 1 cm. broad or less (4-12 dm.\n    high) --2.\n\n     2a. Corolla pinkish, about 8 mm. long by 6-8 mm. broad (early\n         summer)                   =Dogbane, Apocynum androsaemifolium.=\n\n     2b. Corolla white or greenish, about 6 mm. long by 4 mm. broad\n         (summer) --3.\n\n3a. Leaves petioled, acute at the base\n                                     =Indian Hemp, Apocynum cannabinum.=\n\n3b. Leaves sessile, rounded or truncate at the base\n                 =Indian Hemp, Apocynum cannabinum var. hypericifolium.=\n\n\n\n\nASCLEPIADACEAE, the Milkweed Family\n\nHerbs, with simple entire leaves and regular flowers; juice usually\nmilky; except in the first species, which is a twining vine. The flowers\nhave an unusual structure: calyx of 5 sepals; petals 5, united with each\nother, and spreading or reflexed so that they conceal the calyx; stamens\n5, united with each other and with the stigma to form a complex organ in\nthe center of the flower; ovaries 2; on the back of each stamen is a\n projecting hood, which is frequently the most conspicuous part\nof the flower, and may be mistaken for the corolla.\n\n\n1a. Twining vine, with dark purple flowers (summer)\n                                 =Black Swallow-wort, Cynanchum nigrum.=\n\n1b. Stems not twining --2.\n\n     2a. Leaves whorled (3-6 dm. high; summer) (Milkweed) --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves opposite or alternate --4.\n\n3a. Leaves in whorls of 4, lanceolate (flowers pink)\n                                      =Milkweed, Asclepias quadrifolia.=\n\n3b. Leaves in whorls of 4-7, linear (flowers greenish-white)\n                                     =Milkweed, Asclepias verticillata.=\n\n     4a. Umbel sessile (4-8 dm. high; flowers green, summer)\n                                 =Green Milkweed, Acerates viridiflora.=\n\n4b. Umbel peduncled --5.\n\n5a. Leaves linear or narrowly linear-lanceolate (4-8 dm. high; flowers\n    greenish-white, summer)        =Green Milkweed, Acerates floridana.=\n\n5b. Leaves lanceolate or broader (flowers in summer) --6.\n\n     6a. Leaves pubescent beneath --7.\n\n     6b. Leaves glabrous or nearly so --10.\n\n7a. Flowers brilliant orange (3-6 dm. high)\n                                   =Butterfly Weed, Asclepias tuberosa.=\n\n7b. Flowers red or purple --8.\n\n     8a. Reflexed lobes of corolla merely purple-tinged (1-2 m. high)\n                                          =Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca.=\n\n     8b. Reflexed lobes of corolla bright-red or purple --9.\n\n9a. The erect hoods of each flower about 5 mm. long (7-12 dm. high)\n                                     =Milkweed, Asclepias purpurascens.=\n\n9b. The erect hoods of each flower about 3 mm. long (6-10 dm. high)\n                     =Swamp Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata var. pulchra.=\n\n     10a. Leaves broadly rounded and almost sessile at base (flowers\n          purplish) --11.\n\n     10b. Leaves narrowed at the base, distinctly petioled (8-15 dm.\n          high) --12.\n\n11a. Umbel solitary, terminal and erect on a long peduncle (4-8 dm.\n     high)                          =Milkweed, Asclepias amplexicaulis.=\n\n11b. Umbels terminal or lateral, bent toward one side (7-12 dm. high)\n                                      =Milkweed, Asclepias sullivantii.=\n\n     12a. Corolla (not hoods) red (1-2 m. high)\n                                  =Swamp Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata.=\n\n     12b. Corolla (not hoods) greenish (8-15 dm. high)\n                                         =Milkweed, Asclepias exaltata.=\n\n\n\n\nCONVOLVULACEAE, the Morning Glory Family\n\nTwining or trailing herbs (except one species), with regular flowers;\nsepals 5; corolla 5-angled or 5-lobed; stamens 5, attached to the\ncorolla; ovary superior, 2-3-celled.\n\n\n1a. Plants with green foliage and conspicuous flowers (summer) --2.\n\n1b. Leafless brown or yellow plants, with very small flowers (Dodder)\n    --7.\n\n     2a. Style divided at the top into linear or oblong stigmas (flowers\n         white or pink) (Bindweed) --3.\n\n     2b. Style not divided at the top; stigmas sessile, capitate\n         (Morning Glory) --6.\n\n3a. Stem erect; leaves rounded or somewhat cordate at base, not hastate\n    or sagittate (1-3 dm. high)     =Bindweed, Convolvulus spithamaeus.=\n\n3b. Stem trailing or twining; leaves sagittate or hastate --4.\n\n     4a. Calyx almost concealed by two large heart-shape bracts --5.\n\n     4b. Bracts at base of calyx none  =Bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis.=\n\n5a. Leaves triangular-hastate, with sharp basal lobes\n                                         =Bindweed, Convolvulus sepium.=\n\n5b. Leaves oblong-ovate, the basal lobes obtuse\n                          =Bindweed, Convolvulus sepium var. pubescens.=\n\n     6a. Stem smooth or nearly so; ovary 2-celled (flowers white)\n                                  =Wild Potato Vine, Ipomoea pandurata.=\n\n     6b. Stem with reflexed hairs; ovary 3-celled (flowers of various\n         colors)                      =Morning Glory, Ipomoea purpurea.=\n\n7a. Introduced weed, growing as a parasite on clover\n                                            =Dodder, Cuscuta epithymum.=\n\n7b. Native species, on various shrubs and herbs --8.\n\n     8a. Flowers sessile --9.\n\n     8b. Flowers distinctly pedicelled --12.\n\n9a. Sepals united below into a gamosepalous calyx --10.\n\n9b. Sepals separate from each other --11.\n\n     10a. Calyx-lobes obtuse                 =Dodder, Cuscuta arvensis.=\n\n     10b. Calyx-lobes acute               =Dodder, Cuscuta obtusiflora.=\n\n11a. Flowers in dense rope-like twists on various species of herbs\n                                             =Dodder, Cuscuta paradoxa.=\n\n11b. Flowers in dense clusters on various species of shrubs\n                                             =Dodder, Cuscuta compacta.=\n\n     12a. Tips of the petals inflexed          =Dodder, Cuscuta coryli.=\n\n     12b. Tips of the petals erect or spreading --13.\n\n13a. Capsule depressed at the summit      =Dodder, Cuscuta cephalanthi.=\n\n13b. Capsule pointed at the summit           =Dodder, Cuscuta gronovii.=\n\n\n\n\nPOLEMONIACEAE, the Polemonium Family\n\nHerbs with alternate or opposite leaves and conspicuous regular flowers;\nsepals 5, united; petals 5, united and bearing the 5 stamens in the\ncorolla-tube; ovary superior, 3-celled.\n\n\n1a. Leaves pinnately compound and alternate (2-4 dm. high; flowers blue,\n    in spring)                     =Greek Valerian, Polemonium reptans.=\n\n1b. Leaves fascicled, narrowly linear (about 1 dm. high; flowers\n    pink-purple, in spring)                 =Moss Pink, Phlox subulata.=\n\n1c. Leaves simple, strictly opposite --2.\n\n     2a. Corolla-lobes deeply 2-cleft to the middle (1-2 dm. high;\n         flowers pink, in spring)           =Cleft Phlox, Phlox bifida.=\n\n     2b. Corolla-lobes entire and rounded, or somewhat notched at the\n         apex --3.\n\n3a. Flowers in summer (8-15 dm. high; flowers purple)\n                                       =Garden Phlox, Phlox paniculata.=\n\n3b. Flowers in spring (3-6 dm. high) --4.\n\n     4a. Corolla blue-purple; stems ascending\n                                      =Sweet William, Phlox divaricata.=\n\n     4b. Corolla pink or red-purple; stems erect\n                                          =Sweet William, Phlox pilosa.=\n\n\n\n\nHYDROPHYLLACEAE, the Water-leaf Family\n\nHerbs with alternate lobed or divided leaves and regular flowers; sepals\n5; petals 5, united; stamens 5, attached to the corolla-tube and\nprojecting beyond it; ovary 1-celled.\n\n\n1a. Leaves palmately veined and lobed (4-8 dm. high; flowers purple,\n    early summer)                  =Water-leaf, Hydrophyllum canadense.=\n\n1b. Leaves pinnately veined and lobed (2-6 dm. high; flowers blue or\n    purple, varying to white) --2.\n\n     2a. Corolla-lobes much shorter than the corolla-tube (summer)\n                                        =Phacelia, Phacelia franklinii.=\n\n     2b. Corolla-lobes much longer than the corolla-tube (late spring\n         and summer) (Water-leaf) --3.\n\n3a. Calyx with a small reflexed appendage between each pair of sepals\n                              =Water-leaf, Hydrophyllum appendiculatum.=\n\n3b. Calyx without appendages      =Water-leaf, Hydrophyllum virginicum.=\n\n\n\n\nBORAGINACEAE, the Borage Family\n\nHerbs with alternate entire leaves; sepals 5; petals 5, united, corolla\ngenerally regular; stamens 5, attached to the corolla-tube; ovary deeply\n4-lobed with a single style.\n\n\n1a. Corolla reddish-purple, about 8 mm. wide (4-10 dm. high; spring)\n                               =Hound's Tongue, Cynoglossum officinale.=\n\n1b. Corolla blue with a yellow center, 4-8 mm. wide (1-5 dm. high;\n    spring and early summer) (Forget-me-not) --13.\n\n1c. Corolla deep orange, salver-form (2-6 dm. high; spring) (Puccoon)\n    --15.\n\n1d. Corolla white or blue, or lightly tinged with yellow or red --2.\n\n     2a. Corolla rotate, with a very short tube, bright-blue, about 20\n         mm. broad (3-8 dm. high; summer)  =Borage, Borago officinalis.=\n\n     2b. Corolla tubular, funnel-form, or salver-form --3.\n\n3a. Corolla 10 mm. long or more; its tube distinctly longer than the\n    calyx --4.\n\n3b. Corolla less than 10 mm. long; its tube equaling or shorter than the\n    calyx --8.\n\n     4a. Flowers yellowish-white, or somewhat tinged with pink or\n         greenish --5.\n\n     4b. Flowers blue or purple --6.\n\n5a. Corolla-lobes erect; leaves sessile (3-8 dm. high; early summer)\n                               =False Gromwell; Onosmodium occidentale.=\n\n5b. Corolla-lobes spreading; leaves decurrent (6-10 dm. high; summer)\n                                        =Comfrey, Symphytum officinale.=\n\n     6a. Stem and leaves glabrous (3-6 dm. high; spring)\n                                        =Bluebell, Mertensia virginica.=\n\n     6b. Stem and leaves pubescent (4-8 dm. high) --7.\n\n7a. Corolla regular; leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate (summer)\n                                       =Bluebell, Mertensia paniculata.=\n\n7b. Corolla irregular; leaves linear-oblong (summer)\n                                             =Blueweed, Echium vulgare.=\n\n     8a. Ovary and fruit covered with hooked prickles --9.\n\n     8b. Ovary and fruit not prickly --12.\n\n9a. Principal leaves 2.5 cm. wide or more --10.\n\n9b. Principal leaves 2 cm. wide or less (3-8 dm. high; flowers blue or\n    white, summer) (Stickseed) --11.\n\n     10a. Leaves chiefly basal, the racemes on long leafless peduncles\n          (4-8 dm. high; flowers pale blue, early summer)\n                                    =Wild Comfrey, Cynoglossum boreale.=\n\n     10b. Stems leafy (8-12 dm. high; flowers white, summer)\n                                      =Beggar Lice, Lappula virginiana.=\n\n11a. A bract at the base of each flower   =Stickseed, Lappula echinata.=\n\n11b. Racemes without bracts at the base of each flower\n                            =Stickseed, Lappula deflexa var. americana.=\n\n     12a. Racemes bractless, or bracted only at the base (1-4 dm. high)\n          --14.\n\n     12b. Raceme with a bract at the base of each flower (flowers white\n          or yellowish) --17.\n\n13a. Corolla 4 mm. wide                  =Forget-me-not, Myosotis laxa.=\n\n13b. Corolla 6-8 mm. wide         =Forget-me-not, Myosotis scorpioides.=\n\n     14a. Calyx-lobes all of equal length (summer)\n                                    =Scorpion Grass, Myosotis arvensis.=\n\n     14b. Calyx-lobes distinctly unequal in length (spring)\n                                   =Scorpion Grass, Myosotis virginica.=\n\n15a. Corolla-lobes denticulate    =Puccoon, Lithospermum angustifolium.=\n\n15b. Corolla-lobes entire --16.\n\n     16a. Flowers sessile; stem softly pubescent\n                                      =Puccoon, Lithospermum canescens.=\n\n     16b. Flowers on pedicels 2-5 mm. long; stem hispid or bristly\n                                        =Puccoon, Lithospermum gmelini.=\n\n17a. Corolla white; fruit brown and wrinkled (weed 2-4 dm. high; spring\n     and summer)                  =Corn Gromwell, Lithospermum arvense.=\n\n17b. Corolla yellowish-white; fruit white and smooth (5-10 dm. high)\n     --18.\n\n     18a. Corolla distinctly surpassing the calyx in length (spring and\n          summer)              =Corn Gromwell, Lithospermum officinale.=\n\n     18b. Corolla equaling or shorter than the calyx (spring)\n                               =Wild Gromwell, Lithospermum latifolium.=\n\n\n\n\nLABIATAE, the Mint Family\n\nHerbs with opposite leaves, square stems, and usually aromatic odor;\nflowers irregular, with united petals, or almost regular; stamens 2 or\n4, attached to the tube of the corolla; ovary deeply 4-lobed, with a\nsingle style.\n\n\n1a. Stamens 2 --2.\n\n1b. Stamens 4 --15.\n\n     2a. Corolla regular or nearly so; flowers white, in dense axillary\n         clusters; plants usually of wet grounds (2-8 dm. high; summer\n         and autumn) --3.\n\n     2b. Corolla distinctly irregular and more or less 2-lipped --7.\n\n3a. Calyx-teeth short, triangular, acute or obtuse (Bugle Weed) --4.\n\n3b. Calyx-teeth narrow, acuminate or cuspidate (Water Hoarhound) --5.\n\n     4a. Stems and stolons bearing tubers\n                                        =Bugle Weed, Lycopus uniflorus.=\n\n     4b. Stems and stolons not bearing tubers\n                                       =Bugle Weed, Lycopus virginicus.=\n\n5a. Leaves serrate; calyx-teeth sharp-pointed --6.\n\n5b. Leaves coarsely incised; calyx-teeth awn-tipped\n                                  =Water Hoarhound, Lycopus americanus.=\n\n     6a. Corolla twice as long as the calyx; leaves narrowed at the base\n                                    =Water Hoarhound, Lycopus rubellus.=\n\n     6b. Corolla barely longer than the calyx; leaves sessile or nearly\n         so          =Water Hoarhound, Lycopus lucidus var. americanus.=\n\n7a. Corolla blue, 3-4 mm. long; flowers in loose axillary clusters (1-4\n    dm. high; summer) (Pennyroyal) --8.\n\n7b. Corolla 8-40 mm. long --9.\n\n     8a. Leaves serrate               =Pennyroyal, Hedeoma pulegioides.=\n\n     8b. Leaves linear, entire            =Pennyroyal, Hedeoma hispida.=\n\n9a. Lower lobe of the corolla fringed, very much longer than the upper\n    (5-15 dm. high; corolla pale-yellow; late summer)\n                                   =Horse Balm, Collinsonia canadensis.=\n\n9b. Lower lobe of the corolla nearly or quite as long as the upper and\n    not fringed --10.\n\n     10a. Calyx narrowly tubular; its teeth about equal in size (5-10\n          dm. high; flowers in dense terminal heads, in summer) --11.\n\n     10b. Calyx campanulate, 2 of its teeth different in size from the\n          other 3 (4-8 dm. high; flowers pink-purple, in terminal\n          clusters in summer) --14.\n\n11a. Corolla scarlet                       =Oswego Tea, Monarda didyma.=\n\n11b. Corolla bright crimson or rose-red\n                          =Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa var. rubra.=\n\n11c. Corolla white, pink, pale-purple, or yellowish --12.\n\n     12a. Flower-clusters all terminal --13.\n\n     12b. Flower-clusters both terminal and axillary\n                                         =Horse Mint, Monarda punctata.=\n\n13a. Leaves and stem with soft spreading pubescence\n                                     =Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa.=\n\n13b. Leaves and stem grayish with fine appressed pubescence\n                                        =Wild Bergamot, Monarda mollis.=\n\n     14a. Upper calyx-teeth about 3 times as long as the lower\n                                         =Blephilia, Blephilia hirsuta.=\n\n     14b. Upper calyx-teeth but little longer than the lower\n                                         =Blephilia, Blephilia ciliata.=\n\n15a. Calyx with a distinct protuberance on the back of the upper side\n     (Skullcap) --16.\n\n15b. Calyx without a distinct protuberance --20.\n\n     16a. Corolla 5-8 mm. long; flowers in axillary racemes (3-8 dm.\n          high; flowers blue, in summer)\n                            =Mad-dog Skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.=\n\n     16b. Corolla 6-10 mm. long; flowers axillary, solitary (1-3 dm.\n          high; flowers violet, early summer)\n                                        =Skullcap, Scutellaria parvula.=\n\n     16c. Corolla 12-30 mm. long; flowers axillary or in terminal\n          racemes (4-8 dm. high; flowers blue, summer) --17.\n\n17a. Stem-leaves cordate             =Skullcap, Scutellaria versicolor.=\n\n17b. Stem-leaves not distinctly cordate --18.\n\n     18a. Stem-leaves sessile or nearly so; plant of swamps and\n          river-banks              =Skullcap, Scutellaria galericulata.=\n\n     18b. Stem-leaves with petioles 1 cm. or more long; plants of dry or\n          moist woods --19.\n\n19a. Stem glandular-pubescent toward the summit; corolla 16 mm. long or\n     less                                =Skullcap, Scutellaria pilosa.=\n\n19b. Stem not glandular; corolla 20 mm. long\n                                         =Skullcap, Scutellaria incana.=\n\n     20a. Calyx-teeth 5, all equal or nearly so at the time of flowering\n          --28.\n\n     20b. Calyx-teeth 5, one of them different in size and shape from\n          the other four (2-6 dm. high; flowers light blue, summer)\n                               =Dragon Head, Dracocephalum parviflorum.=\n\n     20c. Calyx-teeth 5, two of them different in size and shape from\n          the other three --21.\n\n     20d. Calyx-teeth 10, subulate (woolly plant 4-10 dm. high, with\n          whitish flowers in axillary clusters in summer)\n                                         =Hoarhound, Marrubium vulgare.=\n\n21a. Corolla deeply split on the upper side and the stamens protruding;\n     upper lip of the calyx much shorter than the lower (5-10 dm. high;\n     flowers pink-purple, in terminal spikes, summer) (Wood Sage) --22.\n\n21b. Corolla not deeply split on the upper side --23.\n\n     22a. Calyx canescent               =Wood Sage, Teucrium canadense.=\n\n     22b. Calyx villous               =Wood Sage, Teucrium occidentale.=\n\n23a. Flowers in dense terminal head-like spikes, none axillary (1-5 dm.\n     high; flowers pink-purple or blue, in summer)\n                                         =Self-heal, Prunella vulgaris.=\n\n23b. Some or all of the flowers in axillary clusters --24.\n\n     24a. Leaves linear, entire (1-4 dm. high; flowers purple, summer)\n          --25.\n\n     24b. Leaves oblong to ovate (summer) --26.\n\n25a. Pedicels shorter than the calyx\n                                    =Summer Savory, Satureja hortensis.=\n\n25b. Pedicels much longer than the calyx    =Calamint, Satureja glabra.=\n\n     26a. Leaves 1 cm. long or less, entire (stems growing in mats, 1-3\n          dm. long; flowers purple, in summer)\n                                         =Wild Thyme, Thymus serpyllum.=\n\n     26b. Leaves dentate (flowers purple, summer) --27.\n\n27a. Flowers subtended by bracts as long as the calyx (2-5 dm. high)\n                                             =Basil, Satureja vulgaris.=\n\n27b. Flowers with minute bracts or none (1-3 dm. high)\n                                         =Basil-thyme, Satureja acinos.=\n\n     28a. Corolla 2-lipped or nearly regular, the upper lip flattened,\n          not conspicuously arched over the stamens --29.\n\n     28b. Corolla conspicuously 2-lipped, the stamens ascending under\n          the concave upper lip --42.\n\n29a. Flowers in dense terminal spikes; corolla 2-lipped (8-15 dm. high;\n     summer) --30.\n\n29b. Flowers peduncled, 1-4 in the axils of linear leaves --25b.\n\n29c. Flowers in many-flowered whorls, which are axillary or terminal, or\n     aggregated into terminal spikes or racemes --31.\n\n     30a. Corolla yellowish        =Giant Hyssop, Agastache nepetoides.=\n\n     30b. Corolla purplish\n                          =Giant Hyssop, Agastache scrophulariaefolius.=\n\n31a. Corolla distinctly irregular, the lower lip longer than the upper\n     --32.\n\n31b. Corolla almost regular, the lobes nearly uniform in size --35.\n\n     32a. Stem-leaves sessile or very nearly so (flowers blue) --33.\n\n     32b. Stem-leaves long-petioled --34.\n\n33a. Leaves linear-oblong, acute at both ends (3-8 dm. high; summer)\n                                         =Hyssop, Hyssopus officinalis.=\n\n33b. Leaves oblong to ovate, rounded at the ends (2-4 dm. high; late\n     spring)                                     =Bugle, Ajuga reptans.=\n\n     34a. Leaves ovate to oblong, acute; flowers pink, white, or pale\n          purple (6-15 dm. high; summer)       =Catnip, Nepeta cataria.=\n\n     34b. Leaves nearly circular or kidney-shape; flowers blue\n          (creeping; flowers in spring and summer)\n                                         =Ground Ivy, Nepeta hederacea.=\n\n35a. Flowers in terminal spikes, or the lower axillary (3-8 dm. high;\n     flowers pink-purple or white, summer) (Mint) --36.\n\n35b. Flowers all in axillary whorls (flowers pink-purple or white,\n     summer) (Mint) --38.\n\n35c. Flowers in terminal capitate corymbed clusters (4-8 dm. high;\n     flowers white or dotted with purple, summer) (Mountain Mint) --41.\n\n     36a. Leaves sessile or with very short petiole\n                                            =Spearmint, Mentha spicata.=\n\n     36b. Leaves with manifest petioles --37.\n\n37a. Principal leaves less than half as broad as long\n                                          =Peppermint, Mentha piperita.=\n\n37b. Principal leaves more than half as broad as long\n                                        =Bergamot Mint, Mentha citrata.=\n\n     38a. Stem glabrous; leaves ovate to obovate (4-8 dm. high)\n                                          =Downy Mint, Mentha gentilis.=\n\n     38b. Stem pubescent, at least on the angles (1-6 dm. high) --39.\n\n39a. Principal leaves distinctly petioled and somewhat rounded at base\n                                           =Wild Mint, Mentha arvensis.=\n\n39b. Leaves tapering to the base --40.\n\n     40a. Leaves and stem pubescent\n                           =Wild Mint, Mentha arvensis var. canadensis.=\n\n     40b. Leaves glabrous; stem pubescent on the angles only\n                             =Wild Mint, Mentha arvensis var. glabrata.=\n\n41a. Leaves linear; calyx-teeth awl-shape\n                                =Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum flexuosum.=\n\n41b. Leaves narrowly lanceolate; calyx-teeth triangular-ovate\n                              =Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum virginianum.=\n\n     42a. Stems decumbent to diffuse; leaves cordate to nearly circular\n          (stems 2-5 dm. long or high; flowers in spring and summer)\n          (Dead Nettle) --43.\n\n     42b. Stem erect; leaves palmately cleft; calyx-teeth spiny (6-15\n          dm. tall; flowers pink, in summer)\n                                        =Motherwort, Leonurus cardiaca.=\n\n     42c. Stems erect or ascending; leaves ovate-lanceolate to linear\n          (summer) --45.\n\n43a. Upper leaves closely sessile (flowers red-purple)\n                                     =Dead Nettle, Lamium amplexicaule.=\n\n43b. Leaves all petioled --44.\n\n     44a. Flowers red or purple         =Dead Nettle, Lamium maculatum.=\n\n     44b. Flowers white                     =Dead Nettle, Lamium album.=\n\n45a. Flowers 2-2.5 cm. long, in loose terminal spikes (5-10 dm. tall;\n     flowers rose-color)    =False Dragon Head, Physostegia virginiana.=\n\n45b. Flowers 1-2 cm. long, in axillary and terminal spiked whorls --46.\n\n     46a. Calyx-teeth spiny pointed (flowers pink or pale-purple) (Hemp\n          Nettle) --47.\n\n     46b. Calyx-teeth acute to awl-shape, but not spiny (3-10 dm. high;\n          flowers pale-purple) (Hedge Nettle) --48.\n\n47a. Leaves ovate (3-8 dm. high)      =Hemp Nettle, Galeopsis tetrahit.=\n\n47b. Leaves linear to lanceolate (1-4 dm. high)\n                                       =Hemp Nettle, Galeopsis ladanum.=\n\n     48a. Leaves glabrous --49.\n\n     48b. Leaves distinctly pubescent --50.\n\n49a. Leaves ovate-lanceolate, serrate\n                                     =Hedge Nettle, Stachys tenuifolia.=\n\n49b. Leaves linear-oblong, entire or nearly so\n                                   =Hedge Nettle, Stachys hyssopifolia.=\n\n     50a. Stem pubescent on the angles alone; leaves petioled\n                         =Hedge Nettle, Stachys tenuifolia var. aspera.=\n\n     50b. Stem pubescent on both sides and angles; leaves nearly sessile\n          --51.\n\n51a. Leaves oblong or oblong-lanceolate, more than 1 cm. wide\n                                      =Hedge Nettle, Stachys palustris.=\n\n51b. Leaves linear-lanceolate, 1 cm. wide or less\n                                      =Hedge Nettle, Stachys arenicola.=\n\n\n\n\nVERBENACEAE, the Verbena Family\n\nHerbs, with simple opposite leaves and slightly irregular flowers in\nspikes or heads; petals 5, united and bearing the 4 stamens in the\ncorolla-tube; ovary 1, 2-celled or 4-celled, with 1 style.\n\n\n1a. Plants prostrate or spreading --2.\n\n1b. Plants erect (flowers in summer) (Vervain) --3.\n\n     2a. Leaves serrate; flowers in short dense spikes (flowers\n         pale-blue, summer)              =Fog Fruit, Lippia lanceolata.=\n\n     2b. Leaves pinnatifid; flowers in loose bracted spikes (flowers\n         light-purple, summer)             =Vervain, Verbena bracteosa.=\n\n3a. Spikes dense, continuous (flowers purple or blue, varying to white)\n    --4.\n\n3b. Spikes slender, interrupted, the flowers scattered (corolla white or\n    pale-blue) --6.\n\n     4a. Leaves lanceolate, manifestly petioled (1-2 m. high)\n                                             =Vervain, Verbena hastata.=\n\n     4b. Leaves sessile, not lanceolate (5-8 dm. high) --5.\n\n5a. Leaves narrowly oblanceolate, tapering at the entire base\n                                        =Vervain, Verbena angustifolia.=\n\n5b. Leaves oblong to obovate, not tapering at the base\n                                             =Vervain, Verbena stricta.=\n\n     6a. Leaves incised, tapering to a sessile base (5-10 dm. high)\n                                        =Vervain, Verbena, officinalis.=\n\n     6b. Leaves serrate, petioled (1-2 m. high)\n                                        =Vervain, Verbena urticaefolia.=\n\n\n\n\nSOLANACEAE, the Nightshade Family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, with alternate leaves and regular or slightly irregular\nflowers; sepals 5, united; corolla of 5 united petals, bearing the 5\nstamens attached; ovary 1, 2-5 (usually 2)-celled, with a slender style.\n\n\n1a. Corolla rotate; anthers close together (flowers in summer) --2.\n\n1b. Corolla not rotate; anthers separate --5.\n\n     2a. Stem and leaves prickly (3-8 dm. high) --3.\n\n     2b. Stem and leaves not prickly --4.\n\n3a. Flowers white or bluish         =Horse Nettle, Solanum carolinense.=\n\n3b. Flowers yellow                     =Buffalo Bur, Solanum rostratum.=\n\n     4a. Climbing vine; leaves frequently lobed (flowers blue)\n                                       =Bittersweet, Solanum dulcamara.=\n\n     4b. Not climbing; leaves toothed (flowers white)\n                                           =Nightshade, Solanum nigrum.=\n\n5a. Climbing or trailing shrub, with purplish, white, or greenish\n    flowers about 1 cm. wide (frequently thorny; flowers in summer)\n                                  =Matrimony Vine, Lycium halimifolium.=\n\n5b. Herbaceous plants, not climbing --6.\n\n     6a. Flowers white, red, or blue, 2.5 cm. or more wide (summer) --7.\n\n     6b. Flowers yellow, yellowish-white, or greenish-yellow (summer)\n         --12.\n\n7a. Corolla-tube 10 cm. long or more (5-12 dm. high) --8.\n\n7b. Corolla-tube 5 cm. long or less --10.\n\n     8a. Stem finely pubescent; leaves entire or nearly so\n                                            =Thorn-apple, Datura metel.=\n\n     8b. Stem glabrous; leaves coarsely toothed (Jimson Weed) --9.\n\n9a. Stem green; corolla white          =Jimson Weed, Datura stramonium.=\n\n9b. Stem purple; corolla light-blue or purple\n                                           =Jimson Weed, Datura tatula.=\n\n     10a. Corolla pale-blue (5-10 dm. high)\n                                   =Apple of Peru, Nicandra physalodes.=\n\n     10b. Corolla, red or violet (2-4 dm. high)\n                                            =Petunia, Petunia violacea.=\n\n     10c. Corolla white --11.\n\n11a. Corolla all white (2-4 dm. high)      =Petunia, Petunia axillaris.=\n\n11b. Corolla with yellow center\n                            =White Ground Cherry, Physalis grandiflora.=\n\n     12a. Corolla 30 mm. wide or more, somewhat irregular; stamens\n          declined to one side (3-6 dm. high)\n                                            =Henbane, Hyoscyamus niger.=\n\n     12b. Corolla smaller, strictly regular --13.\n\n13a. Flowers in terminal panicles; corolla tubular, with slightly\n     spreading lobes (5-10 dm. high)  =Wild Tobacco, Nicotiana rustica.=\n\n13b. Flowers solitary in the axils; corolla short, widely spreading (3-8\n     dm. high) (Ground Cherry) --14.\n\n     14a. Annuals with branching slender roots --15.\n\n     14b. Perennials with thickened roots and rootstocks --16.\n\n15a. Plants pubescent               =Ground Cherry, Physalis pubescens.=\n\n15b. Plants smooth, or with a few scattered hairs\n                                     =Ground Cherry, Physalis ixocarpa.=\n\n     16a. Stem viscid-pubescent  =Ground Cherry, Physalis heterophylla.=\n\n     16b. Stem glabrous or slightly pubescent, not viscid --17.\n\n17a. Leaves and stem distinctly pubescent\n                                   =Ground Cherry, Physalis virginiana.=\n\n17b. Leaves and stem almost glabrous\n                                  =Ground Cherry, Physalis subglabrata.=\n\n\n\n\nSCROPHULARIACEAE, the Figwort Family\n\nHerbs with opposite or alternate leaves and usually irregular flowers;\ncorolla of united petals, bearing the 2 or 4 (or rarely 5) stamens\nattached; petals actually 5, but sometimes apparently only 2 or 4; a\nsterile fifth stamen sometimes present; ovary superior, 2-celled.\n\n\n1a. Anther-bearing stamens 5 (6-15 dm. high; flowers in summer)\n    (Mullein) --2.\n\n1b. Anther-bearing stamens 4; a sterile fifth stamen may or may not be\n    present --3.\n\n1c. Anther-bearing stamens 2 --37.\n\n     2a. Leaves densely white-woolly; flowers yellow, in dense spikes\n                                           =Mullein, Verbascum thapsus.=\n\n     2b. Leaves smooth or nearly so; flowers yellow or white, in loose\n         racemes                    =Moth Mullein, Verbascum blattaria.=\n\n3a. Flowers (not the bracts) greenish-yellow, yellow, or orange --4.\n\n3b. Flowers blue, purple, brown, red, pink, or white, never yellow --16.\n\n     4a. Flowers in dense terminal leafy-bracted spikes --5.\n\n     4b. Flowers in loose racemes or axillary --9.\n\n5a. Corolla 7 mm. long or less, or none --6.\n\n5b. Corolla 12 mm. long or more --7.\n\n     6a. Leaves alternate (3-6 dm. high; early summer)\n                                          =Synthyris, Synthyris bullii.=\n\n     6b. Leaves opposite (1-2 dm. high; summer)\n                                         =Eyebright, Euphrasia arctica.=\n\n7a. Stem-leaves entire (2-6 dm. high; summer)\n                 =Painted Cup, Castilleja pallida var. septentrionalis.=\n\n7b. Stem-leaves palmately lobed, bracteal leaves scarlet (3-6 dm. high;\n    early summer)                    =Painted Cup, Castilleja coccinea.=\n\n7c. Stem-leaves pinnately lobed or incised (Lousewort) --8.\n\n     8a. Flowers in spring (2-4 dm. high)\n                                    =Lousewort, Pedicularis canadensis.=\n\n     8b. Flowers in late summer (3-8 dm. high)\n                                    =Lousewort, Pedicularis lanceolata.=\n\n9a. Upper lip of the corolla very different in size and shape from the\n    lower lip --10.\n\n9b. Upper lip of the corolla resembling the lower lip in shape, and not\n    very different in size (5-12 dm. high; summer) (False Foxglove)\n    --13.\n\n     10a. Leaves alternate (2-5 dm. high; summer)\n                                    =Butter-and-eggs, Linaria vulgaris.=\n\n     10b. Leaves opposite --11.\n\n11a. Stem erect; leaves narrowed at the base --30b.\n\n11b. Stem creeping or spreading (summer) --12.\n\n     12a. Leaves pinnately veined, ovate\n                                       =Musk Flower, Mimulus moschatus.=\n\n     12b. Leaves palmately veined, circular or nearly so\n                 =Yellow Monkey Flower, Mimulus glabratus var. jamesii.=\n\n13a. Stem glabrous --14.\n\n13b. Stem pubescent --15.\n\n     14a. Principal stem-leaves pinnatifid\n                                   =False Foxglove, Gerardia virginica.=\n\n     14b. Principal stem-leaves entire\n                                   =False Foxglove, Gerardia laevigata.=\n\n15a. Corolla hairy on the outside\n                                 =False Foxglove, Gerardia pedicularia.=\n\n15b. Corolla smooth on the outside     =False Foxglove, Gerardia flava.=\n\n     16a. Leaves all basal; flowers on leafless stalks (1 dm. high or\n          less; flowers pink or white, summer)\n                          =Mudwort, Limosella aquatica var. tenuifolia.=\n\n     16b. Leaves opposite (those subtending the flowers may be\n          alternate) --20.\n\n     16c. Leaves alternate or irregularly scattered --17.\n\n17a. Leaves entire --18.\n\n17b. Leaves pinnately lobed or incised --8a.\n\n17c. Leaves palmately veined and lobed; stem trailing (flowers blue,\n     summer)                       =Kenilworth Ivy, Linaria cymbalaria.=\n\n     18a. Corolla-tube less than 1 cm. long, spurred --19.\n\n     18b. Corolla more than 2 cm. long, not spurred (3-8 dm. high;\n          flowers red-purple, summer)   =Snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus.=\n\n19a. Stem and foliage pubescent (1-3 dm. high; flowers blue, summer)\n                                      =Small Snapdragon, Linaria minor.=\n\n19b. Stem and foliage glabrous (2-6 dm. high; flowers blue, summer)\n                                        =Toad-flax, Linaria canadensis.=\n\n     20a. Leaves with 1 or 2 lobes near the base (3-5 dm. high; flowers\n          purple, summer)               =Gerardia, Gerardia auriculata.=\n\n     20b. Leaves linear (2-6 dm. high; flowers rose-purple, summer and\n          autumn) (Gerardia) --21.\n\n     20c. Leaves lanceolate or broader, not lobed --26.\n\n21a. Pedicels equaling or but little longer than the calyx, and\n     conspicuously shorter than the subtending leaf --22.\n\n21b. Pedicels much longer than the calyx, and generally equaling or\n     exceeding the subtending leaf --24.\n\n     22a. Plants of moist ground, bogs, and shores --23.\n\n     22b. Plants of dry uplands             =Gerardia, Gerardia aspera.=\n\n23a. Corolla about 25 mm. long            =Gerardia, Gerardia purpurea.=\n\n23b. Corolla less than 20 mm. long      =Gerardia, Gerardia paupercula.=\n\n     24a. Stem rough on the angles --25.\n\n     24b. Stem glabrous                 =Gerardia, Gerardia tenuifolia.=\n\n25a. Leaves 2-5 mm. wide\n                       =Gerardia, Gerardia tenuifolia var. macrophylla.=\n\n25b. Leaves thread-like, 1 mm. wide or less\n                                       =Gerardia, Gerardia skinneriana.=\n\n     26a. Corolla 16 mm. long, or shorter --27.\n\n     26b. Corolla 20 mm. long, or longer --32.\n\n27a. Corolla dull-purple, brown, or greenish; one sterile stamen present\n     (1-2.5 m. high; flowers in summer) (Figwort) --28.\n\n27b. Corolla blue or white (1-4 dm. high) --29.\n\n     28a. Sterile stamen purple     =Figwort, Scrophularia marilandica.=\n\n     28b. Sterile stamen yellow       =Figwort, Scrophularia leporella.=\n\n29a. Flowers nearly or quite sessile (summer) --30.\n\n29b. Flowers on pedicels 10 mm. long or more (spring) --31.\n\n     30a. Foliage-leaves prominently toothed --6b.\n\n     30b. Foliage-leaves entire, or with 1 or 2 small teeth at the base\n                                        =Cow Wheat, Melampyrum lineare.=\n\n31a. Corolla more than 10 mm. long, blue and white\n                                      =Blue-eyed Mary, Collinsia verna.=\n\n31b. Corolla 5-8 mm. long, blue and white\n                                      =Collinsia, Collinsia parviflora.=\n\n     32a. Flowers solitary in the axils of the upper foliage-leaves (4-8\n          dm. high; flowers blue, in summer) (Monkey Flower) --33.\n\n     32b. Flowers in dense terminal or subterminal spikes (3-9 dm. high;\n          summer) --34.\n\n     32c. Flowers in loose terminal panicles (flowers white or\n          pale-violet) (Beard-tongue) --35.\n\n33a. Leaves clasping at the base       =Monkey Flower, Mimulus ringens.=\n\n33b. Leaves petioled, not clasping      =Monkey Flower, Mimulus alatus.=\n\n     34a. Stem and foliage glabrous (flowers white)\n                                           =Turtlehead, Chelone glabra.=\n\n     34b. Stem and foliage pubescent (flowers purple)\n                                      =Blue Hearts, Buchnera americana.=\n\n35a. Stem finely pubescent (3-6 dm. high; flowers pale-violet, late\n     spring)                        =Beard-tongue, Pentstemon hirsutus.=\n\n35b. Stem glabrous below the inflorescence (6-12 dm. high) --36.\n\n     36a. Corolla-tube gradually enlarged from base to tip (flowers\n          pale-violet, in early summer)\n                                  =Beard-tongue, Pentstemon laevigatus.=\n\n     36b. Corolla-tube abruptly enlarged just beyond the calyx (flowers\n          white, early summer)\n                   =Beard-tongue, Pentstemon laevigatus var. digitalis.=\n\n37a. Corolla distinctly irregular, 2-lipped (1-4 dm. high; flowers\n     yellowish or white, summer) --38.\n\n37b. Corolla regular or nearly so and 2-lobed, or none --6a.\n\n37c. Corolla regular or nearly so, 4-lobed --40.\n\n     38a. Leaves narrowed at the base, with mid-vein\n                                    =Hedge Hyssop, Gratiola virginiana.=\n\n     38b. Leaves rounded or somewhat clasping at the base, with 3-5\n          principal veins (False Pimpernel) --39.\n\n39a. Peduncles longer than the subtending leaves\n                              =False Pimpernel, Ilysanthes anagallidea.=\n\n39b. Peduncles shorter than the subtending leaves\n                                    =False Pimpernel, Ilysanthes dubia.=\n\n     40a. Leaves whorled (8-20 dm. high; flowers white or pale-blue, in\n          spikes, summer)           =Culver's Root, Veronica virginica.=\n\n     40b. Leaves alternate or opposite (Speedwell) --41.\n\n41a. Flowers in racemes, which arise from the axils of the opposite\n     leaves (flowers pale-blue to nearly white, late spring and summer)\n     --42.\n\n41b. Flowers solitary in the axils of leaf-like bracts, or in terminal\n     bracted racemes (1-4 dm. high; spring and summer) --46.\n\n     42a. Stem and foliage glabrous; swamp plants 2-7 dm. high --43.\n\n     42b. Stem and foliage pubescent; plants of dry ground, 1-3 dm. high\n          --45.\n\n43a. Leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate\n                                 =Marsh Speedwell, Veronica scutellata.=\n\n43b. Leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate --44.\n\n     44a. Stem-leaves sessile and somewhat clasping\n                         =Water Speedwell, Veronica anagallis-aquatica.=\n\n     44b. Stem-leaves on short petioles\n                                        =Brooklime, Veronica americana.=\n\n45a. Leaves narrowed at base into a petiole\n                                      =Speedwell, Veronica officinalis.=\n\n45b. Leaves rounded or heart-shape at the base\n                                       =Speedwell, Veronica chamaedrys.=\n\n     46a. Bracteal leaves entire; stem glabrous or minutely pubescent\n          --47.\n\n     46b. All leaves serrate; foliage pubescent (flowers blue) --48.\n\n47a. Flowers white, about 2 mm. wide    =Speedwell, Veronica peregrina.=\n\n47b. Flowers pale-blue with darker stripes, 3-4 mm. wide\n                                    =Speedwell, Veronica serpyllifolia.=\n\n     48a. Flowers nearly sessile, about 2 mm. wide\n                                         =Speedwell, Veronica arvensis.=\n\n     48b. Flowers on slender pedicels, 5-8 mm. wide\n                                     =Speedwell, Veronica tournefortii.=\n\n\n\n\nLENTIBULARIACEAE, the Bladderwort Family\n\nSmall herbs, growing on rocks, in mud, or in water; calyx and corolla\nboth 2-lipped; stamens 2, attached to the corolla; ovary 1-celled.\n\n\n1a. Corolla purple --2.\n\n1b. Corolla yellow (flowers in summer) (Bladderwort) --4.\n\n     2a. Leaves oval to elliptical, entire (about 1 dm. high, on rocks;\n         flowers in summer)           =Butterwort, Pinguicula vulgaris.=\n\n     2b. Leaves dissected or none, submerged (flowers in summer)\n         (Bladderwort) --3.\n\n3a. Flower-stalk with a single bract near the middle\n                                  =Bladderwort, Utricularia resupinata.=\n\n3b. Flower-stalk without bracts, except at the base of the pedicels\n                                    =Bladderwort, Utricularia purpurea.=\n\n     4a. Stem and numerous dissected leaves floating in water\n                     =Bladderwort, Utricularia vulgaris var. americana.=\n\n     4b. Stem and minute leaves creeping on the bottom of ponds or in\n         mud, while the flowers are borne on erect stalks, easily\n         detached from the delicate stems --5.\n\n5a. Upper lip of corolla conspicuous, as long or nearly as long as the\n    lower lip; lower lip with a prominent raised palate --6.\n\n5b. Upper lip of corolla half as long as the lower lip, or less --7.\n\n     6a. Spur of corolla very short and blunt\n                                       =Bladderwort, Utricularia gibba.=\n\n     6b. Spur of corolla very long and slender\n                                     =Bladderwort, Utricularia cornuta.=\n\n7a. Spur of corolla very short and blunt, or almost none\n                                       =Bladderwort, Utricularia minor.=\n\n7b. Spur of corolla long and slender\n                                  =Bladderwort, Utricularia intermedia.=\n\n\n\n\nOROBANCHACEAE, the Broom-rape Family\n\nParasitic plants without green color and with scales in place of leaves;\ncorolla 2-lipped, of united petals; stamens 4, attached to the corolla.\n\n\n1a. Flowers in a widely branching panicle, numerous; growing under beech\n    trees (1-5 dm. high; flowers white and purple, late summer)\n                                     =Beech Drops, Epifagus virginiana.=\n\n1b. Flowers sessile in a dense bracted spike (1-2 dm. high; flowers\n    pale-yellow, early summer)       =Squaw-root, Conopholis americana.=\n\n1c. Flowers 1-15, each on a long erect naked peduncle (1-2 dm. high;\n    flowers yellowish or pale-violet, spring and summer) (Cancer-root)\n    --2.\n\n     2a. Stem erect and scaly, 5-10 cm. high\n                                   =Cancer-root, Orobanche fasciculata.=\n\n     2b. Stem very short, almost below the surface of the ground, with\n         long erect peduncles         =Cancer-root, Orobanche uniflora.=\n\n\n\n\nACANTHACEAE, the Acanthus Family\n\nHerbs with opposite simple leaves; corolla of united petals, 2-lipped or\nalmost regular; stamens 2 or 4, attached to the corolla; ovary 2-celled.\n\n\n1a. Corolla about 10 mm. long; flowers in dense heads (4-10 dm. high;\n    flowers blue or white, summer)  =Water Willow, Dianthera americana.=\n\n1b. Corolla about 30 mm. long; flowers axillary (3-8 dm. high; flowers\n    blue, in summer) (Ruellia) --2.\n\n     2a. Foliage glabrous or slightly pubescent\n                                            =Ruellia, Ruellia strepens.=\n\n     2b. Foliage densely hirsute             =Ruellia, Ruellia ciliosa.=\n\n\n\n\nPHRYMACEAE, the Lopseed Family\n\nHerb with opposite leaves and irregular flowers in long slender spikes;\npetals united, corolla 2-lipped; stamens 4, attached to the corolla;\novary 1-celled.\n\n\nOne species only, 5-10 dm. high; flowers purple, in summer\n                                         =Lopseed, Phryma leptostachya.=\n\n\n\n\nPLANTAGINACEAE, the Plantain Family\n\nHerbs with basal leaves and small white flowers in spikes; sepals 4;\npetals 4, united; stamens 4; ovary 2-celled.\n\n\n1a. Leaves linear (1-4 dm. high; summer) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves broader, lanceolate to broadly ovate or cordate (summer) --3.\n\n     2a. Spikes mixed with bracts several times longer than the flowers\n                                          =Buckhorn, Plantago aristata.=\n\n     2b. Bracts about as long as the flowers\n                                           =Plantain, Plantago purshii.=\n\n3a. Leaves cordate, pinnately veined; plant of wet ground and marshes\n    (4-8 dm. tall)                         =Plantain, Plantago cordata.=\n\n3b. Leaves with 3 to many longitudinal ribs or veins --4.\n\n     4a. Leaves densely pubescent with grayish hairs --5.\n\n     4b. Leaves smooth or slightly pubescent --6.\n\n5a. Flower-stalks 3-6 dm. high               =Plantain, Plantago media.=\n\n5b. Flower-stalks less than 3 dm. high   =Plantain, Plantago virginica.=\n\n     6a. Flower-stalks 3-6 dm. high; spikes not over 10 cm. long\n                                =English Plantain, Plantago lanceolata.=\n\n     6b. Scapes 1-4 dm. high; spikes long and slender, usually equaling\n         or longer than the peduncle; dooryard plantains --7.\n\n7a. Leaves green at the base                 =Plantain, Plantago major.=\n\n7b. Leaves reddish at the base             =Plantain, Plantago rugelii.=\n\n\n\n\nRUBIACEAE, the Madder family\n\nHerbs or shrubs, with opposite or whorled leaves and regular flowers;\nsepals 4, or minute or almost wanting; petals 4, united; stamens 4;\novary inferior.\n\n\n1a. Shrub (1-3 m. tall; flowers white, in spherical heads, summer)\n                               =Button Bush, Cephalanthus occidentalis.=\n\n1b. Herbaceous --2.\n\n     2a. Leaves opposite --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves whorled; flowers white, green, or purple (Bedstraw) --6.\n\n     2c. Leaves whorled; flowers yellow        =Bedstraw, Galium verum.=\n\n3a. Leaves about as long as wide (trailing; flowers paired, white, in\n    spring)                         =Partridge Berry, Mitchella repens.=\n\n3b. Leaves at least twice as long as wide --4.\n\n     4a. Corolla salver-form, about 1 cm. wide; peduncles 1-flowered\n         (about 1 dm. high; flowers blue or white, in spring)\n                                           =Bluets, Houstonia coerulea.=\n\n     4b. Corolla funnel-form, about 5 mm. wide; flowers in clusters (1-2\n         dm. high; flowers white or pale-purple, summer) (Houstonia) --5.\n\n5a. Basal leaves strongly ciliate      =Houstonia, Houstonia ciliolata.=\n\n5b. Basal leaves smooth               =Houstonia, Houstonia longifolia.=\n\n     6a. Leaves in whorls of 4-7.\n\n     6b. Leaves in whorls of 6-8 --16.\n\n7a. Ovary and fruit hispid with hooked bristles (3-7 dm. high; summer)\n    --8.\n\n7b. Ovary and fruit not bristly (early summer) --11.\n\n     8a. Leaves with 1 principal vein (flowers dull purple)\n                                             =Bedstraw, Galium pilosum.=\n\n     8b. Leaves with 3 principal veins --9.\n\n9a. Flowers bright-white                     =Bedstraw, Galium boreale.=\n\n9b. Flowers greenish, yellowish, or purplish --10.\n\n     10a. Leaves acuminate               =Bedstraw, Galium lanceolatum.=\n\n     10b. Leaves acute or obtuse          =Bedstraw, Galium circaezans.=\n\n11a. Corolla-lobes 3 (2-6 dm. high; flowers white or greenish) --12.\n\n11b. Corolla-lobes 4 --13.\n\n     12a. Flowers in clusters of 2 or 3     =Bedstraw, Galium claytoni.=\n\n     12b. Flowers solitary in the axils, on long hair-like pedicels\n                                            =Bedstraw, Galium trifidum.=\n\n13a. Corolla brownish or purple (3-6 dm. high)\n                                          =Bedstraw, Galium latifolium.=\n\n13b. Corolla white (1-4 dm. high) --14.\n\n     14a. Flowers rather numerous in small cymes\n                                            =Bedstraw, Galium palustre.=\n\n     14b. Flowers in clusters of 2 or 3, or solitary --15.\n\n15a. Principal leaves spreading or ascending\n                                          =Bedstraw, Galium tinctorium.=\n\n15b. Principal leaves recurved or reflexed\n                                        =Bedstraw, Galium labradoricum.=\n\n     16a. Ovary and fruit bristly or hispid --17.\n\n     16b. Ovary and fruit not bristly (summer) --18.\n\n17a. Leaves narrowly lanceolate to linear, mostly 6-8 in a whorl (stem\n     5-15 dm. long; flowers white; spring and summer)\n                                             =Bedstraw, Galium aparine.=\n\n17b. Leaves narrowly oval or elliptical, mostly in whorls of 6; flowers\n     in clusters of 3 (1-5 dm. high; flowers greenish, summer)\n                                           =Bedstraw, Galium triflorum.=\n\n     18a. Leaves cuspidate or mucronate at the apex (flowers white)\n          --19.\n\n     18b. Leaves obtuse at the apex (flowers white or greenish; 2-6 dm.\n          high) --20.\n\n19a. Flowers very numerous in terminal panicles (stem 3-8 dm. long)\n                                             =Bedstraw, Galium mollugo.=\n\n19b. Flowers in axillary clusters (1-3 dm. high)\n                                            =Bedstraw, Galium tricorne.=\n\n19c. Flowers few, in small loose terminal cymes --20.\n\n     20a. Stem smooth or nearly so (2-4 dm. high)\n                                           =Bedstraw, Galium concinnum.=\n\n     20b. Stem hispid with reflexed bristles (5-15 dm. long)\n                                           =Bedstraw, Galium asprellum.=\n\n\n\n\nCAPRIFOLIACEAE, the Honeysuckle Family\n\nShrubs or herbs, with opposite leaves; corolla regular or irregular,\npetals 4 or 5, united; stamens 4 or 5; ovary inferior, 1-5-celled.\n\n\n1a. Leaves compound (shrubs 1-4 m. high; flowers white, in large\n    clusters in early summer) (Elder) --2.\n\n1b. Leaves simple --3.\n\n     2a. Pith of the twigs white; inflorescence flattened or convex\n                                           =Elder, Sambucus canadensis.=\n\n     2b. Pith of the twigs brown; inflorescence pyramidal\n                                             =Elder, Sambucus racemosa.=\n\n3a. Plant trailing; flowers nodding, in pairs (1 dm. high; flowers pink,\n    summer)              =Twin Flower, Linnaea borealis var. americana.=\n\n3b. Erect herbs (6-12 dm. high; flowers dull-red, axillary, early\n    summer) (Feverwort) --4.\n\n3c. Shrubs, small trees, or woody vines --5.\n\n     4a. Leaf-bases broadly connate and 2-5 cm. wide\n                                     =Feverwort, Triosteum perfoliatum.=\n\n     4b. Leaf-bases narrowly connate, not over 1 cm. wide\n                                     =Feverwort, Triosteum aurantiacum.=\n\n5a. Climbing vines (spring and early summer) (Honeysuckle) --6.\n\n5b. Erect or spreading shrubs or small trees --11.\n\n     6a. Flowers in 2-flowered axillary clusters (flowers white or pink)\n                                       =Honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica.=\n\n     6b. Flowers in terminal clusters --7.\n\n7a. Leaves distinctly pubescent beneath (flowers yellow) --8.\n\n7b. Leaves glabrous beneath, or very minutely puberulent --9.\n\n     8a. Leaves pubescent above         =Honeysuckle, Lonicera hirsuta.=\n\n     8b. Leaves glabrous above      =Honeysuckle, Lonicera glaucescens.=\n\n9a. Corolla purple on the outside, glabrous within\n                                    =Honeysuckle, Lonicera caprifolium.=\n\n9b. Corolla yellow on the outside (or slightly tinged with purple),\n    pubescent within --10.\n\n     10a. Corolla-tube 6-8 mm. long      =Honeysuckle, Lonicera dioica.=\n\n     10b. Corolla-tube 11-14 mm. long\n                                    =Honeysuckle, Lonicera sullivantii.=\n\n11a. Corolla tubular at base; style long and slender --12.\n\n11b. Corolla rotate or somewhat bell-shape, style very short (flowers\n     white, late spring or early summer) --22.\n\n     12a. Flowers yellow or yellowish (spring and early summer) --13.\n\n     12b. Flowers white, pink, or red --18.\n\n13a. Leaves serrate (5-10 dm. tall)\n                                 =Bush Honeysuckle, Diervilla lonicera.=\n\n13b. Leaves entire; flowers in pairs (Honeysuckle) --14.\n\n     14a. Each pair of flowers subtended by 2 broad leaf-like bracts\n          (1-3 m. high)             =Honeysuckle, Lonicera involucrata.=\n\n     14b. Bracts at the base of each pair of flowers linear or narrowly\n          lanceolate --15.\n\n15a. Native species of woods and bogs --16.\n\n15b. Introduced species, growing mostly near dwellings; leaves very\n     pubescent beneath                =Honeysuckle, Lonicera xylosteum.=\n\n     16a. Peduncles 15 mm. long or more (1-4 m. high) --17.\n\n     16b. Peduncles about 5 mm. long (1 m. high, or less)\n                          =Honeysuckle, Lonicera coerulea var. villosa.=\n\n17a. Leaves ciliate                  =Honeysuckle, Lonicera canadensis.=\n\n17b. Leaves not ciliate            =Honeysuckle, Lonicera oblongifolia.=\n\n     18a. Corolla irregular, over 1 cm. long (1-4 m. high; spring)\n                                       =Honeysuckle, Lonicera tatarica.=\n\n     18b. Corolla regular, less than 1 cm. long (5-15 dm. high; flowers\n          white or pink, in axillary clusters, early summer) --19.\n\n19a. Flowers in axillary spikes\n                               =Wolfberry, Symphoricarpos occidentalis.=\n\n19b. Flowers almost sessile in the axils --20.\n\n     20a. Flowers numerous in each axil\n                           =Indian Currant, Symphoricarpos orbiculatus.=\n\n     20b. Flowers 1 or 2 in each axil (Snowberry) --21.\n\n21a. Leaves green beneath         =Snowberry, Symphoricarpos racemosus.=\n\n21b. Leaves whitened beneath\n                 =Snowberry, Symphoricarpos racemosus var. pauciflorus.=\n\n     22a. Leaves palmately lobed --23.\n\n     22b. Leaves not lobed --25.\n\n23a. Outermost flowers of the cluster enlarged and imperfect (1-4 m.\n     high)            =Cranberry Tree, Viburnum opulus var. americanum.=\n\n23b. All flowers of the cluster alike --24.\n\n     24a. Flower-clusters 4-10 cm. broad (1-2 m. high)\n                                     =Arrow Wood, Viburnum acerifolium.=\n\n     24b. Flower-clusters 2-3 cm. broad\n                                    =Squashberry, Viburnum pauciflorum.=\n\n25a. Outer flowers of the cluster enlarged and imperfect (1-3 m. high)\n                                     =Hobble-bush, Viburnum alnifolium.=\n\n25b. All flowers of the cluster alike --26.\n\n     26a. Leaves finely serrate; the veins not prominent --27.\n\n     26b. Leaves coarsely serrate, all or most of the teeth terminating\n          in a prominent vein --29.\n\n27a. Peduncle of the flower-cluster, below its branches, at least 2 cm.\n     long (1-3 m. high)               =Withe-rod, Viburnum cassinoides.=\n\n27b. Peduncle of the cluster 1 cm. long, or even shorter (3-8 m. high)\n     --28.\n\n     28a. Leaves distinctly acuminate   =Sheep-berry, Viburnum lentago.=\n\n     28b. Leaves obtuse or barely acute\n                                      =Black Haw, Viburnum prunifolium.=\n\n29a. Leaves densely pubescent beneath (6-15 dm. high)\n                                       =Arrow-wood, Viburnum pubescens.=\n\n29b. Leaves glabrous beneath, or with tufts of hairs in the forks of the\n     veins (1-4 m. high)                =Arrow-wood, Viburnum dentatum.=\n\n\n\n\nVALERIANACEAE, the Valerian Family\n\nHerbs with opposite leaves and small nearly or quite regular flowers;\npetals 5, united; stamens 3; sepals minute or wanting; ovary inferior.\n\n\n1a. Stem-leaves pinnately cleft (3-10 dm. high; flowers white or\n    pinkish, summer) --2.\n\n1b. Stem-leaves entire or dentate (2-6 dm. high; flowers white, summer)\n    (Corn Salad) --3.\n\n     2a. Leaf-segments parallel-veined Valerian, Valeriana edulis.\n\n     2b. Leaf-segments net-veined\n                                  =Swamp Valerian, Valeriana uliginosa.=\n\n3a. Upper stem-leaves entire\n                              =Corn Salad, Valerianella chenopodifolia.=\n\n3b. Upper stem-leaves dentate       =Corn Salad, Valerianella radiata.=\n\n\n\n\nDIPSACACEAE, the Teasel Family\n\nHerbs with opposite leaves, and small pale blue flowers aggregated in\ndense heads; calyx minute; petals 4, united; stamens 4, attached to the\ncorolla; ovary inferior.\n\n\nOne species in Michigan, 1-2 m. high, with prickly leaves and stem,\nblooming in summer                        =Teasel, Dipsacus sylvestris.=\n\n\n\n\nCUCURBITACEAE, the Gourd Family\n\nHerbs, climbing by tendrils, with alternate palmately lobed leaves and\nimperfect flowers; staminate flowers in showy clusters, with 5-6 petals\nand 3 stamens; pistillate flowers small.\n\n\n1a. Leaves 5-angled or shallowy 5-lobed (flowers white, summer)\n                                       =Bur Cucumber, Sicyos angulatus.=\n\n1b. Leaves 5-lobed to about the middle (commonly cultivated and\n    frequently wild; flowers white, summer)\n                                   =Wild Cucumber, Echinocystis lobata.=\n\n\n\n\nCAMPANULACEAE, the Bellflower Family\n\nHerbs with alternate simple leaves and milky juice; sepals 5; petals 5,\nunited; stamens 5, attached at the very base of the corolla; ovary\ninferior.\n\n\n1a. Stem-leaves circular or nearly so, cordate-clasping at base (2-6 dm.\n    high; flowers blue, axillary, in summer)\n                          =Venus' Looking-Glass, Specularia perfoliata.=\n\n1b. Stem-leaves linear or nearly so, not over 1 cm. wide (summer) --2.\n\n1c. Stem-leaves ovate to lanceolate, 2 cm. wide or more (flowers blue,\n    in a terminal spike or raceme, summer) (Bellflower) --4.\n\n     2a. Stem and leaves glabrous (or rarely pubescent) (1-6 dm. high;\n         flowers blue)               =Harebell, Campanula rotundifolia.=\n\n     2b. Stem and leaves rough with reflexed bristles (marsh plants,\n         with weak slender stems 3-10 dm. long; flowers white or\n         pale-blue) (Marsh Bellflower) --3.\n\n3a. Corolla 5-8 mm. long      =Marsh Bellflower, Campanula aparinoides.=\n\n3b. Corolla 10-12 mm. long      =Marsh Bellflower, Campanula uliginosa.=\n\n     4a. Corolla rotate; flowers in spikes (6-15 dm. high)\n                                      =Bellflower, Campanula americana.=\n\n     4b. Corolla bell-shape; flowers in one-sided racemes (4-10 dm.\n         high)                    =Bellflower, Campanula rapunculoides.=\n\n\n\n\nLOBELIACEAE, the Lobelia Family\n\nHerbs with alternate simple leaves and milky juice; flowers irregular;\npetals 5, united; corolla split down the upper side; stamens 5, united\nby their anthers into a ring or tube surrounding the style; ovary\n2-celled, inferior. Flowers in summer and autumn.\n\n\n1a. Leaves all basal, tubular; flowers on leafless stalks (aquatic, 1-4\n    dm. high; flowers blue)          =Water Lobelia, Lobelia dortmanna.=\n\n1b. Leaves normal, on the stem --2.\n\n     2a. Flowers more than 2 cm. long (5-10 dm. high) --3.\n\n     2b. Flowers about 1 cm. long, or shorter (flowers light blue) --4.\n\n3a. Flowers scarlet               =Cardinal Flower, Lobelia cardinalis.=\n\n3b. Flowers blue                   =Great Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica.=\n\n     4a. Flowers in loose racemes, pedicelled --5.\n\n     4b. Flowers in slender terminal spike-like racemes, nearly sessile\n         (4-10 dm. high, usually unbranched)\n                                             =Lobelia, Lobelia spicata.=\n\n5a. Foliage pubescent (3-8 dm. high)\n                                      =Indian Tobacco, Lobelia inflata.=\n\n5b. Foliage glabrous (1-4 dm. high)           =Lobelia, Lobelia kalmii.=\n\n\n\n\nCOMPOSITAE, the Composite Family\n\nHerbs, with various types of foliage, but with flowers of characteristic\nstructure, resembling a sunflower, a thistle, or a dandelion. Each\napparent flower is a head of numerous small flowers, attached side by\nside to the expanded end of the stem, and subtended and partly enclosed\nby a series of bracts, called the involucre, which resembles a calyx.\n\nThe calyx of the individual flower is minute or actually wanting, and is\nusually modified to aid in seed dispersal. It appears at the base of the\ncorolla, at the summit of the inferior ovary, and is known as pappus.\nThe structure of the pappus is best observed in the ripe fruit.\n\nThe corolla of the individual flowers consists of 5 (or rarely 4) united\npetals. In some flowers the petals are united to form a tubular or\nbell-shape corolla. In others they are united to form a flat or\nstrap-shape corolla. The stamens are attached to the corolla, and are\nunited by their anthers into a tube which surrounds the style, and above\nwhich the 2-lobed stigma protrudes.\n\nThe apparent flower of a Composite, composed of several or many\nindividual flowers, is termed a head. It may be composed entirely of\ntubular flowers, as the thistle or bone-set; or entirely of strap-shape\nflowers, as the dandelion; or of both sorts together, as the aster or\nsunflower. In the latter case, the tubular flowers invariably occupy the\ncenter of the head, called the disk, and the larger strap-shape flowers\nare at the margin, where their projecting corollas, called rays, may be\nvery conspicuous. Such heads are called radiate.\n\nIn a few composites (see 1a below) the flowers have minute corollas\nwithout  parts.\n\nIn identifying a composite, determine first whether the heads are\ncomposed of tubular flowers, of strap-shape flowers, or of both sorts\ntogether; and, secondly, observe the nature of the pappus, using\npreferably the ripe heads, or at least the oldest flower-heads\navailable. No further difficulties will be encountered.\n\n\n1a. Flowers without petal-like or brightly  parts; staminate and\n    pistillate flowers in separate heads (or rarely in the same heads);\n    coarse weeds with inconspicuous flowers (summer and autumn) --2.\n\n1b. Flowers with some petal-like parts, usually brightly  or\n    white --10.\n\n     2a. Leaves toothed or lobed --3.\n\n     2b. Leaves deeply pinnatifid or dissected (4-15 dm. high; flowers\n     in erect spikes) (Ragweed) --7.\n\n3a. Fruit or pistillate flowers thickly covered with sharp hooked spines\n    (3-10 dm. high) (Cocklebur) --4.\n\n3b. Fruit not spiny --8.\n\n     4a. With spines on the stem at the base of the leaves\n                                         =Cocklebur, Xanthium spinosum.=\n\n     4b. Without any spines on the stem --5.\n\n5a. Body of the bur smooth or slightly hairy\n                                        =Cocklebur, Xanthium canadense.=\n\n5b. Body of the bur and the spines densely pubescent --6.\n\n     6a. Body of the bur more than twice as long as thick; a common weed\n                                          =Cocklebur, Xanthium commune.=\n\n     6b. Body of the bur less than twice as long as thick\n                                        =Cocklebur, Xanthium echinatum.=\n\n7a. Leaves twice-pinnatifid          =Ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia.=\n\n7b. Leaves once-pinnatifid             =Ragweed, Ambrosia psilostachya.=\n\n     8a. Leaves deeply 3-lobed (1-5 m. high)\n                                      =Giant Ragweed, Ambrosia trifida.=\n\n     8b. Leaves serrate or obscurely lobed --9.\n\n9a. Stem simple or sparingly branched; pistillate heads in the axils of\n    the upper leaves (1-3 m. high)\n                    =Giant Ragweed, Ambrosia trifida var. integrifolia.=\n\n9b. Stem much branched; heads all alike, in panicles\n                                         =Marsh Elder, Iva xanthifolia.=\n\n     10a. Flowers all strap-shape; juicy milky. (The central flowers\n          must be examined carefully, since they are frequently much\n          smaller than the marginal ones) --11.\n\n     10b. Flowers all tubular, with regular. 4-5-lobed corollas --45.\n\n     10c. Flowers both tubular and strap-shape; heads radiate (in a few\n          species the rays are small and may be overlooked by mistake)\n          --108.\n\n11a. Flowers blue (summer and autumn) --12.\n\n11b. Flowers orange, yellow, white, or purplish --15.\n\n     12a. Heads 2.5 cm. wide, or larger --13.\n\n     12b. Heads 1.5 cm. wide, or smaller --14.\n\n13a. Leaves linear; bracts longer than the flowers, heads 5-10 cm. wide\n     (6-15 dm. high)                  =Salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius.=\n\n13b. Leaves broader, mostly serrate; bracts shorter than the flowers;\n     heads 2.5-4 cm. wide                  =Chicory, Cichorium intybus.=\n\n     14a. Heads in a narrow crowded cluster (5-15 dm. high) --30b.\n\n     14b. Heads in a spreading open panicle (Wild Lettuce) --22.\n\n15a. Heads solitary at the summit of leafless stalks --16.\n\n15b. Heads several, on leafy, naked, or scaly stalks --19.\n\n     16a. Basal leaves strictly entire; heads about 2.5 cm. wide (summer\n          and autumn) --35a.\n\n     16b. Basal leaves toothed, lobed, or pinnatifid (spring and summer)\n          --17.\n\n17a. Heads 8-14 mm. wide (1-4 dm. high)\n                                    =Dwarf Dandelion, Krigia virginica.=\n\n17b. Heads 25-50 mm. wide (1-6 dm. high) (Dandelion) --18.\n\n     18a. Outer involucral bracts reflexed\n                                      =Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale.=\n\n     18b. Outer involucral bracts erect or spreading\n                                  =Dandelion, Taraxacum erythrospermum.=\n\n19a. Pappus none; heads about 1 cm. wide (4-10 dm. high; summer)\n                                         =Nipplewort, Lapsana communis.=\n\n19b. Pappus of an inner row of bristles and an outer row of short\n     scales; heads about 3 cm. wide (3-8 dm. high; early summer)\n                                        =Cynthia, Krigia amplexicaulis.=\n\n19c. Pappus of feathery bristles (summer) --20.\n\n19d. Pappus of simple bristles --25.\n\n     20a. Flower-stalk scaly, without foliage leaves (2-6 dm. high)\n                                 =Fall Dandelion, Leontodon autumnalis.=\n\n     20b. Stem leafy (3-10 dm. high) --21.\n\n21a. Leaves entire, linear-lanceolate\n                                 =Meadow Salsify, Tragopogon pratensis.=\n\n21b. Leaves serrate, oblong-lanceolate    =Picris, Picris hieracioides.=\n\n     22a. Pappus tawny in color (1-3 m. high) --23.\n\n     22b. Pappus white --24.\n\n23a. Leaves pinnatifid                  =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca spicata.=\n\n23b. Leaves undivided, dentate\n                      =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca spicata var. integrifolia.=\n\n     24a. Upper leaves entire; heads about 1.5 cm. wide (5-10 dm. high)\n                                      =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca pulchella.=\n\n     24b. Upper leaves dentate or lobed; heads about 1 cm. wide (1-3 m.\n          high)                       =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca floridana.=\n\n25a. Achene tipped with a slender beak, bearing the pappus at its summit\n     (summer) (Wild Lettuce) --26.\n\n25b. Achene without a beak --29.\n\n     26a. Leaves hirsute or hispid on the mid-veins beneath --27.\n\n     26b. Leaves glabrous --28.\n\n27a. Leaves pubescent on both sides (1-2 m. high)\n                                        =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca hirsuta.=\n\n27b. Leaves glabrous, except on the mid-vein (5-15 dm. high)\n                        =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca scariola var. integrata.=\n\n     28a. Leaves entire or sparsely toothed (1-2 m. high)\n                                   =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca sagittifolia.=\n\n     28b. Leaves chiefly sinuate-pinnatifid (1-3 m. high)\n                                     =Wild Lettuce, Lactuca canadensis.=\n\n29a. Flowers white, cream-color, or purplish (summer and autumn)\n     (Rattlesnake Root) --30.\n\n29b. Flowers bright-yellow or orange --33.\n\n     30a. Heads nodding (6-20 dm. high) --31.\n\n     30b. Heads pointing in various directions, in spike-like panicles;\n          involucres pubescent (5-15 dm. high)\n                               =Rattlesnake Root, Prenanthes racemosus.=\n\n31a. Heads with 5-7 flowers in each\n                               =Rattlesnake Root, Prenanthes altissima.=\n\n31b. Heads with 8-12 flowers --32.\n\n31c. Heads with 20 or more flowers\n                              =Rattlesnake Root, Prenanthes crepidinea.=\n\n     32a. Pappus dark reddish-brown\n                                    =Rattlesnake Root, Prenanthes alba.=\n\n     32b. Pappus pale-brown or nearly white\n                              =Rattlesnake Root, Prenanthes trifoliata.=\n\n33a. Pappus tawny or brown in color (summer and autumn) (Hawkweed) --34.\n\n33b. Pappus white --42.\n\n     34a. Heads 2.5 cm. in diameter, or larger --35.\n\n     34b. Heads 1-2 cm. in diameter (4-10 dm. high) --37.\n\n35a. Leaves all basal (1-4 dm. high)    =Hawkweed, Hieracium pilosella.=\n\n35b. Stem-leaves present (4-15 dm. high) --36.\n\n     36a. Leaves rounded at the sessile base\n                                        =Hawkweed, Hieracium canadense.=\n\n     36b. Leaves narrowed toward the base\n                                       =Hawkweed, Hieracium umbellatum.=\n\n37a. A rosette of basal leaves conspicuous at flowering time --38.\n\n37b. No rosette of basal leaves at time of flowering --41.\n\n     38a. Leaves glabrous on the upper side --39.\n\n     38b. Leaves hairy on the upper side --40.\n\n39a. Stem glabrous, leafless or with one or two leaves\n                                          =Hawkweed, Hieracium venosum.=\n\n39b. Stem with several leaves, hairy below\n                                         =Hawkweed, Hieracium marianum.=\n\n     40a. Leaves with short scattered hairs above\n                                         =Hawkweed, Hieracium gronovii.=\n\n     40b. Leaves and stem densely covered with very long hairs\n                                       =Hawkweed, Hieracium longipilum.=\n\n41a. Leaves glabrous                  =Hawkweed, Hieracium paniculatum.=\n\n41b. Leaves very hairy                    =Hawkweed, Hieracium scabrum.=\n\n     42a. Bracts of the involucre smooth (5-20 dm. tall; summer and\n          autumn) (Sow Thistle) --43.\n\n     42b. Bracts of the involucre hairy --44.\n\n43a. The clasping leaf-bases acute     =Sow Thistle, Sonchus oleraceus.=\n\n43b. The clasping leaf-bases rounded       =Sow Thistle, Sonchus asper.=\n\n     44a. Heads 2.5-5 cm. broad; involucre 2 cm. long (4-10 dm. high)\n                                        =Sow Thistle, Sonchus arvensis.=\n\n     44b. Heads 1-2 cm. broad; involucre 6-10 mm. long (3-6 dm. high;\n          summer)                         =Hawksbeard, Crepis tectorum.=\n\n45a. Leaves or involucre or both spiny (thistles, burdock, etc.) --46.\n\n45b. Neither leaves nor involucre spiny --60.\n\n     46a. Leaves 1-4 dm. broad, not spiny (flowers purple or white;\n          summer) (Burdock) --47.\n\n     46b. Leaves narrower, not spiny --48.\n\n47a. Diameter of involucre at flowering time 3-5 cm. (1-3 m. high)\n                                               =Burdock, Arctium lappa.=\n\n47b. Diameter of involucre at flowering time 1.5-3 cm. (5-15 dm. high)\n                                               =Burdock, Arctium minus.=\n\n     48a. Each head 1-flowered; heads aggregated in a globular\n          head-like cluster (1-2 m. high; flowers blue or white, summer)\n                              =Globe Thistle, Echinops sphaerocephalus.=\n\n     48b. Each head many-flowered --49.\n\n49a. Principal involucral bracts with stout spreading spines 2-4 cm.\n     long (5-15 dm. high; flowers purple, summer)\n                                       =Milk Thistle, Silybum marianum.=\n\n49b. Principal involucral bracts with slender spines or none --50.\n\n     50a. Pappus feathery; receptacle bristly (summer and autumn)\n          (Thistle) --51.\n\n     50b. Pappus not feathery (flowers purple, summer) --59.\n\n51a. Heads subtended by a circle of large leafy bracts (5-15 dm. high;\n     flowers pale-yellow)                =Thistle, Cisium spinoissimum.=\n\n51b. Heads not subtended by several leafy bracts --52.\n\n     52a. Leaves conspicuously white-woolly on both sides (4-10 dm.\n          high) --53.\n\n     52b. Leaves conspicuously white-woolly or brown-woolly below, not\n          above (flowers purple or pink) --54.\n\n     52c. Leaves green on both sides (flowers pink or purple, rarely\n          white) --56.\n\n53a. Leaves deeply pinnately parted with linear divisions; flowers\n     almost white                           =Thistle, Cirsium pitcheri.=\n\n53b. Leaves irregularly pinnatifid; flowers purple-pink\n                                           =Thistle, Cirsium undulatum.=\n\n     54a. Stem-leaves entire or shallowly lobed (1-3 m. high)\n                                          =Thistle, Cirsium altissimum.=\n\n     54b. Stem-leaves obviously pinnatifid (1-2 m. high) --55.\n\n55a. Leaves decurrent on the stem        =Thistle, Cirsium lanceolatum.=\n\n55b. Leaves not decurrent                   =Thistle, Cirsium discolor.=\n\n     56a. Outer and middle involucral bracts appressed, pointless or\n          with weak short prickles --57.\n\n     56b. Outer and middle bracts erect, not appressed, acuminate into a\n          long slender more or less prickly tip (4-10 dm. high) --58.\n\n57a. Heads numerous 2-2.5 cm. broad, in close clusters (5-12 dm. high)\n                                      =Canada Thistle, Cirsium arvense.=\n\n57b. Heads few or solitary, 3-5 cm. broad (1-2 m. high)\n                                             =Thistle, Cirsium muticum.=\n\n     58a. Principal bracts with a conspicuous viscid stripe down the\n          middle; heads 6-19 cm. broad, solitary or few\n                                              =Thistle, Cirsium hillii.=\n\n     58b. Principal bracts not viscid        =Thistle, Cirsium pumilum.=\n\n59a. Receptacle not bristly; heads 3-5 cm. wide (1-3 m. high; flowers\n     pale-purple, summer)         =Cotton Thistle, Onopordum acanthium.=\n\n59b. Receptacle bristly; heads 2-2.5 cm. wide (5-12 dm. high; flowers\n     purple to white, late summer)           =Thistle, Carduus crispus.=\n\n     60a. Leaves basal; stem-leaves none or reduced to scales (2-8 dm.\n          high; flowers whitish, in spring) --61.\n\n     60b. Stem-leaves present; basal leaves present or absent --62.\n\n61a. Leaves toothed or lobed; flower-stalk not scaly\n                                     =Adenocaulon, Adenocaulon bicolor.=\n\n61b. Leaves deeply cleft; flower-stalk scaly --197a.\n\n     62a. Leaves compound or dissected (flowers in summer and autumn)\n          --63.\n\n     62b. Leaves merely lobed, never truly compound or dissected --72.\n\n     62c. Leaves entire or serrate --78.\n\n63a. Some of the involucral bracts leaf-like, longer than the heads\n     (3-20 dm. high; flowers yellow or greenish, summer and autumn)\n     (Beggar Ticks) --126.\n\n63b. Bracts short and not leaf-like --64.\n\n     64a. Heads 7-20 mm. wide, in a flat-topped or convex cluster (3-10\n          dm. high; flowers yellow, summer) (Tansy) --65.\n\n     64b. Heads smaller, in spikes, racemes, or panicles (flowers yellow\n          or greenish, late summer and autumn) (Wormwood) --66.\n\n65a. Heads 7-10 mm. wide, numerous in a dense cluster\n                                             =Tansy, Tanacetum vulgare.=\n\n65b. Heads 10-20 mm. wide, few, 2-10 in a loose open cluster\n                                           =Tansy, Tanacetum huronense.=\n\n     66a. Heads 2-3 mm. broad (4-15 dm. high) --67.\n\n     66b. Heads 4-6 mm. broad (3-10 dm. high) --69.\n\n67a. Leaf-lobes narrowly linear, strictly entire\n                                          =Wormwood, Artemisia caudata.=\n\n67b. Leaf-lobes serrate --68.\n\n     68a. Heads in a loose spreading panicle\n                                            =Wormwood, Artemisia annua.=\n\n     68b. Heads in axillary clusters, producing a leafy spike-like\n          panicle                         =Wormwood, Artemisia biennis.=\n\n69a. Leaf-lobes narrowly linear --70.\n\n69b. Leaf-lobes oblong to obovate, not linear --71.\n\n     70a. Shrubby; involucre pubescent\n                                    =Southernwood, Artemisia abrotanum.=\n\n     70b. Herbaceous; involucre glabrous or rarely pubescent\n                                       =Wormwood, Artemisia canadensis.=\n\n71a. Leaves finely gray-pubescent on both sides\n                                       =Wormwood, Artemisia absinthium.=\n\n71b. Leaves smooth or nearly so above, densely white-woolly beneath\n                                          =Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris.=\n\n     72a. Heads 2-4 cm. broad, purple, blue, or rarely white (3-6 dm.\n          high; summer) --92.\n\n     72b. Heads 1 cm. wide or less --73.\n\n73a. Leaves densely white-woolly beneath (flowers yellowish, late\n     summer) --74.\n\n73b. Leaves smooth or hairy, never white-woolly --75.\n\n     74a. Heads 6-8 mm. wide (4-8 dm. high)\n                                      =Wormwood, Artemisia stelleriana.=\n\n     74b. Heads 3-4 mm. wide (5-10 dm. high)\n                                      =Wormwood, Artemisia ludoviciana.=\n\n75a. Principal bracts of the involucre 5, with frequently a few much\n     smaller ones --76.\n\n75b. Principal bracts of the involucre numerous --77.\n\n     76a. Heads few in small terminal clusters; foliage somewhat\n          viscid-pubescent (6-15 dm. high; flowers yellow, summer)\n          --114a.\n\n     76b. Heads very numerous in flat-topped clusters; foliage never\n          viscid-pubescent (1-2 m. high; flowers white, late summer)\n          --105c.\n\n77a. Leaves broadly halberd-shape, 3-lobed (1-2 m. high; flowers white,\n     late summer) --105b.\n\n77b. Leaves lobed only at the base (5-10 dm. high; flowers yellow,\n     summer) --93a.\n\n77c. Leaves pinnatifid (2-8 dm. high; flowers yellow) --172.\n\n     78a. Bracts of the involucre dry and chaffy, at least at the tip;\n          plants always pubescent and usually white-woolly --79.\n\n     78b. Bracts of the involucre green or , but never dry and\n          chaffy --90.\n\n79a. Pappus none; heads 3-4 mm. wide, in ample panicled spikes (flowers\n     yellowish, late summer) --74b.\n\n79b. Pappus a minute ring or crown; leaves crenate (5-10 dm. high;\n     flowers yellow, summer) --93a.\n\n79c. Pappus of hairs; heads in flat-topped clusters or slender spikes\n     --80.\n\n     80a. Heads sessile or subsessile in small flat-topped clusters;\n          flowering in spring or early summer; principal leaves basal\n          (1-4 dm. high; flowers white or purplish) (Everlasting) --81.\n\n     80b. Heads in terminal spikes (2-6 dm. high; flowers purplish,\n          summer)                       =Cudweed, Gnaphalium purpureum.=\n\n     80c. Heads in small or large flat-topped clusters, flowering in\n          summer or autumn; principal leaves on the stem --88.\n\n81a. Stolons from the basal rosette of leaves leafy throughout and\n     ascending at the tip --82.\n\n81b. Stolons prostrate throughout, leafy only at the tip --87.\n\n     82a. Basal leaves 2-5 cm. long, 1-nerved --83.\n\n     82b. Basal leaves 5-12 cm. long, 3-nerved --84.\n\n83a. Basal leaves spatulate or oblanceolate, smooth above\n                                   =Everlasting, Antennaria canadensis.=\n\n83b. Basal leaves obovate, pubescent above\n                                    =Everlasting, Antennaria neodioica.=\n\n     84a. Basal leaves smooth above\n                                     =Everlasting, Antennaria parlinii.=\n\n     84b. Basal leaves dull green and pubescent above --85.\n\n85a. Heads 6-8 mm. high       =Everlasting, Antennaria plantaginifolia.=\n\n85b. Heads 8-11 mm. high --86.\n\n     86a. Leaf-blade ovate or obovate\n                                       =Everlasting, Antennaria fallax.=\n\n     86b. Leaf-blade spatulate, with rounded tip\n                                 =Everlasting, Antennaria occidentalis.=\n\n87a. Styles crimson                  =Everlasting, Antennaria neglecta.=\n\n87b. Styles pale yellow            =Everlasting, Antennaria petaloidea.=\n\n     88a. Erect; involucral bracts pearly white (4-9 dm. high)\n                           =Pearly Everlasting, Anaphalis margaritacea.=\n\n     88b. Erect; involucral bracts dull white or pale brown, somewhat\n          pubescent (4-8 dm. high) (Cudweed) --89.\n\n     88c. Diffusely branched; heads in dense clusters; bracts brown (1-2\n          dm. high)                    =Cudweed, Gnaphalium uliginosum.=\n\n89a. Leaves decurrent on the stem       =Cudweed, Gnaphalium decurrens.=\n\n89b. Leaves not decurrent on the stem\n                                     =Cudweed, Gnaphalium polycephalum.=\n\n     90a. Twining vine (flowers white, summer)\n                                          =Hemp Weed, Mikania scandens.=\n\n     90b. Not twining or climbing --91.\n\n91a. Involucral bracts deeply fringed at the tip (flowers purple, blue,\n     or rarely white, summer; 3-6 dm. high) --92.\n\n91b. Involucral bracts entire or nearly so --93.\n\n     92a. Upper leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate\n                                        =Corn Flower, Centaurea cyanus.=\n\n     92b. Upper leaves oblong or oblong-lanceolate\n                                            =Knapweed, Centaurea nigra.=\n\n93a. Pappus none or a short ring or crown (5-10 dm. high; flowers\n     yellow, summer)\n                  =Costmary, Chrysanthemum balsamita var. tanacetoides.=\n\n93b. Pappus of 2-4 stiff awns (2-15 dm. high; flowers yellow, late\n     summer) (Bur Marigold) --130.\n\n93c. Pappus of hairs or bristles --94.\n\n     94a. Leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate, entire; heads never in a\n          large flat-topped cluster --95.\n\n     94b. Leaves not linear --99.\n\n95a. Heads showy, purple, in a long spike or raceme (late summer)\n     (Blazing Star) --96.\n\n95b. Heads not showy, in a loose panicle or raceme --240b.\n\n     96a. Involucral bracts rounded at the tip, appressed (5-15 dm.\n          high) --97.\n\n     96b. Involucral bracts pointed (3-6 dm. high) --98.\n\n97a. Heads 8-12-flowered                =Blazing Star, Liatris spicata.=\n\n97b. Heads with 25 flowers or more     =Blazing Star, Liatris scariosa.=\n\n     98a. Involucral bracts long-acuminate, spreading\n                                      =Blazing Star, Liatris squarrosa.=\n\n     98b. Involucral bracts mucronate, appressed\n                                    =Blazing Star, Liatris cylindracea.=\n\n99a. Flowers yellow (2-8 dm. high) --172b.\n\n99b. Flowers bright-red or purple, in flat-topped clusters (8-20 dm.\n     high; late summer) (Ironweed) --100.\n\n99c. Flowers blue (3-8 dm. high; late summer)\n                                  =Mist Flower, Eupatorium coelestinum.=\n\n99d. Flowers flesh-color, pink, cream-color, or white (flowers in\n     summer) --103.\n\n     100a. Leaves glabrous beneath or minutely pubescent; heads\n           15-30-flowered --101.\n\n     100b. Leaves tomentose beneath; heads 30-50-flowered --102.\n\n101a. Inflorescence densely crowded; usually 1 m. or less high\n                                       =Ironweed, Vernonia fasciculate.=\n\n101b. Inflorescence loose and open, 15-30 cm. wide; 1-2 m. high\n                                         =Ironweed, Vernonia altissima.=\n\n     102a. Pappus tawny in color         =Ironweed, Vernonia missurica.=\n\n     102b. Pappus purple               =Ironweed, Vernonia illinoensis.=\n\n103a. Leaves alternate --104.\n\n103b. Leaves opposite --106.\n\n103c. Leaves whorled (1-3 m. high; flowers pink or purple, late summer)\n      (Joe-Pye Weed) --107.\n\n     104a. Heads 5-flowered (5-20 dm. high; flowers white or pinkish,\n           late summer) (Indian Plantain) --105.\n\n     104b. Heads 10 25-flowered (5-10 dm. high; flowers white, late\n           summer)                =False Boneset, Kuhnia eupatorioides.=\n\n     104c. Heads with more than 50 flowers (3-20 dm. high; flowers\n           white, summer)           =Fireweed, Erechtites hieracifolia.=\n\n105a. Leaves entire, with many veins from base to apex\n                                    =Indian Plantain, Cacalia tuberosa.=\n\n105b. Leaves sharply serrate      =Indian Plantain, Cacalia suaveolens.=\n\n105c. Leaves broadly triangular or kidney-shape, sinuate or entire\n                              =Indian Plantain, Cacalia atriplicifolia.=\n\n     106a. Leaves united at the base (5-15 dm. high)\n                                      =Boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum.=\n\n     106b. Leaves sessile but not united at the base (5-15 dm. high)\n                             =Upland Boneset, Eupatorium sessilifolium.=\n\n     106c. Leaves petioled (4-12 dm. high)\n                            =White Snakeroot, Eupatorium urticaefolium.=\n\n107a. Inflorescence ovoid or pyramidal\n                                   =Joe-Pye Weed, Eupatorium purpureum.=\n\n107b. Inflorescence depressed or flattened\n                    =Joe-Pye Weed, Eupatorium purpureum var. maculatum.=\n\n     108a. Rays yellow or brown --109.\n\n     108b. Rays white to blue or red, never yellow or brown --197.\n\n109a. Principal leaves basal, the stem merely with bract-like scales\n      --110.\n\n109b. Principal leaves on the stem, opposite or whorled --111.\n\n109c. Principal leaves on the stem, alternate, or with smaller ones\n      clustered in their axils --132.\n\n     110a. Flower-stalk 1-5 dm. high, 1-flowered (spring)\n                                         =Coltsfoot, Tussilago farfara.=\n\n     110b. Flower-stalk 1-3 m. high, several-flowered (summer)\n                              =Prairie Dock, Silphium terebinthinaceum.=\n\n111a. Ray-flowers pistillate (the 2-lobed style protrudes from their\n      base) --112.\n\n111b. Ray-flowers with neither stamens nor pistil --118.\n\n     112a. Principal leaves lobed (summer) (Leafcup) --113.\n\n     112b. Principal leaves toothed or entire, not lobed --115.\n\n113a. Rays 10 or more (1-2 m. high)        =Leafcup, Polymnia uvedalia.=\n\n113b. Rays 5 (5-15 dm. high) --114.\n\n     114a. Rays shorter than the involucre or none\n                                         =Leafcup, Polymnia canadensis.=\n\n     114b. Rays about 1 cm. long\n                            =Leafcup, Polymnia canadensis var. radiata.=\n\n115a. Stem 6 dm. high or less; pappus of slender hairs (spring)\n                                            =Arnica, Arnica cordifolia.=\n\n115b. Stem usually 8-20 dm. high; pappus of short scales or none\n      (summer) --116.\n\n     116a. Leaves united at base into a cup surrounding the stem\n                                      =Cup Plant, Silphium perfoliatum.=\n\n     116b. Leaves closely sessile with a rounded base\n                                   =Rosin Weed, Silphium integrifolium.=\n\n     116c. Leaves tapering to a short petiole; principal leaves whorled\n                                     =Rosin Weed, Silphium trifoliatum.=\n\n     116d. Leaves abruptly rounded at the sessile base, all opposite\n           (Ox-eye) --117.\n\n117a. Leaves smooth                   =Ox-eye, Heliopsis helianthoides.=\n\n117b. Leaves rough                           =Ox-eye, Heliopsis scabra.=\n\n     118a. Principal stem-leaves lobed or divided --119.\n\n     118b. Principal stem-leaves entire or serrate --127.\n\n119a. Submerged aquatic; leaf-segments filiform\n                                        =Water Marigold, Bidens beckii.=\n\n119b. Terrestrial plants; leaves merely 3-lobed (3-8 dm. high; late\n      spring and summer) (Tickseed) --120.\n\n119c. Terrestrial plants; leaves compound or dissected (summer and\n      autumn) --121.\n\n     120a. Leaf-lobes linear-oblong, all about equal\n                                          =Tickseed, Coreopsis palmata.=\n\n     120b. Lateral leaf-lobes very much smaller than the terminal\n                                       =Tickseed, Coreopsis lanceolata.=\n\n121a. Leaf-segments entire (Tickseed) --122.\n\n121b. Leaf-segments serrate (5-15 dm. high) (Tickseed Sunflower) --124.\n\n     122a. Leaf-segments numerous, linear or nearly so (4-10 dm. high)\n           --123.\n\n     122b. Leaf-segments 3-5, lanceolate (1-3 m. high)\n                                        =Tickseed, Coreopsis tripteris.=\n\n123a. Rays yellow throughout         =Tickseed, Coreopsis verticillata.=\n\n123b. Rays brown, at least at the base  =Tickseed, Coreopsis tinctoria.=\n\n     124a. Achenes wedge-shape, the inner ones less than 2 mm. wide\n           --125.\n\n     124b. Achenes obovate, the inner ones more than 2 mm. wide\n                                  =Tickseed Sunflower, Bidens aristosa.=\n\n125a. Leaf-lobes lanceolate   =Tickseed Sunflower, Bidens trichosperma.=\n\n125b. Leaf-lobes linear\n               =Tickseed Sunflower, Bidens trichosperma var. tenuiloba.=\n\n     126a. Outer leaf-like bracts 10-16; achenes brown\n                                         =Beggar Ticks, Bidens vulgata.=\n\n     126b. Outer leaf-like bracts 5-8; achenes black\n                                        =Beggar Ticks, Bidens frondosa.=\n\n     126c. Outer leaf-like bracts about 4\n                                       =Beggar Ticks, Bidens discoidea.=\n\n127a. Bracts of the involucre all essentially alike in form and texture\n      (flowers in summer and autumn) (Sunflower) --179.\n\n127b. Bracts of the involucre in two distinct sets, differing in form or\n      consistency or both --128.\n\n     128a. Leaves entire (3-8 dm. high; late spring and summer) --120b.\n\n     128b. Leaves serrate (late summer and autumn) (Bur Marigold) --129.\n\n129a. Rays large and conspicuous, 2-3 cm. long (3-10 dm. high)\n                                          =Bur Marigold, Bidens laevis.=\n\n129b. Rays 1 cm. long or less --130.\n\n     130a. Outer bracts leaf-like, serrate, 3-8 cm. long (4-15 dm. high)\n                                          =Bur Marigold, Bidens comosa.=\n\n     130b. Outer bracts 1-2.5 cm. long (2-15 dm. high) --131.\n\n131a. Heads nodding after flowering       =Bur Marigold, Bidens cernua.=\n\n131b. Heads permanently erect            =Bur Marigold, Bidens connata.=\n\n     132a. Heads small, seldom more than 1 cm. wide, including the rays,\n           blooming in late summer and autumn; flowers numerous, crowded\n           in spikes, racemes, corymbs, or panicles (Goldenrod) --133.\n\n     132b. Heads medium size or large, more than 1 cm. and usually\n           exceeding 2 cm. in width, including the rays --165.\n\n133a. Heads chiefly in clusters or short racemes in the axils of\n      ordinary foliage leaves, or occasionally the upper compacted into\n      a leafy cluster terminating the stem --134.\n\n133b. Heads crowded at or near the ends of the branches at about the\n      same distance from the base of the panicle, forming a rounded or\n      flat-topped inflorescence --140.\n\n133c. Heads more or less uniformly distributed along the length of the\n      branches, forming a cylindrical or pyramidal inflorescence, never\n      flat-topped --146.\n\n     134a. Stem and both sides of the leaves more or less pubescent or\n           rough (4-10 dm. high) --135.\n\n     134b. Stem and both sides of the leaves essentially smooth or with\n           very short hairs (3-10 dm. high) --136.\n\n135a. Rays white                          =Goldenrod, Solidago bicolor.=\n\n135b. Rays yellow                         =Goldenrod, Solidago hispida.=\n\n     136a. Basal leaves abruptly narrowed to winged petioles --137.\n\n     136b. Basal leaves not abruptly narrowed to winged petioles --138.\n\n137a. Involucre 2-5 mm. long            =Goldenrod, Solidago latifolia.=\n\n137b. Involucre 8-12 mm. long         =Goldenrod, Solidago macrophylla.=\n\n     138a. Lower leaves broadly oval, obtuse, thickish, crenate; achenes\n           glabrous                        =Goldenrod, Solidago erecta.=\n\n     138b. Lower leaves lanceolate, acuminate, thin, sharply serrate;\n           achenes hairy --139.\n\n139a. Stem usually simple; heads few in very small clusters\n                            =Goldenrod, Solidago caesia var. axillaris.=\n\n139b. Stem usually diffusely branched; heads numerous\n                                           =Goldenrod, Solidago caesia.=\n\n     140a. Lower leaves ovate, oblong, or oval, pinnately veined (5-15\n           dm. high) --141.\n\n     140b. Lower leaves linear-lanceolate. 3-5-veined (3-12 dm. high)\n           --142.\n\n141a. Stem and leaves rough-hairy          =Goldenrod, Solidago rigida.=\n\n141b. Stem and leaves smooth            =Goldenrod, Solidago ohioensis.=\n\n     142a. Heads very few in a small cluster; leaves few and scattered\n                                       =Goldenrod, Solidago houghtonii.=\n\n     142b. Heads very many, in a large cluster; stem very leafy --143.\n\n143a. Leaves hairy    =Goldenrod, Solidago graminifolia var. nuttallii.=\n\n143b. Leaves smooth --144.\n\n     144a. Leaves folded, 8-20 mm. wide\n                                        =Goldenrod, Solidago riddellii.=\n\n     144b. Leaves flat, 1-8 mm. wide --145.\n\n145a. Leaves 4-8 mm. wide, distinctly 3-5-ribbed\n                                     =Goldenrod, Solidago graminifolia.=\n\n145b. Leaves 1-4 mm. wide, usually with 1 mid-vein\n                                       =Goldenrod, Solidago tenuifolia.=\n\n     146a. Only 2-5 stem-leaves below the inflorescence (1-3 dm. high)\n                                          =Goldenrod, Solidago cutleri.=\n\n     146b. Stem-leaves numerous --147.\n\n147a. Basal leaves much larger than the greatly reduced or bract-like\n      upper ones --148.\n\n147b. Leaves essentially uniform in size from base to summit of stem\n      --157.\n\n     148a. Racemes or branches of the panicle either short and arranged\n           along a more or less elongated central axis, or elongated and\n           ascending, scarcely recurved, forming a narrow, more or less\n           elongated panicle --149.\n\n     148b. Racemes or branches of the panicle usually elongated,\n           spreading outwards, usually recurved, forming a widened\n           panicle --153.\n\n149a. Leaves mostly entire, the upper ones with smaller leaves fascicled\n      in the axils (5-20 dm. high)       =Goldenrod, Solidago speciosa.=\n\n149b. Leaves mostly serrate, at least the basal ones --150.\n\n     150a. Heads on pedicels 5-15 mm. long; achenes pubescent; stems\n           usually clustered (1-5 dm. high, or prostrate) --151.\n\n     150b. Heads on pedicels not over 5 mm. long; achenes smooth or\n           nearly so; stems usually single (6-12 dm. high) --152.\n\n151a. Basal leaves 7-12 cm. long         =Goldenrod, Solidago racemosa.=\n\n151b. Basal leaves 15-30 cm. long\n                           =Goldenrod, Solidago racemosa var. gillmani.=\n\n     152a. Leaves pinnately veined      =Goldenrod, Solidago uliginosa.=\n\n     152b. Leaves 3-5-ribbed             =Goldenrod, Solidago neglecta.=\n\n153a. Both sides of the leaf pubescent or rough --154.\n\n153b. Leaf not pubescent or rough on both sides --155.\n\n     154a. Stem closely pubescent (2-8 dm. high)\n                                        =Goldenrod, Solidago nemoralis.=\n\n     154b. Stem glabrous (5-12 dm. high)\n                            =Goldenrod, Solidago juncea var. scabrella.=\n\n155a. Leaves rough above, smooth below (6-15 dm. high)\n                                           =Goldenrod, Solidago patula.=\n\n155b. Leaves smooth on both sides (5-12 dm. high) --156.\n\n     156a. Branches of the panicle spreading or recurved\n                                           =Goldenrod, Solidago juncea.=\n\n     156b. Branches of the panicle upright\n                               =Goldenrod, Solidago juncea var. ramosa.=\n\n157a. Stem more or less pubescent or hairy throughout (5-20 dm. high)\n      --158.\n\n157b. Stem smooth, at least below the inflorescence --161.\n\n     158a. Involucre 2-2.7 mm. long    =Goldenrod, Solidago canadensis.=\n\n     158b. Involucre 3-5 mm. long --159.\n\n159a. Leaves pinnately veined, scabrous above\n                                           =Goldenrod, Solidago rugosa.=\n\n159b. Leaves 3-5-ribbed, pubescent but not scabrous above --160.\n\n     160a. Stem and lower side of leaves covered with short hairs;\n           common species               =Goldenrod, Solidago altissima.=\n\n     160b. Stem and lower side of leaves with distinct, loose, soft\n           hairs (shore of Lake Superior)\n                           =Goldenrod, Solidago altissima var. procera.=\n\n161a. Involucre 2-2.7 mm. long (5-20 dm. high) --158a.\n\n161b. Involucre 3-6 mm. long --162.\n\n     162a. Racemes or branches of the panicle either short and arranged\n           along a more or less elongated axis, or elongated and\n           ascending, scarcely recurved, forming a narrow more or less\n           elongated panicle (5-10 dm. high)\n                          =Goldenrod, Solidago speciosa var. angustata.=\n\n     162b. Racemes or branches of the panicle usually elongated,\n           spreading outward, usually recurved, forming a widened\n           panicle; leaves distinctly serrate --163.\n\n163a. Leaves pinnately veined (5-12 dm. high)\n                                        =Goldenrod, Solidago ulmifolia.=\n\n163b. Leaves 3-5-ribbed (5-20 dm. high) --164.\n\n     164a. Leaves glabrous on both sides\n                                         =Goldenrod, Solidago serotina.=\n\n     164b. Leaves slightly pubescent beneath\n                           =Goldenrod, Solidago serotina var. gigantea.=\n\n165a. Ray-flowers pistillate (the 2-lobed style protrudes from their\n      base) --166.\n\n165b. Ray-flowers with neither stamens nor pistil --174.\n\n     166a. Principal leaves more than 2 dm. long (1-3 m. high; summer)\n           --167.\n\n     166b. Principal leaves less than 1.5 dm. long --168.\n\n167a. Leaves deeply lobed          =Compass Plant, Silphium laciniatum.=\n\n167b. Leaves toothed or serrate            =Elecampane, Inula helenium.=\n\n     168a. Leaves narrowly linear (3-6 dm. high; late summer)\n                                     =Sneezeweed, Helenium tenuifolium.=\n\n     168b. Leaves of a broader shape --169.\n\n169a. Heads 1-2 cm. wide; flowers in spring and early summer (2-8 dm.\n      high) (Ragwort) --170.\n\n169b. Heads 2-5 cm. wide; flowers in late summer and autumn --173.\n\n     170a. Basal leaves cordate at base       =Ragwort, Senecio aureus.=\n\n     170b. Basal leaves narrowed to the base --171.\n\n171a. Basal leaves obovate                  =Ragwort, Senecio obovatus.=\n\n171b. Basal leaves oblong                 =Ragwort, Senecio balsamitae.=\n\n     172a. Introduced annual in waste places (1-4 dm. high; spring and\n           summer)                        =Groundsel, Senecio vulgaris.=\n\n     172b. Native biennial in moist ground (3-8 dm. high; summer)\n                                       =Squaw Weed, Senecio discoideus.=\n\n173a. Leaves 2-5 cm. long, sharply spinulose-serrate; involucre viscid\n      (3-6 dm. high; summer)           =Gum Plant, Grindelia squarrosa.=\n\n173b. Leaves 5-12 cm. long, merely serrate; involucre gray-pubescent\n      (5-15 dm. high; late summer)    =Sneeze Weed, Helenium autumnale.=\n\n     174a. Disk hemispherical or oblong-cylindrical (Summer) --175.\n\n     174b. Disk flat or somewhat convex (Sunflower) (summer and autumn)\n           --179.\n\n175a. Disk yellow or greenish-yellow (1-3 dm. high) --176.\n\n175b. Disk gray-brown or purple (5-15 dm. high) --177.\n\n     176a. Principal stem-leaves pinnately divided\n                                     =Golden Glow, Rudbeckia laciniata.=\n\n     176b. Principal stem-leaves merely serrate\n                            =Yellow Ironweed, Actinomeris alternifolia.=\n\n177a. Rays drooping; leaves pinnately divided\n                             =Gray-headed Coneflower, Lepachys pinnata.=\n\n177b. Rays spreading when in bloom --178.\n\n     178a. Lower leaves deeply 3-lobed\n                                        =Coneflower, Rudbeckia triloba.=\n\n     178b. Stem-leaves sharply serrate\n                      =Coneflower, Rudbeckia speciosa var. sullivantii.=\n\n     178c. Stem-leaves entire or sparingly serrate\n                                    =Black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta.=\n\n179a. Disk-flowers brown or purple --180.\n\n179b. Disk-flowers yellow --182.\n\n     180a. Stem-leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate; petioles prominent,\n           not winged --181.\n\n     180b. Stem-leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate, contracted at the base\n           into a winged petiole (6-15 dm. high)\n                                     =Sunflower, Helianthus atrorubens.=\n\n     180c. Stem-leaves oblong-lanceolate, very thick and rigid,\n           gradually narrowed to a sessile or short-petioled base\n           (5-20 dm. high)          =Sunflower, Helianthus scaberrimus.=\n\n181a. Disk less than 2 cm. wide (3-10 dm. high)\n                                     =Sunflower, Helianthus petiolaris.=\n\n181b. Disk more than 2.5 cm. wide (1-3 m. high)\n                                         =Sunflower, Helianthus annuus.=\n\n     182a. Leaves all or chiefly at the base (5-10 dm. high)\n                                   =Sunflower, Helianthus occidentalis.=\n\n     182b. Leaves chiefly scattered on the stem --183.\n           183a. Leaves mainly or all alternate, and not definitely\n           3-ribbed (1-4 m. high) --184.\n\n183b. Leaves mainly or all opposite, lanceolate to ovate, and 3-ribbed\n      --186.\n\n     184a. Stem glabrous        =Sunflower, Helianthus grosse-serratus.=\n\n     184b. Stem hairy or rough --185.\n\n185a. Leaves hairy beneath, rough above, lanceolate\n                                      =Sunflower, Helianthus giganteus.=\n\n185b. Leaves rough on both sides, elongated\n                                    =Sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani.=\n\n     186a. Leaves sessile (5-15 dm. high) --187.\n\n     186b. Leaves petioled, or narrowed at the base into a petiole (5-30\n           dm. high) --189.\n\n187a. Leaves wedge-shape at the base\n                                   =Sunflower, Helianthus doronicoides.=\n\n187b. Leaves rounded at the base --188.\n\n     188a. Stem glabrous or nearly so\n                                    =Sunflower, Helianthus divaricatus.=\n\n     188b. Stem densely and softly hirsute\n                                         =Sunflower, Helianthus mollis.=\n\n189a. Stems rough, pubescent, or hispid --190.\n\n189b. Stems glabrous or nearly so --193.\n\n     190a. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, more than 5 times as long as wide\n                    =Sunflower, Helianthus giganteus var. subtuberosus.=\n\n     190b. Leaves ovate-lanceolate, not more than 4 times as long as\n           wide --191.\n\n191a. Leaves rounded at base, above the petiole\n                                       =Sunflower, Helianthus hirsutus.=\n\n191b. Leaves narrowed to the base --192.\n\n     192a. Bracts of the involucre spreading\n                            =Jerusalem Artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus.=\n\n     192b. Bracts all appressed     =Sunflower, Helianthus laetiflorus.=\n\n193a. Heads 3 cm. wide or less, including the rays\n                                  =Sunflower, Helianthus microcephalus.=\n\n193b. Heads 4 cm. wide or more, including the rays --194.\n\n     194a. Leaves narrowed at the base into a winged petiole --195.\n\n     194b. Petiole slender, not winged\n                                    =Sunflower, Helianthus decapetalus.=\n\n195a. Leaves green on both sides; bracts longer than the disk\n                                =Sunflower, Helianthus tracheliifolius.=\n\n195b. Leaves paler below than above; bracts not longer than the disk\n      --196.\n\n     196a. Leaves minutely pubescent beneath\n                                      =Sunflower, Helianthus strumosus.=\n\n     196b. Leaves conspicuously downy beneath\n                          =Sunflower, Helianthus strumosus var. mollis.=\n\n197a. Leaves all basal, the flowers on scaly stalks (2-8 dm. high;\n      flowers whitish, in spring)        =Coltsfoot, Petasites palmata.=\n\n197b. Stem-leaves present, opposite --198.\n\n197c. Stem-leaves present, alternate --200.\n\n     198a. Leaves ovate, dentate, 2-6 cm. long (2-8 dm. high; summer)\n           (Galinsoga) --199.\n\n     198b. Leaves lobed, 10-25 cm. long --113b.\n\n199a. Pubescence sparse, appressed    =Galinsoga, Galinsoga parviflora.=\n\n199b. Pubescence abundant, spreading\n                         =Galinsoga, Galinsoga parviflora var. hispida.=\n\n     200a. Leaves dissected or deeply lobed or pinnatifid; pappus never\n           capillary; rays white to pink (3-10 dm. high; summer and\n           autumn) --201.\n\n     200b. Leaves entire or serrate --206.\n\n201a. Heads 4-8 mm. wide (Yarrow) --202.\n\n201b. Heads 12-50 mm. wide --203.\n\n     202a. Flower-clusters flat-topped   =Yarrow, Achillea millefolium.=\n\n     202b. Flower-clusters very convex      =Yarrow, Achillea lanulosa.=\n\n203a. Principal leaves pinnatifid --213a.\n\n203b. Principal leaves 1-3 times pinnately parted or dissected --204.\n\n     204a. Leaf-segments very narrowly linear; leaves 2-3-pinnate --205.\n\n     204b. Leaf-segments linear or lanceolate; heads 2.5-5 cm. wide\n                                          =Camomile, Anthemis arvensis.=\n\n     204c. Leaf-segments ovate to ovate-oblong; heads 1-2 cm. wide\n                                   =Feverfew, Chrysanthemum parthenium.=\n\n205a. Foliage strongly scented            =Dog Fennel, Anthemis cotula.=\n\n205b. Foliage not ill-scented       =Wild Camomile, Matricaria inodora.=\n\n     206a. Heads 3-6 mm. broad, including the rays (summer and autumn)\n           --207.\n\n     206b. Heads 7 mm. broad or larger, including the rays --209.\n\n207a. Rays purple (1-4 dm. high)     =Horse Weed, Erigeron divaricatus.=\n\n207b. Rays white --208.\n\n     208a. Leaves obovate to oblong (3-10 dm. high) --135a.\n\n     208b. Leaves linear or narrowly lanceolate (2-25 dm. high)\n                                      =Horse Weed, Erigeron canadensis.=\n\n209a. Pappus none, or minute and not of hairs (summer and autumn) --210.\n\n209b. Pappus of hairs --214.\n\n     210a. Disk-flowers purple or brown (4-12 dm. high; rays pink)\n           (Purple Coneflower) --211.\n\n     210b. Disk-flowers yellow or nearly white --212.\n\n211a. Leaves ovate or ovate-lanceolate, most of them serrate\n                                =Purple Coneflower, Brauneria purpurea.=\n\n211b. Leaves narrowly lanceolate, gradually narrowed at the base, entire\n                                 =Purple Coneflower, Brauneria pallida.=\n\n     212a. Rays broadly obovate; heads 1-2 cm. wide (3-6 dm. high)\n                                        =Sneezewort, Achillea ptarmica.=\n\n     212b. Rays oblong or narrowly elliptical --213.\n\n213a. Leaves serrate (3-10 dm. high)\n           =Ox-eye Daisy, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum var. pinnatifidum.=\n\n213b. Leaves entire (8-25 dm. high)     =Boltonia, Boltonia asteroides.=\n\n     214a. Involucral bracts all the same length or nearly so and\n           narrow, or with a few short outer ones; plants blooming in\n           spring and summer, or a few plants persisting in bloom until\n           autumn (Fleabane) --215.\n\n     214b. Involucral bracts unequal, the outer successively shorter (or\n           rarely nearly equal), loosely or closely overlapping; plants\n           3-15 dm. high, blooming in late summer and autumn (Aster)\n           --221.\n\n215a. Rays short and inconspicuous, barely longer than the pappus (1-5\n      dm. high; summer)      =Fleabane, Erigeron acris var. asteroides.=\n\n215b. Rays conspicuous, spreading, 3 mm. long or more --216.\n\n     216a. Rare plants of the Northern Peninsula, with entire leaves and\n           stems 1-5 dm. high, from a thick woody root (flowers white or\n           purple, summer) --217.\n\n     216b. Common species, with erect stems from fibrous roots; leaves\n           toothed (except in one species) --218.\n\n217a. Heads 3-5 cm. wide; rays about 100\n                                         =Fleabane, Erigeron glabellus.=\n\n217b. Heads 1-2 cm. wide; rays 20-30\n                                     =Fleabane, Erigeron hyssopifolius.=\n\n     218a. Stem unbranched, except for the peduncles; leaves chiefly\n           basal; heads 1-9 (2-5 dm. high; flowers pale-purple, spring)\n                                        =Fleabane, Erigeron pulchellus.=\n\n     218b. Stem branched; principal leaves on the stem; heads usually\n           numerous (3-12 dm. high; spring and summer) --219.\n\n219a. Stem-leaves linear, entire           =Fleabane, Erigeron ramosus.=\n\n219b. Stem-leaves ovate-lanceolate, the principal ones toothed --220.\n\n     220a. Rays 100 or more, light-purple or pink\n                                    =Fleabane, Erigeron philadelphicus.=\n\n     220b. Rays much fewer, white           =Fleabane, Erigeron annuus.=\n\n221a. Basal leaves petioled and heart-shape at the base --222.\n\n221b. Basal leaves not petioled; stem-leaves with heart-shape clasping\n      bases --231.\n\n221c. Basal and stem-leaves sessile or petioled, but never heart-shape\n      or clasping --240.\n\n     222a. Rays white or violet --223.\n\n     222b. Rays blue --225.\n\n223a. Plant glandular, especially on the pedicels and branches of the\n      inflorescence                         =Aster, Aster macrophyllus.=\n\n223b. Plant not glandular --224.\n\n     224a. Leaves rough above                  =Aster, Aster schreberi.=\n\n     224b. Leaves smooth above               =Aster, Aster divaricatus.=\n\n225a. Stem-leaves clasping the stem by a cordate base\n                                               =Aster, Aster undulatus.=\n\n225b. Stem-leaves not cordate-clasping --226.\n\n     226a. Leaves entire --227.\n\n     226b. Leaves serrate --228.\n\n227a. Leaves glabrous above                      =Aster, Aster shortii.=\n\n227b. Leaves rough above                         =Aster, Aster azureus.=\n\n     228a. Involucre 4-6 mm. long --229.\n\n     228b. Involucre 6-10 mm. long --230.\n\n229a. Leaves rough; petioles mostly winged    =Aster, Aster lowrieanus.=\n\n229b. Leaves smooth; petioles slender, not winged\n                                             =Aster, Aster cordifolius.=\n\n     230a. Heads few, seldom more than 10, in a loose spreading cluster\n                                             =Aster, Aster lindleyanus.=\n\n     230b. Heads numerous, in a rather elongate crowded cluster\n                                           =Aster, Aster sagittifolius.=\n\n231a. Stem hirsute or rough-pubescent --232.\n\n231b. Stem smooth, or essentially so --236.\n\n     232a. Leaves conspicuously serrate         =Aster, Aster puniceus.=\n\n     232b. Leaves entire or nearly so --233.\n\n233a. Leaves narrowed toward the base and barely clasping, linear or\n      oblong-linear --234.\n\n233b. Leaves ovate-oblong or lanceolate, with a broad conspicuously\n      clasping base --235.\n\n     234a. Involucre pubescent but not glandular\n                                            =Aster, Aster amethystinus.=\n\n     234b. Involucre glandular             =Aster, Aster oblongifolius.=\n\n235a. Involucre very glandular and viscid; rays very numerous,\n      violet-purple; leaves lanceolate     =Aster, Aster novae-angliae.=\n\n235b. Involucre slightly glandular or not at all; rays 20-30, generally\n      blue-purple; leaves ovate-oblong            =Aster, Aster patens.=\n\n     236a. Leaves of a linear type --237.\n\n     236b. Leaves broader than linear, at least 1 cm. wide --238.\n\n237a. Bracts narrow, approximately equal in length --253a.\n\n237b. Bracts of several lengths, the outer successively shorter --256a.\n\n     238a. Leaves smooth above                    =Aster, Aster laevis.=\n\n     238b. Leaves rough above --239.\n\n239a. Leaves contracted below the middle and then abruptly dilated to\n      the clasping base                    =Aster, Aster prenanthoides.=\n\n239b. Leaves gradually narrowed toward the base\n                                                =Aster, Aster puniceus.=\n\n     240a. Rays conspicuous --241.\n\n     240b. Rays minute or wanting               =Aster, Aster angustus.=\n\n241a. Stems and leaves gray with a silky pubescence\n                                                =Aster, Aster sericeus.=\n\n241b. Stem and leaves green, not silky --242.\n\n     242a. Bracts glandular-viscid; rays violet\n                                           =Aster, Aster oblongifolius.=\n\n     242b. Bracts bristly-ciliate --243.\n\n     242c. Bracts smooth or pubescent, not glandular or bristly-ciliate\n           --244.\n\n243a. Leaves crowded, rigid; rays white      =Aster, Aster multiflorus.=\n\n243b. Leaves not crowded and rigid; rays blue --234a.\n\n     244a. Bracts narrowed at the tip into thickened firm green\n           awl-shape points --245.\n\n     244b. Bracts acute or obtuse at the flattened tip --247.\n\n245a. Involucre 4-5 mm. long --246.\n\n245b. Involucre 7-8 mm. high                 =Aster, Aster polyphyllus.=\n\n     246a. Stem smooth                         =Aster, Aster ericoides.=\n\n     246b. Stem hairy; leaves linear\n                                 =Aster, Aster ericoides var. villosus.=\n\n     246c. Stem densely white-woolly\n                             =Aster, Aster ericoides var. platyphyllus.=\n\n247a. Leaves at most 4.5 cm. long --248.\n\n247b. Leaves larger, at least the principal ones --249.\n\n     248a. Stems in clusters; leaves rigid, linear, with 1 vein; flowers\n           blue                            =Aster, Aster linariifolius.=\n\n     248b. Stem solitary; leaves not rigid; flowers rose-pink\n                                               =Aster, Aster nemoralis.=\n\n249a. Heads solitary at the end of minutely leafy branchlets; leaves\n      linear                                     =Aster, Aster dumosus.=\n\n249b. Heads in flat-topped clusters; leaves lanceolate or broader --250.\n\n249c. Heads in more or less one-sided racemes --251.\n\n249d. Heads in panicles or irregular clusters --253.\n\n     250a. Leaves rigid, linear-lanceolate  =Aster, Aster ptarmicoides.=\n\n     250b. Leaves not rigid, lanceolate       =Aster, Aster umbellatus.=\n\n251a. Leaves lanceolate, sharply serrate --252.\n\n251b. Leaves linear or narrowly linear-lanceolate, only the larger ones\n      with a few teeth near the middle          =Aster, Aster vimineus.=\n\n     252a. Stem glabrous or somewhat pubescent\n                                            =Aster, Aster lateriflorus.=\n\n     252b. Stem woolly with long hairs\n                         =Aster, Aster lateriflorus var. hirsuticaulis.=\n\n253a. Bracts narrow, approximately equal in length\n                                             =Aster, Aster longifolius.=\n\n253b. Bracts of several lengths, the outer successively shorter --254.\n\n     254a. Heads 10-15 mm. wide, including the rays\n                                             =Aster, Aster tradescanti.=\n\n     254b. Heads 15-25 mm. wide, including the rays --255.\n\n255a. Bracts with conspicuous dilated or subrhombic tips\n                                            =Aster, Aster salicifolius.=\n\n255b. Bracts without conspicuous green tips --256.\n\n256a. Rays purple or rose; bog plant with linear leaves\n                                                 =Aster, Aster junceus.=\n\n256b. Rays white, or slightly tinged with blue; leaves oblong to\n      narrowly lanceolate                    =Aster, Aster paniculatus.=\n\n\n\n\nGLOSSARY\n\n\n=Achene.= A small, dry, hard, seed-like fruit containing a single seed.\n\n=Acuminate.= Taper-pointed.\n\n=Acute.= Ending with an acute angle.\n\n=Alternate.= Located singly on the stem, with other leaves above or below.\n\n=Annual.= Living but a single season.\n\n=Anther.= The (usually) enlarged end of a stamen, bearing the pollen.\n\n=Ascending.= Rising or curving obliquely upward.\n\n=Auricle.= An ear-shape appendage at the base of a leaf or other organ.\n\n=Auricled, auriculate.= Furnished with auricles.\n\n=Awl-shape.= Tapering to a slender stiff point.\n\n=Awn.= An awl-shape or bristle-shape appendage.\n\n=Axil.= The point on a stem just above the base of a leaf or branch.\n\n=Axillary.= Arising from or produced in the axil.\n\n=Basal.= Arising from or produced at the base.\n\n=Beak.= Ending in a prominent slender point.\n\n=Bract.= A small leaf near the base of a flower or flower-stalk, or in a\n     flower-cluster.\n\n=Bracteal.= An adjective derived from bract.\n\n=Bipinnate.= A leaf with a pinnately branched axis, bearing leaflets on\n     the sides of the branches.\n\n=Calyx.= The outer portion of the flower, usually green in color. In\n     some plants it is  to resemble (or replace) the corolla,\n     and in others may be minute or wanting.\n\n=Capitate.= Shaped like a head; or arranged in a dense compact cluster.\n\n=Capsule.= A dry fruit with usually several seeds, opening at maturity.\n\n=Catkin.= A cylindrical or ovoid cluster of inconspicuous flowers, for\n     example, the \"pussy willow.\"\n\n=Cells of ovary.= The cavity or cavities within an ovary, in which the\n     seeds are produced.\n\n=Ciliate.= Provided with hairs at the margin.\n\n=Clasping.= With the base of a leaf or other organ wholly or partly\n     surrounding the stem.\n\n=Cleft.= Deeply divided toward the base or the mid-rib.\n\n=Closed sheath.= A leaf-sheath in which the margins are united to form a\n     tube.\n\n=Composite.= A flower-cluster containing several or many small flowers,\n     closely crowded together and provided with calyx-like bracts, so that\n     the whole cluster resembles a single flower.\n\n=Compound.= Composed of 2 or more similar parts united, as a compound\n     ovary.\n\n=Compound leaf.= A leaf with two or more separate leaflets on a single\n     petiole.\n\n=Connate.= Grown together.\n\n=Cordate.= Heart-shape. A whole leaf-blade may be cordate, or the term may\n     be applied to the base of a leaf only.\n\n=Cordate-sagittate.= Intermediate in shape between cordate and sagittate.\n\n=Corm.= An enlarged stem-base, of solid structure and usually underground.\n\n=Corolla.= The portion of a flower next to the calyx (in ordinary cases).\n     It is generally the most conspicuous part of the flower, but may be\n     completely absent, or inconspicuous, or replaced by the calyx.\n\n=Corymb.= A flat-topped or convex-topped flower-cluster.\n\n=Creeping.= With stems prostrate on the ground and rooting at intervals.\n\n=Crenate.= With round-pointed teeth at the margin.\n\n=Crenulate.= Finely or minutely crenate.\n\n=Cuspidate.= Ending with a short sharp stiff point.\n\n=Deciduous.= Not persistent for a long time; not evergreen.\n\n=Decompound.= Repeatedly branched with numerous leaflets.\n\n=Decurrent.= Extending with wing-like expansions down the stem.\n\n=Decumbent.= A stem prostrate at the base, but with the tip more or less\n     ascending.\n\n=Dehiscent.= Breaking open at maturity to discharge the contents.\n\n=Deltoid.= Broadly triangular.\n\n=Dioecious.= Bearing staminate and pistillate flowers upon separate\n     plants.\n\n=Dissected.= Finely divided into numerous small or narrow segments.\n\n=Divided.= With deep segments or lobes.\n\n=Elliptical.= Having the shape of an ellipse.\n\n=Elliptical-lanceolate.= Intermediate in shape between elliptical and\n     lanceolate.\n\n=Entire.= With an unbroken margin, without teeth or lobes.\n\n=Epiphyte.= A plant growing attached to the bark of another plant, and\n     without connection with the soil.\n\n=Erect.= Growing in nearly or quite a vertical position.\n\n=Evenly pinnate.= A compound leaf terminating in a pair of leaflets.\n\n=Filament.= The (usually) slender basal portion of a stamen, supporting\n     the anther at its tip.\n\n=Floweret.= A small flower.\n\n=Gamopetalous.= Composed of united petals.\n\n=Gamosepalous.= Composed of united sepals.\n\n=Glabrous.= Smooth; without hairs.\n\n=Glandular.= Bearing glands.\n\n=Glaucous.= Covered with a thin bluish or whitish deposit, easily rubbed\n     off.\n\n=Glume.= A bract at the base of a spikelet of a grass.\n\n=Half recurved.= Curved half-way backward.\n\n=Hastate.= Shaped like an arrow-head, but with the basal lobes pointing\n     outwards instead of backward.\n\n=Head.= A dense cluster of flowers, about as broad as long.\n\n=Hirsute.= With stiff coarse hairs.\n\n=Imperfect.= Flowers which contain either pistil or stamens, not both.\n\n=Incised.= With deep, sharp, irregular, divisions.\n\n=Indehiscent.= Not breaking open at maturity to discharge the contents.\n\n=Inflorescence.= A cluster of flowers.\n\n=Internode.= A section of stem between two joints, or nodes.\n\n=Involucre.= A collection of bracts at the base of a flower-cluster.\n\n=Irregular.= Possessing similar parts of different size or form. An\n     irregular flower is generally distinguished by petals of unequal\n     size or shape.\n\n=Laciniate.= Cut into narrow pointed lobes or divisions.\n\n=Lanceolate.= Shaped like a lance-head, several times longer than wide,\n     and broadest below the middle.\n\n=Linear.= Long and narrow, but with about uniform width.\n\n=Linear-lanceolate.= Intermediate in shape between linear and lanceolate;\n     narrowly lanceolate.\n\n=Lip.= The largest and most conspicuous petal in an irregular corolla,\n     usually applied to the lower petal of an orchid.\n\n=Lobe.= A segment or division of any organ.\n\n=Leaflet.= One portion of the blade of a compound leaf.\n\n=Lemma.= One of the bracts in the spikelet of a grass, and described in\n     the treatment of that family.\n\n=Membranous.= Thin or membrane-like in texture.\n\n=Monoecious.= Bearing stamens and pistils in separate flowers, but on the\n     same plant.\n\n=Mucronate.= Tipped with a short small abrupt tip.\n\n=Node.= A joint of a stem, at which leaves are borne and branches appear.\n\n=Oblanceolate.= Reversed lanceolate in shape.\n\n=Oblique.= With unequal sides.\n\n=Oblong.= Somewhat rectangular in shape, with parallel sides.\n\n=Oblong-lanceolate.= Intermediate in shape between oblong and lanceolate.\n\n=Oblong-spatulate.= Intermediate in shape between oblong and spatulate.\n\n=Obovate.= Reversed ovate in shape.\n\n=Obtuse.= Blunt-tipped; terminating in an obtuse angle.\n\n=Odd-pinnate.= A compound leaf terminating in a single leaflet.\n\n=Once-compound.= A compound leaf bearing leaflets at the end or along the\n     sides of the main axis.\n\n=Once-pinnate.= A compound leaf bearing leaflets along the sides of the\n     axis.\n\n=Open sheath.= A leaf-sheath with separate margins.\n\n=Opposite.= Situated in pairs on opposite sides of the stem or axis.\n\n=Ovary.= The basal, usually swollen portion of the pistil, within which\n     the seeds are produced.\n\n=Ovate.= Egg-shape in outline.\n\n=Ovate-lanceolate.= Intermediate in shape between ovate and lanceolate;\n     broadly lanceolate or narrowly ovate.\n\n=Ovate-oblong.= Intermediate in shape between ovate and oblong.\n\n=Ovoid.= Egg-shape.\n\n=Palmate.= With several organs or structures attached at or proceeding\n     from the same point; applied chiefly to the arrangement of\n     principal veins in a leaf and of leaflets in a compound leaf.\n\n=Panicle.= A loose, more or less irregular, branching cluster of\n     pedicelled flowers, usually much longer than thick.\n\n=Parallel-veined.= With the principal veins of the leaf paralleling each\n     other from the base to the apex, or (rarely) from the mid-rib to\n     the margin.\n\n=Pedicel.= The stalk of a single flower.\n\n=Parasite.= A plant which grows attached to another and derives its\n     nourishment from it.\n\n=Peduncle.= The stalk of a flower-cluster, or of a solitary flower.\n\n=Peltate.= Attached to the stalk by the lower surface, instead of the\n     margin.\n\n=Perennial.= Living through several seasons.\n\n=Perfect.= Bearing stamens and pistils in the same flower.\n\n=Perfoliate.= Clasping the stem so completely that the stem seems to pass\n     through it.\n\n=Perianth.= The calyx and corolla of a flower.\n\n=Perigynium.= A sac-like structure surrounding the achene of a sedge.\n\n=Persistent.= Remaining attached for a considerable time.\n\n=Petal.= One member or segment of the corolla.\n\n=Petiole.= The stalk of a leaf.\n\n=Pinnate.= With several organs or structures attached at the sides of an\n     axis or stalk; applied chiefly to the arrangement of the principal\n     veins in a leaf and of leaflets in a compound leaf.\n\n=Pinnatifid.= Deeply pinnately cut or divided.\n\n=Pistil.= The central portion of a flower, consisting of ovary, style, and\n     stigma; the seed-bearing part of the flower.\n\n=Pistillate.= Bearing pistils.\n\n=Polygamous.= Applied to plants in which some flowers are perfect and\n     others either staminate or pistillate.\n\n=Pubescent.= Hairy.\n\n=Raceme.= A more or less elongated flower-cluster, bearing pedicelled\n     flowers along a single axis.\n\n=Racemose.= Arranged in racemes.\n\n=Receptacle.= The end of a peduncle or pedicel upon which the organs of a\n     flower, or the flowers of a head, are attached.\n\n=Recurved.= Curved back.\n\n=Reflexed.= Abruptly bent back or down.\n\n=Regular.= Uniform in shape or structure. Flowers are generally considered\n     regular when all the petals are of the same size and shape.\n\n=Retrorse.= Directed backward or downward.\n\n=Revolute.= Rolled backward or under.\n\n=Rootstock.= A horizontal subterranean stem, sending up leaves or stems.\n\n=Rotate.= Wheel-shape; essentially flat and circular.\n\n=Sac-like.= Inflated; sack-like.\n\n=Sagittate.= Shaped like an arrow-head.\n\n=Salver-form.= A corolla having a slender tube abruptly expanded at the\n     summit into a flat or spreading portion.\n\n=Scape.= A peduncle arising directly from the base of the plant, leafless\n     or bearing bracts only.\n\n=Segment.= One member or portion of an organ.\n\n=Sepal.= One member or portion of the calyx.\n\n=Serrate.= With sharp teeth at the margin.\n\n=Serrulate.= Finely or minutely serrate.\n\n=Sessile.= Without a stalk, petiole, or pedicel.\n\n=Sheathing.= Inclosing.\n\n=Simple.= In one piece; not compound; usually applied to leaves with a\n     single blade.\n\n=Sinuate.= Wavy-margined.\n\n=Sinus.= The angle between two lobes or divisions.\n\n=Spadix.= A short fleshy spike.\n\n=Spathe.= A large bract or pair of bracts enclosing a flower-cluster.\n\n=Spatulate.= Shaped like a spatula, with a narrow base and an enlarged,\n     more or less rounded summit.\n\n=Spike.= An elongated flower-cluster having sessile flowers upon an\n     unbranched axis.\n\n=Spike-like.= Resembling a spike.\n\n=Spinulose-serrate.= Provided with teeth tipped with minute spines.\n\n=Spur.= A hollow projection from the calyx or corolla, usually slender in\n     shape, and generally directed backward.\n\n=Stamen.= One of the organs of a flower, consisting of a filament and\n     anther.\n\n=Staminate.= Bearing stamens.\n\n=Stolon.= A short stem arising from the base of a plant, prostrate or\n     nearly so, and eventually taking root.\n\n=Striate.= Marked with fine stripes or ridges.\n\n=Style.= A portion of the pistil, usually slender, and connecting the\n     ovary and stigma.\n\n=Superior.= A superior ovary occupies the center of the flower and is\n     not attached to any other floral organs.\n\n=Subtending.= Situated at the base of an organ.\n\n=Subulate.= Awl-shape.\n\n=Ternately.= Divided by threes.\n\n=Tomentose.= Densely hairy with matted or tangled hairs.\n\n=Trifoliate.= With three leaflets.\n\n=Truncate.= Cut straight across at the tip, or nearly so.\n\n=Tube.= The more or less cylindrical portion of a gamosepalous calyx or\n     a gamopetalous corolla, distinguished from the expanded or lobed\n     terminal portion.\n\n=Tubular.= Shaped like a tube.\n\n=Twice-pinnate.= Same as bipinnate.\n\n=Two-lipped.= A calyx or corolla in which the upper half is decidedly\n     different in size or shape from the lower.\n\n=Umbel.= A flower-cluster with several or many pedicelled flowers all\n     arising from the same point.\n\n=Undulate.= With a wavy margin.\n\n=Viscid.= Sticky.\n\n=Villous.= With long soft hairs.\n\n=Whorl.= An arrangement of 3 or more leaves or flowers in a circle around\n     a node.\n\n=Whorled.= In a whorl.\n\n=Wing.= A thin flat expansion on the sides or edge of an organ.\n\n\n\n\nINDEX\n\n\nAbies, 1\n\nAbutilon, 72\n\nAcalypha, 66\n\nAcanthaceae, 107\n\nAcanthus Family, 107\n\nAcer, 70\n\nAceraceae, 70\n\nAcerates, 90\n\nAchillea, 130, 131\n\nAcnida, 30\n\nAcorus, 8\n\nActaea, 39\n\nActinomeris, 128\n\nAdder's Mouth, 17\n\nAdenocaulon, 118\n\nAdlumia, 41\n\nAesculus, 70\n\nAgastache, 97\n\nAgrimonia, 55\n\nAgrimony, 55\n\nAgropyron, 6\n\nAgrostemma, 33\n\nAgrostis, 6\n\nAilanthus, 65\n\nAizoaceae, 31\n\nAlder, 22\n\nAlder, Black, 69\n\nAletris, 13\n\nAlfalfa, 61\n\nAlisma, 3\n\nAlismaceae, 3\n\nAllium, 13\n\nAlnus, 22\n\nAlopecurus, 4\n\nAlsike Clover, 61\n\nAlthaea, 72\n\nAlum Root, 50, 51\n\nAlyssum, 42, 46\n\nAlyssum, Yellow, 42, 46\n\nAmaranth Family, 30\n\nAmaranthaceae, 30\n\nAmaranthus, 30\n\nAmaryllidaceae, 14\n\nAmaryllis Family, 14\n\nAmbrosia, 114\n\nAmelanchier, 55\n\nAmerican Columbo, 88\n\nAmerican Ipecac, 57\n\nAmmophila, 4\n\nAmorpha, 58\n\nAmphicarpa, 59\n\nAnacardiaceae, 68\n\nAnagallis, 87\n\nAnaphalis, 120\n\nAndromeda, 86\n\nAndropogon, 5\n\nAndrosace, 87\n\nAnemone, 38, 39\n\nAnemone, Rue, 39\n\nAnemone, Wood, 38\n\nAnemonella, 39\n\nAngelica, 82\n\nAnonaceae, 40\n\nAntennaria, 120\n\nAnthemis, 130\n\nAntirrhinum, 103\n\nAnychia, 31\n\nApios, 58\n\nAplectrum, 16\n\nApocynaceae, 90\n\nApocynum, 90\n\nAppalachian Cherry, 54\n\nApple, 54\n\nApple of Peru, 101\n\nAquifoliaceae, 69\n\nAquilegia, 36\n\nArabis, 46, 47\n\nAraceae, 8\n\nAralia, 80\n\nAraliaceae, 80\n\nArbutus, Trailing, 85\n\nArceuthobium, 25\n\nArctium, 117\n\nArctostaphylos, 85\n\nArenaria, 32\n\nArethusa, 16\n\nArisaema, 8\n\nAristolochia, 25\n\nAristolochiaceae, 25\n\nArnica, 123\n\nArrow Arum, 9\n\nArrow Grass, 3\n\nArrow Grass Family, 3\n\nArrow-head, 3\n\nArrow Wood, 111\n\nArtemisia, 119\n\nArtichoke, Jerusalem, 129\n\nArum Family, 8\n\nAsarum, 25\n\nAsclepias, 90, 91\n\nAsclepiadaceae, 90\n\nAsh, 88\n\nAsh, Mountain, 52\n\nAsh, Prickly, 65\n\nAsimina, 40\n\nAsparagus, 10\n\nAspen, 19\n\nAster, 132-134\n\nAtriplex, 29\n\nAvena, 6\n\nAvens, 56, 57\n\n\nBaby's Breath, 34\n\nBalm of Gilead, 19\n\nBalsam, 1\n\nBalsam Poplar, 19\n\nBalsaminaceae, 71\n\nBaneberry, 39\n\nBaptisia, 61\n\nBarbarea, 44\n\nBarberry, 40\n\nBarberry Family, 40\n\nBarnyard Grass, 5\n\nBarren Strawberry, 55\n\nBartonia, 88\n\nBasil, 97\n\nBasil-thyme, 97\n\nBasswood, 72\n\nBayberry, 21\n\nBeach Grass, 4\n\nBeach Pea, 59\n\nBeaked Hazel, 22\n\nBearberry, 85\n\nBeard Grass, 5\n\nBeard-tongue, 104\n\nBedstraw, 108, 109\n\nBeech, 22\n\nBeech Drops, 84, 106\n\nBeech Family, 22\n\nBeggar Lice, 94\n\nBeggar Ticks, 124\n\nBellflower, 112\n\nBellflower Family, 112\n\nBellwort, 12\n\nBenzoin, 41\n\nBerberidaceae, 40\n\nBerberis, 40\n\nBergamot Mint, 98\n\nBerula, 81\n\nBetula, 21, 22\n\nBetulaceae, 21\n\nBidens, 123, 124\n\nBilberry, 86, 87\n\nBindweed, 91, 92\n\nBindweed, Black, 28\n\nBirch, 21, 22\n\nBirch Family, 21\n\nBird-foot Violet, 75\n\nBirthwort Family, 25\n\nBishop's Cap, 51\n\nBistort, 28\n\nBitter Cress, 45, 47\n\nBitter Dock, 26\n\nBitter Nut, 21\n\nBittersweet, 100\n\nBitter-sweet, 69\n\nBlack Alder, 69\n\nBlack Ash, 88\n\nBlackberry, 53\n\nBlack Bindweed, 28\n\nBlack Cherry, 54\n\nBlack Currant, 49, 50\n\nBlack-eyed Susan, 128\n\nBlack Haw, 111\n\nBlack Jack Oak, 22\n\nBlack Locust, 58\n\nBlack Maple, 70\n\nBlack Medick, 60\n\nBlack Mustard, 44\n\nBlack Oak, 23\n\nBlack Raspberry, 53\n\nBlack Snakeroot, 82\n\nBlack Spruce, 1\n\nBlack Swallow-wort, 90\n\nBlack Walnut, 21\n\nBlack Willow, 20\n\nBladder Campion, 34\n\nBladder Nut, 69\n\nBladder Nut Family, 69\n\nBladderwort, 106\n\nBladderwort Family, 105\n\nBlazing Star, 13, 121\n\nBlephilia, 96\n\nBlite, 29\n\nBloodroot, 41\n\nBloody Dock, 26\n\nBlue Ash, 88\n\nBluebell, 93, 94\n\nBlueberry, 86\n\nBlue Cohosh, 40\n\nBlue-eyed Grass, 15\n\nBlue-eyed Mary, 104\n\nBlue Flag, 15\n\nBlue Grass, 7\n\nBlue Hearts, 104\n\nBlue-joint, 5\n\nBluets, 108\n\nBlue Violet, 76\n\nBlueweed, 94\n\nBoehmeria, 24\n\nBog Rosemary, 86\n\nBoltonia, 131\n\nBoneset, False, 122\n\nBorage, 93\n\nBorage Family, 93\n\nBoraginaceae, 93\n\nBorago, 93\n\nBowman's Root, 57\n\nBox Elder, 70\n\nBrasenia, 35\n\nBrassica, 43, 44\n\nBrauneria, 131\n\nBraya, 47\n\nBristly Locust, 58\n\nBristly Sarsaparilla, 80\n\nBrome-grass, 7\n\nBromus, 7\n\nBroom-rape Family, 106\n\nBuchnera, 104\n\nBuckbean, 88\n\nBuckeye, 70\n\nBuckhorn, 107\n\nBuckthorn, 71\n\nBuckthorn Family, 71\n\nBuckwheat, 27\n\nBuckwheat, False, 28\n\nBuckwheat Family, 25\n\nBuffalo Berry, 77\n\nBuffalo Bur, 100\n\nBuffalo Clover, 61\n\nBugbane, 39\n\nBugle, 98\n\nBugle Weed, 95\n\nBug-seed, 28\n\nBulrush, 7\n\nBur Clover, 60\n\nBur Cucumber, 112\n\nBurdock, 117\n\nBur Marigold, 124\n\nBurnet, 57\n\nBur Oak, 23\n\nBur-reed, 2\n\nBur-reed Family, 2\n\nBush Clover, 61, 63\n\nBush Honeysuckle, 110\n\nButter-and-eggs, 102\n\nButtercup, 36, 37, 38\n\nButterfly Weed, 91\n\nButternut, 21\n\nButterwort, 105\n\nButton Bush, 108\n\n\nCacalia, 122\n\nCactaceae, 77\n\nCactus Family, 77\n\nCakile, 45\n\nCalamagrostis, 5\n\nCalamint, 97\n\nCalla, 9\n\nCallirhoe, 73\n\nCallitrichaceae, 68\n\nCallitriche, 68\n\nCalopogon, 16\n\nCaltha, 36\n\nCalypso, 17\n\nCamassia, 14\n\nCamelina, 42\n\nCamomile, 130\n\nCampanula, 112\n\nCampanulaceae, 112\n\nCampion, 33, 34\n\nCanada Thistle, 118\n\nCanada Violet, 76\n\nCanadian Blue Grass, 7\n\nCancer-root, 106\n\nCannabis, 24\n\nCaper Family, 47\n\nCapparidaceae, 47\n\nCaprifoliaceae, 109\n\nCapsella, 46\n\nCaraway, 83\n\nCardamine, 45, 47\n\nCardinal Flower, 113\n\nCarduus, 118\n\nCarex, 8\n\nCarpet-weed, 31\n\nCarpet-weed Family, 31\n\nCarpinus, 21\n\nCarrion-flower, 11\n\nCarrot, Wild, 82\n\nCarum, 83\n\nCarya, 21\n\nCaryophyllaceae, 31\n\nCashew Family, 68\n\nCassia, 60\n\nCastalia, 35\n\nCastanea, 22\n\nCastilleja, 102\n\nCatchfly, 33, 34\n\nCatnip, 98\n\nCat-tail, 2\n\nCat-tail Family, 2\n\nCaulophyllum, 40\n\nCeanothus, 71\n\nCedar, 1\n\nCelandine, 41\n\nCelandine Poppy, 41\n\nCelastraceae, 69\n\nCelastrus, 69\n\nCeltis, 24\n\nCenchrus, 5\n\nCentaurea, 121\n\nCentaurium, 89\n\nCentaury, 89\n\nCephalanthus, 108\n\nCerastium, 33\n\nCeratophyllaceae, 34\n\nCeratophyllum, 34\n\nCercis, 58\n\nChaerophyllum, 83\n\nChamaedaphne, 86\n\nChamaelirium, 13\n\nCharlock, 44\n\nCheat, 7\n\nChelidonium, 41\n\nChelone, 104\n\nChenopodiaceae, 28\n\nChenopodium, 28, 29\n\nCherry, 54\n\nCherry, Ground, 101\n\nChervil, 83\n\nChestnut, 22\n\nChickweed, 32, 33\n\nChickweed, Mouse-ear, 33\n\nChicory, 115\n\nChimaphila, 85\n\nChiogenes, 85\n\nChives, Wild, 13\n\nChokeberry, 55\n\nChoke Cherry, 54\n\nChrysanthemum, 121, 130, 131\n\nChrysosplenium, 50\n\nCichorium, 115\n\nCicuta, 82\n\nCimicifuga, 39\n\nCinquefoil, 52, 56, 57\n\nCircaea, 78\n\nCirsium, 117, 118\n\nCistaceae, 74\n\nCladium, 8\n\nClammy Locust, 58\n\nClammy-weed, 47\n\nClaytonia, 34\n\nClearweed, 24\n\nCleft Phlox, 92\n\nClematis, 35\n\nClimbing Fumitory, 41\n\nClimbing Rose, 52\n\nClintonia, 13\n\nClover, 61\n\nClover, Bush, 61, 63\n\nClover, Hop, 60\n\nClover, Prairie, 60\n\nClover, Sweet, 61\n\nCocklebur, 114\n\nCockle, Corn, 33\n\nCoffee-tree, 58\n\nCohosh, Blue, 40\n\nColic-root, 13\n\nCollinsia, 104\n\nCollinsonia, 95\n\nColtsfoot, 122, 130\n\nColumbine, 36\n\nComandra, 24\n\nComfrey, 93, 94\n\nCommelina, 9\n\nCommelinaceae, 9\n\nCommon Blue Violet, 76\n\nCommon Cat-tail, 2\n\nCommon Vetch, 59\n\nCompass Plant, 127\n\nCompositae, 113\n\nComposite Family, 113\n\nConeflower, Gray-headed, 128\n\nConeflower, Purple, 131\n\nConioselinum, 83\n\nConium, 83\n\nConopholis, 106\n\nConringia, 42\n\nConvolvulaceae, 91\n\nConvolvulus, 91, 92\n\nCoptis, 39\n\nCorallorhiza, 16\n\nCoral Root, 16\n\nCoreopsis, 123, 124\n\nCorispermum, 28\n\nCork Elm, 24\n\nCornaceae, 83\n\nCorn Cockle, 33\n\nCorn Flower, 121\n\nCorn Gromwell, 94\n\nCorn Salad, 111\n\nCornus, 83, 84\n\nCorydalis, 42\n\nCorylus, 22\n\nCostmary, 121\n\nCotton Grass, 8\n\nCotton Thistle, 118\n\nCottonwood, 19\n\nCowbane, 81\n\nCowherb, 34\n\nCow Parsnip, 82\n\nCowslip, 36\n\nCow Wheat, 104\n\nCrab, 54\n\nCrab Grass, 5\n\nCrack Willow, 20\n\nCranberry, 85\n\nCranberry Tree, 111\n\nCrane-fly Orchis, 16\n\nCrane's-bill, 64, 65\n\nCrassulaceae, 48\n\nCreeping Cedar, 1\n\nCreeping Wahoo, 69\n\nCrepis, 117\n\nCress, 43-47\n\nCress, Bitter, 45, 47\n\nCress, Field, 46\n\nCress, Garden, 45, 46\n\nCress, Lake, 45, 46\n\nCress, Mouse-ear, 47\n\nCress, Penny, 46\n\nCress, Rock, 46, 47\n\nCress, Water, 45\n\nCress, Winter, 44\n\nCress, Yellow, 43\n\nCrotalaria, 59\n\nCrowberry, 68\n\nCrowberry Family, 68\n\nCrowfoot, 35\n\nCrowfoot, Cursed, 37\n\nCrowfoot Family, 35\n\nCrowfoot, Sea-side, 36\n\nCrowfoot, Small-flowered, 36\n\nCrowfoot, Water, 35, 37\n\nCruciferae, 42\n\nCryptotaenia, 82\n\nCuckoo Flower, 45\n\nCucurbitaceae, 112\n\nCudweed, 120, 121\n\nCulver's Root, 104\n\nCup Plant, 123\n\nCurrant, 49, 50\n\nCurrant, Indian, 110\n\nCursed Crowfoot, 37\n\nCuscuta, 92\n\nCustard Apple Family, 40\n\nCut-grass, 5\n\nCycloloma, 29\n\nCynanchum, 90\n\nCynoglossum, 93, 94\n\nCynthia, 115\n\nCyperaceae, 7\n\nCyperus, 8\n\nCypress Spurge, 67\n\nCypripedium, 18\n\n\nDactylis, 6\n\nDaisy, Ox-eye, 131\n\nDalibarda, 56\n\nDame's Rocket, 47\n\nDandelion, 115\n\nDandelion, Dwarf, 115\n\nDatura, 100\n\nDaucus, 82\n\nDay-flower, 9\n\nDay Lily, 11\n\nDead Nettle, 99\n\nDecodon, 77\n\nDeerberry, 86\n\nDentaria, 44\n\nDeptford Pink, 34\n\nDesmodium, 62, 63\n\nDevil's Club, 80\n\nDewberry, 53\n\nDianthera, 107\n\nDianthus, 34\n\nDicentra, 41\n\nDiervilla, 110\n\nDigitaria, 5\n\nDioscorea, 14\n\nDioscoreaceae, 14\n\nDiplotaxis, 42, 43\n\nDipsacaceae, 112\n\nDipsacus, 112\n\nDirca, 77\n\nDitch Stonecrop, 49\n\nDock, 26\n\nDock, Prairie, 122\n\nDodder, 92\n\nDodecatheon, 87\n\nDogbane, 90\n\nDogbane Family, 90\n\nDog Fennel, 130\n\nDog Rose, 52\n\nDog's-tooth Violet, 12\n\nDog Violet, 76\n\nDogwood, 83, 84\n\nDogwood Family, 83\n\nDowny Mint, 78\n\nDraba, 42, 46\n\nDracocephalum, 96\n\nDragon Head, 96\n\nDragon Head, False, 99\n\nDragon Root, 8\n\nDrop-seed, 5\n\nDrosera, 48\n\nDroseraceae, 48\n\nDuckweed, 9\n\nDuckweed Family, 9\n\nDulichium, 7\n\nDutchman's Breeches, 41\n\nDwarf Birch, 22\n\nDwarf Dandelion, 115\n\nDwarf Dogwood, 83\n\nDwarf Ginseng, 80\n\nDwarf Iris, 15\n\nDwarf Mistletoe, 25\n\nDwarf Raspberry, 53\n\nDwarf Water Plantain, 3\n\nDwarf White Trillium, 12\n\nDyer's Greenweed, 58\n\n\nEchinochloa, 5\n\nEchinocystis, 112\n\nEchinodorus, 3\n\nEchinops, 117\n\nEchium, 94\n\nEel Grass, 3\n\nElaeagnaceae, 77\n\nElatinaceae, 74\n\nElatine, 74\n\nElder, 109\n\nElder, Box, 70\n\nElder, Marsh, 114\n\nElecampane, 127\n\nEleocharis, 7\n\nEleusine, 6\n\nElm, 24\n\nElodea, 3\n\nElymus, 6\n\nEmpetraceae, 68\n\nEmpetrum, 68\n\nEnchanter's Nightshade, 78\n\nEnglish Plantain, 107\n\nEpifagus, 106\n\nEpigaea, 85\n\nEpilobium, 79\n\nEpipactis, 17\n\nEragrostis, 7\n\nErechtites, 122\n\nEricaceae, 84\n\nErigenia, 81\n\nErigeron, 130-132\n\nEriocaulaceae, 9\n\nEriocaulon, 9\n\nEriophorum, 8\n\nErodium, 64\n\nEryngium, 80\n\nErysimum, 43\n\nErythronium, 12\n\nEupatorium, 121, 122\n\nEuphorbia, 67, 68\n\nEuphrasia, 102\n\nEvening Primrose, 78\n\nEvening Primrose Family, 78\n\nEverlasting, 120\n\nEverlasting, Pearly, 120\n\nEvonymus, 69\n\nEyebright, 102\n\n\nFagaceae, 22\n\nFagopyrum, 27\n\nFagus, 22\n\nFall Dandelion, 115\n\nFalse Asphodel, 14\n\nFalse Boneset, 122\n\nFalse Buckwheat, 28\n\nFalse Dragon Head, 99\n\nFalse Flax, 42\n\nFalse Foxglove, 102\n\nFalse Gromwell, 93\n\nFalse Heather, 74\n\nFalse Loosestrife, 78\n\nFalse Mermaid, 68\n\nFalse Mermaid Family, 68\n\nFalse Mitrewort, 51\n\nFalse Nettle, 24\n\nFalse Pimpernel, 104\n\nFalse Solomon's Seal, 14\n\nFatsia, 80\n\nFennel, 81\n\nFennel, Dog, 130\n\nFescue Grass, 7\n\nFestuca, 7\n\nFeverfew, 130\n\nFeverwort, 109\n\nField Cress, 46\n\nField Garlic, 13\n\nFigwort, 103\n\nFigwort Family, 101\n\nFilipendula, 57\n\nFire Pink, 33\n\nFireweed, 79, 122\n\nFive-finger, 55\n\nFlax, 63\n\nFlax, False, 42\n\nFlax Family, 63\n\nFleabane, 131, 132\n\nFloating Foxtail, 4\n\nFloating Heart, 88\n\nFloerkea, 68\n\nFlowering Dogwood, 83\n\nFlowering Raspberry, 54\n\nFlowering Wintergreen, 65\n\nFlower-of-an-hour, 72\n\nFoeniculum, 81\n\nFog Fruit, 99\n\nForget-me-not, 94\n\nForked Chickweed, 31\n\nFour-o'Clock Family, 31\n\nFoxglove, False, 102\n\nFox Grape, 72\n\nFoxtail, 4\n\nFoxtail, Floating, 4\n\nFragaria, 56\n\nFrasera, 88\n\nFraxinus, 88\n\nFringed Gentian, 89\n\nFringed Orchis, 19\n\nFrog's Bit Family, 3\n\nFrost Grape, 72\n\nFrostweed, 74\n\nFumaria, 42\n\nFumariaceae, 41\n\nFumitory, 42\n\nFumitory, Climbing, 41\n\nFumitory Family, 41\n\n\nGaleopsis, 99\n\nGale, Sweet, 21\n\nGalinsoga, 130\n\nGalium, 108, 109\n\nGarden Cress, 45, 46\n\nGarden Phlox, 92\n\nGarlic, Field, 13\n\nGaultheria, 86\n\nGaura, 79\n\nGaylussacia, 86\n\nGenista, 58\n\nGentian, 89\n\nGentiana, 89\n\nGentianaceae, 88\n\nGentian Family, 88\n\nGentian, Spurred, 89\n\nGeraniaceae, 64\n\nGeranium, 64, 65\n\nGeranium Family, 64\n\nGerardia, 102, 103\n\nGeum, 56, 57\n\nGiant Hyssop, 97\n\nGiant Ragweed, 114\n\nGillenia, 57\n\nGinseng, 80\n\nGleditsia, 58\n\nGlobe-flower, 36\n\nGlobe Thistle, 117\n\nGlyceria, 7\n\nGnaphalium, 120, 121\n\nGoat's Rue, 60\n\nGolden Alexander, 81\n\nGolden Currant, 49\n\nGolden Glow, 128\n\nGoldenrod, 125-127\n\nGolden Saxifrage, 50\n\nGolden Seal, 38\n\nGold-thread,  39\n\nGood King Henry, 29\n\nGooseberry, 49\n\nGoosefoot, 28, 29\n\nGoosefoot Family, 28\n\nGourd Family, 112\n\nGramineae, 4\n\nGrape, 72\n\nGrape Family, 71\n\nGrape Hyacinth, 14\n\nGrass Family, 4\n\nGrass of Parnassus, 50\n\nGrass, Star, 14\n\nGratiola, 104\n\nGray-headed Coneflower, 128\n\nGreat Lobelia, 113\n\nGreat Solomon's Seal, 11\n\nGreat-spurred Violet, 75\n\nGreek Valerian, 92\n\nGreen Ash, 88\n\nGreen Brier, 11\n\nGreen Foxtail, 4\n\nGreen Milkweed, 90\n\nGreen Sorrel, 25\n\nGreen Violet, 75\n\nGrindelia, 128\n\nGround Cherry, 101\n\nGround Hemlock, 2\n\nGround Ivy, 98\n\nGroundsel, 128\n\nGum Plant, 128\n\nGymnocladus, 58\n\nGypsophila, 34\n\nGypsophyll, 34\n\n\nHabenaria, 18, 19\n\nHackberry, 24\n\nHair Grass, 6\n\nHalenia, 89\n\nHaloragidaceae, 79\n\nHamamelidaceae, 51\n\nHamamelis, 51\n\nHand-leaf Violet, 75\n\nHarbinger of Spring, 81\n\nHardhack, 53\n\nHarebell, 112\n\nHare's Ear, 42\n\nHawksbeard, 117\n\nHawkweed, 116, 117\n\nHazel, 22\n\nHeather, False, 74\n\nHeath Family, 84\n\nHedeoma, 95\n\nHedge Hyssop, 104\n\nHedge Mustard, 44\n\nHedge Nettle, 99\n\nHelenium, 127, 128\n\nHelianthemum, 74\n\nHelianthus, 128-130\n\nHeliopsis, 123\n\nHemerocallis, 11\n\nHemlock, 1\n\nHemlock, Ground, 2\n\nHemlock Parsley, 83\n\nHemlock, Poison, 83\n\nHemlock, Water, 82\n\nHemp, 24\n\nHemp, Indian, 90\n\nHemp Nettle, 99\n\nHemp, Water, 30\n\nHemp Weed, 131\n\nHenbane, 101\n\nHepatica, 38\n\nHeracleum, 82\n\nHerb Robert, 64\n\nHerb Sophia, 43\n\nHercules' Club, 80\n\nHesperis, 47\n\nHeteranthera, 10\n\nHeuchera, 50, 51\n\nHibiscus, 72\n\nHickory, 21\n\nHieracium, 116, 117\n\nHill's Oak, 23\n\nHippuris, 79\n\nHoarhound, 96\n\nHoarhound, Water, 95\n\nHobble-bush, 111\n\nHog Peanut, 59\n\nHolly Family, 69\n\nHolly, Mountain, 69\n\nHonewort, 82\n\nHoney Locust, 58\n\nHoneysuckle, 110\n\nHoneysuckle, Bush, 110\n\nHoneysuckle Family, 109\n\nHop, 24\n\nHop Clover, 60\n\nHop Tree, 65\n\nHordeum, 4\n\nHornbeam, 21\n\nHorned Pondweed, 2\n\nHornwort, 34\n\nHornwort Family, 34\n\nHorse Balm, 95\n\nHorse Chestnut, 70\n\nHorse Mint, 96\n\nHorse Nettle, 100\n\nHorse Radish, 46\n\nHorse Weed, 130, 131\n\nHound's Tongue, 93\n\nHoustonia, 108\n\nHuckleberry, 86\n\nHudsonia, 74\n\nHumulus, 24\n\nHyacinth, Wild, 14\n\nHybanthus, 75\n\nHydrocharitaceae, 3\n\nHydrocotyle, 80\n\nHydrophyllaceae, 93\n\nHydrophyllum, 93\n\nHyoscyamus, 101\n\nHypericaceae, 73\n\nHypericum, 73, 74\n\nHypoxis, 14\n\nHyssop, 98\n\nHyssop, Hedge, 104\n\nHyssopus, 98\n\n\nIlex, 69\n\nIllecebraceae, 31\n\nIlysanthes, 104\n\nImpatiens, 71\n\nImperatoria, 82\n\nIndian Cucumber-root, 13\n\nIndian Currant, 110\n\nIndian Hemp, 90\n\nIndian Mustard, 44\n\nIndian Pipe, 84\n\nIndian Plantain, 122\n\nIndian Tobacco, 113\n\nIndian Turnip, 8\n\nIndigo, Wild, 61\n\nInula, 127\n\nIpomoea, 92\n\nIridaceae, 15\n\nIris, 15\n\nIris Family, 15\n\nIronweed, 122\n\nIronweed, Yellow, 128\n\nIronwood, 22\n\nIsopyrum, 39\n\nIva, 114\n\n\nJack Pine, 1\n\nJeffersonia, 40\n\nJerusalem Artichoke, 129\n\nJerusalem Oak, 29\n\nJimson Weed, 100\n\nJoe-Pye Weed, 122\n\nJointweed, 27\n\nJuglandaceae, 21\n\nJuglans, 21\n\nJuncaceae, 10\n\nJuncaginaceae, 3\n\nJuncus, 10\n\nJuneberry, 55\n\nJuniper, 1\n\nJuniperus, 1\n\n\nKalmia, 85\n\nKenilworth Ivy, 103\n\nKentucky Coffee-tree, 58\n\nKing-nut Hickory, 21\n\nKnapweed, 121\n\nKnawel, 31\n\nKnotweed, 26, 27\n\nKnotwort Family, 31\n\nKochia, 28\n\nKoeleria, 6\n\nKrigia, 115\n\nKuhnia, 122\n\n\nLabiatae, 95\n\nLabrador Tea, 85\n\nLactuca, 115, 116\n\nLadies' Tresses, 16\n\nLady's Slipper, 18\n\nLake Cress, 45, 46\n\nLamb's Quarters, 29\n\nLamium, 99\n\nLaportea, 24\n\nLappula, 94\n\nLapsana, 115\n\nLarge-toothed Aspen, 19\n\nLarix, 1\n\nLarkspur, 36\n\nLathyrus, 59\n\nLauraceae, 41\n\nLaurel Family, 41\n\nLead Plant, 58\n\nLeafcup, 123\n\nLeatherleaf, 86\n\nLeatherwood, 77\n\nLechea, 74, 75\n\nLedum, 85\n\nLeek, Wild, 13\n\nLeersia, 5\n\nLeguminosae, 58\n\nLemna, 9\n\nLemnaceae, 9\n\nLentibulariaceae, 105\n\nLeontodon, 115\n\nLeonurus, 98\n\nLepachys, 128\n\nLepidium, 45, 46\n\nLespedeza, 61, 63\n\nLettuce, 115, 116\n\nLettuce, Wild, 115, 116\n\nLiatris, 121\n\nLilac, 88\n\nLiliaceae, 10\n\nLilium, 12\n\nLily, 12\n\nLily Family, 10\n\nLily of the Valley, Wild, 12\n\nLily, Pond, 35\n\nLily, Water, 35\n\nLimnanthaceae, 68\n\nLimosella, 103\n\nLinaceae, 63\n\nLinaria, 102, 103\n\nLinden Family, 72\n\nLinnaea, 109\n\nLinum, 63\n\nLiparis, 17\n\nLippia, 99\n\nLiriodendron, 40\n\nListera, 17\n\nLithospermum, 94\n\nLive-for-ever, 49\n\nLizard's Tail, 19\n\nLobelia, 113\n\nLobeliaceae, 113\n\nLobelia Family, 113\n\nLocust, 58\n\nLocust, Honey, 58\n\nLombardy Poplar, 19\n\nLong-spurred Violet, 76\n\nLonicera, 110\n\nLoosestrife, 77, 87, 88\n\nLoosestrife, False, 78\n\nLoosestrife Family, 77\n\nLopseed, 107\n\nLopseed Family, 107\n\nLoranthaceae, 25\n\nLotus, 35\n\nLousewort, 102\n\nLove Grass, 7\n\nLove-in-a-mist, 38\n\nLow Juniper, 1\n\nLudvigia, 78\n\nLupine, 59\n\nLupinus, 59\n\nLuzula, 10\n\nLychnis, 33\n\nLysimachia, 87, 88\n\nLycium, 100\n\nLycopus, 95\n\nLythraceae, 77\n\nLythrum, 77\n\n\nMadder Family, 108\n\nMad-dog Skullcap, 96\n\nMagnoliaceae, 40\n\nMagnolia Family, 40\n\nMaianthemum, 13\n\nMallow, 73\n\nMallow Family, 72\n\nMallow, Marsh, 72\n\nMallow, Poppy, 73\n\nMallow, Rose, 72\n\nMallow, Virginia, 73\n\nMalva, 73\n\nMalvaceae, 72\n\nManna Grass, 7\n\nMaple, 70\n\nMaple Family, 70\n\nMare's-tail, 79\n\nMarigold, Bur, 124\n\nMarigold, Water, 123\n\nMarrubium, 96\n\nMarsh Cinquefoil, 57\n\nMarsh Elder, 114\n\nMarsh Harebell, 112\n\nMarsh Mallow, 72\n\nMarsh Pea, 59\n\nMarsh Speedwell, 105\n\nMasterwort, 82\n\nMatricaria, 130\n\nMatrimony Vine, 100\n\nMay Apple, 40\n\nMeadow Beauty, 77\n\nMeadow Parsnip, 81\n\nMeadow Pink, 34\n\nMeadow Rue, 39\n\nMeadow Salsify, 115\n\nMeadow-sweet, 53\n\nMedeola, 13\n\nMedicago, 60, 61\n\nMelampyrum, 104\n\nMelastomaceae, 77\n\nMelastoma Family, 77\n\nMelilotus, 61\n\nMenispermaceae, 40\n\nMenispermum, 40\n\nMentha, 98\n\nMenyanthes, 88\n\nMermaid Weed, 79\n\nMertensia, 93, 94\n\nMexican Tea, 29\n\nMezereum Family, 77\n\nMicrostylis, 17\n\nMignonette Family, 48\n\nMignonette, Yellow, 48\n\nMikania, 121\n\nMilfoil, Water, 79\n\nMilk Thistle, 117\n\nMilk Vetch, 60\n\nMilkweed, 90, 91\n\nMilkweed Family, 90\n\nMilkweed, Green, 90\n\nMilkwort, 66\n\nMilkwort Family, 65\n\nMillet, 4\n\nMimulus, 102, 104\n\nMint, 98\n\nMint Family, 95\n\nMist Flower, 121\n\nMistletoe, Dwarf, 25\n\nMistletoe Family, 25\n\nMitchella, 108\n\nMitella, 51\n\nMitrewort, False, 51\n\nMocker-nut Hickory, 21\n\nMollugo, 31\n\nMonarda, 96\n\nMoneses, 85\n\nMoneywort, 87\n\nMonkey Flower, 104\n\nMonkey Flower, Yellow, 102\n\nMonotropa, 84\n\nMoonseed, 40\n\nMoonseed Family, 40\n\nMorning Glory, 92\n\nMorning Glory Family, 91\n\nMorus, 24\n\nMoss Pink, 92\n\nMotherwort, 98\n\nMoth Mullein, 101\n\nMountain Alder, 22\n\nMountain Ash, 52\n\nMountain Holly, 69\n\nMountain Maple, 70\n\nMountain Mint, 98\n\nMouse-ear Chickweed, 33\n\nMouse-ear Cress, 47\n\nMud Plantain, 10\n\nMudwort, 103\n\nMugwort, 119\n\nMuhlenbergia, 5, 6\n\nMulberry, 24\n\nMullein, 101\n\nMullein Pink, 33\n\nMuscari, 14\n\nMusk Flower, 102\n\nMustard, 43, 44\n\nMustard Family, 42\n\nMyosotis, 94\n\nMyrica, 20, 21\n\nMyricaceae, 20\n\nMyriophyllum, 79\n\n\nNaiad, 2\n\nNaias, 2\n\nNajadaceae, 2\n\nNarrow-leaved Cat-tail, 2\n\nNelumbo, 35\n\nNemopanthus, 69\n\nNepeta, 98\n\nNettle, 24\n\nNettle, Dead, 99\n\nNettle Family, 23\n\nNettle, Hedge, 99\n\nNettle, Hemp, 99\n\nNettle, Horse, 100\n\nNicandra, 101\n\nNicotiana, 101\n\nNigella, 38\n\nNightshade, 100\n\nNightshade, Enchanter's, 78\n\nNightshade Family, 100\n\nNinebark, 53\n\nNipplewort, 115\n\nNodding Pogonia, 18\n\nNorway Pine, 1\n\nNut Grass, 8\n\nNyctaginaceae, 31\n\nNymphaea, 35\n\nNymphaeaceae, 35\n\nNymphoides, 88\n\nNyssa, 83\n\n\nOak, 22, 23\n\nOakesia, 12\n\nOats, 6\n\nOenothera, 78\n\nOleaceae, 88\n\nOleaster Family, 77\n\nOlive Family, 88\n\nOnagraceae, 78\n\nOne-flowered Wintergreen, 85\n\nOnion, Wild, 13\n\nOnosmodium, 93\n\nOpuntia, 77\n\nOrache, 29\n\nOrchard Grass, 6\n\nOrchidaceae, 15\n\nOrchis, 17\n\nOrchis, Crane-fly, 16\n\nOrchis Family, 15\n\nOrchis, Showy, 17\n\nOrnithogalum, 14\n\nOrobanchaceae, 106\n\nOrobanche, 106\n\nOrpine Family, 48\n\nOsmorhiza, 82\n\nOstrya, 22\n\nOswego Tea, 96\n\nOxalidaceae, 64\n\nOxalis, 64\n\nOx-eye, 123\n\nOx-eye Daisy, 131\n\nOxybaphus, 31\n\nOxypolis, 81\n\n\nPainted Cup, 102\n\nPainted Trillium, 12\n\nPale Violet, 76\n\nPanax, 80\n\nPanic-grass, 5\n\nPanicum, 5\n\n<DW29>, 76\n\nPapaveraceae, 41\n\nPapaver, 41\n\nPapaw, 40\n\nPaper Birch, 21\n\nParietaria, 24\n\nParnassia, 50\n\nParsley Family, 80\n\nParsley, Hemlock, 83\n\nParsnip, Cow, 82\n\nParsnip, Meadow, 81\n\nParsnip, Prairie, 81\n\nParsnip, Water, 81\n\nParsnip, Wild, 81\n\nPartridge Berry, 108\n\nPartridge Pea, 60\n\nPasque Flower, 38\n\nPastinaca, 81\n\nPatience Dock, 26\n\nPea, 59\n\nPeach-leaved Willow, 20\n\nPear, 54\n\nPear, Prickly, 77\n\nPearlwort, 32\n\nPearly Everlasting, 120\n\nPedicularis, 102\n\nPellitory, 24\n\nPeltandra, 9\n\nPenny Cress, 46\n\nPennyroyal, 95\n\nPennywort, Water, 80\n\nPenthorum, 49\n\nPentstemon, 104\n\nPepper Family, 19\n\nPepper Grass, 46\n\nPeppermint, 98\n\nPerfumed Cherry, 54\n\nPeriwinkle, 90\n\nPetalostemum, 60\n\nPetasites, 130\n\nPetunia, 101\n\nPhacelia, 93\n\nPhleum, 4\n\nPhlox, 92\n\nPhragmites, 6\n\nPhryma, 107\n\nPhrymaceae, 107\n\nPhysalis, 101\n\nPhysocarpus, 53\n\nPhysostegia, 99\n\nPhytolacca, 30\n\nPhytolaccaceae, 30\n\nPicea, 1\n\nPickerel-weed, 10\n\nPickerel-weed Family, 10\n\nPicris, 115\n\nPignut Hickory, 21\n\nPigweed, 30\n\nPilea, 24\n\nPimpernel, 87\n\nPimpernel, False, 104\n\nPimpernel, Water, 87\n\nPinaceae, 1\n\nPin Cherry, 54\n\nPine, 1\n\nPine Drops, 84\n\nPine Family, 1\n\nPineweed, 74\n\nPinguicula, 105\n\nPink, Deptford, 34\n\nPink Family, 31\n\nPink, Fire, 33\n\nPink, Meadow, 34\n\nPink, Moss, 92\n\nPink, Mullein, 33\n\nPink, Rose, 89\n\nPin Oak, 23\n\nPinus, 1\n\nPinweed, 74, 75\n\nPiperaceae, 19\n\nPipewort, 9\n\nPipewort Family, 9\n\nPitcher Plant, 48\n\nPitcher Plant Family, 48\n\nPlane Tree Family, 51\n\nPlantaginaceae, 107\n\nPlantago, 107\n\nPlantain, 107\n\nPlantain Family, 107\n\nPlantain, Indian, 122\n\nPlantain, Mud, 10\n\nPlatanaceae, 51\n\nPlatanus, 51\n\nPlum, 54\n\nPoa, 7\n\nPodophyllum, 40\n\nPodostemaceae, 48\n\nPodostemum, 48\n\nPogonia, 18\n\nPoison Hemlock, 83\n\nPoison Ivy, 69\n\nPoison Sumach, 68\n\nPokeweed, 30\n\nPokeweed Family, 30\n\nPolanisia, 47\n\nPolemoniaceae, 92\n\nPolemonium, 92\n\nPolemonium Family, 92\n\nPolygala, 65, 66\n\nPolygalaceae, 65\n\nPolygonatum, 11\n\nPolygonaceae, 25\n\nPolygonum, 26-28\n\nPolymnia, 123\n\nPolytaenia, 81\n\nPond Lily, 35\n\nPondweed, 2\n\nPondweed Family, 2\n\nPontederia, 10\n\nPontederiaceae, 10\n\nPoplar, 19\n\nPoppy, 41\n\nPoppy, Celandine, 41\n\nPoppy Family, 41\n\nPoppy Mallow, 73\n\nPopulus, 19\n\nPortulaca, 34\n\nPortulacaceae, 34\n\nPotamogeton, 2\n\nPotentilla, 52, 55-57\n\nPrairie Clover, 60\n\nPrairie Dock, 122\n\nPrairie Fringed Orchis, 19\n\nPrairie June-grass, 6\n\nPrairie Parsnip, 81\n\nPrenanthes, 116\n\nPrickly Ash, 65\n\nPrickly Pear, 77\n\nPrimrose, 87\n\nPrimrose Family, 87\n\nPrimula, 87\n\nPrimulaceae, 87\n\nPrince's Feather, 27\n\nPrince's Pine, 85\n\nProserpinaca, 79\n\nPrunella, 97\n\nPrunus, 54\n\nPsedera, 71\n\nPtelea, 65\n\nPterospora, 84\n\nPuccoon, 94\n\nPulse Family, 58\n\nPurple Avens, 57\n\nPurple Coneflower, 131\n\nPurple Fringed Orchis, 19\n\nPurslane, 34\n\nPurslane Family, 34\n\nPurslane, Water, 78\n\nPutty Root, 16\n\nPyenanthemum, 98\n\nPyrola, 84, 85\n\nPyrus, 52, 54, 55\n\n\nQuack Grass, 6\n\nQuaking Aspen, 19\n\nQuassia Family, 65\n\nQueen of the Prairie, 57\n\nQuercus, 22, 23\n\n\nRadicula, 43, 45, 46\n\nRadish, 45\n\nRadish, Horse, 46\n\nRadish, Wild, 44, 45\n\nRagged Fringed Orchis, 19\n\nRagweed, 114\n\nRagwort, 127, 128\n\nRam's Head Lady's Slipper, 18\n\nRanunculaceae, 35\n\nRanunculus, 35-38\n\nRaphanus, 44, 45\n\nRaspberry, 53, 54\n\nRattlebox, 59\n\nRattlesnake Master, 80\n\nRattlesnake Plantain, 17\n\nRattlesnake Root, 116\n\nRed Ash, 88\n\nRedbud, 58\n\nRed Cedar, 1\n\nRed Clover, 61\n\nRed Currant, 50\n\nRed Maple, 70\n\nRed Mulberry, 24\n\nRed Oak, 23\n\nRed Raspberry, 53\n\nRed-root, 71\n\nRed Sorrel, 25\n\nRed-top, 6\n\nReed, 6\n\nReed Grass, 5\n\nRein Orchis, 18\n\nReseda, 48\n\nResedaceae, 48\n\nRhamnaceae, 71\n\nRhamnus, 71\n\nRhexia, 77\n\nRhus, 68, 69\n\nRibes, 49, 50\n\nRiver Weed, 48\n\nRiver Weed Family, 48\n\nRobinia, 58\n\nRock Cress, 46, 47\n\nRocket, Sea, 45\n\nRock-rose Family, 74\n\nRosa, 52\n\nRosaceae, 51\n\nRose, 52\n\nRose Family, 51\n\nRose Mallow, 72\n\nRose Pink, 89\n\nRosin Weed, 123\n\nRound-leaved Orchis, 17\n\nRound-leaved Violet, 75\n\nRowan Tree, 52\n\nRubiaceae, 108\n\nRubus, 53, 54\n\nRudbeckia, 128\n\nRue Anemone, 39\n\nRue Family, 65\n\nRuellia, 107\n\nRumex, 25, 26\n\nRush, 10\n\nRush Family, 10\n\nRush, Twig, 8\n\nRussian Thistle, 28\n\nRutabaga, 43\n\nRutaceae, 65\n\n\nSabbatia, 89\n\nSagina, 32\n\nSagittaria, 3\n\nSalicaceae, 19\n\nSalix, 20\n\nSalmonberry, 54\n\nSalsify, 115\n\nSalsola, 28\n\nSambucus, 109\n\nSamolus, 87\n\nSandalwood Family, 24\n\nSand Bur, 5\n\nSand Cherry, 54\n\nSand Rocket, 42, 43\n\nSand Spurrey, 32\n\nSand Violet, 76\n\nSanguinaria, 41\n\nSanguisorba, 57\n\nSanicula, 82\n\nSantalaceae, 24\n\nSapindaceae, 70\n\nSaponaria, 34\n\nSarracenia, 48\n\nSarraceniaceae, 48\n\nSarsaparilla, 80\n\nSarsaparilla Family, 80\n\nSassafras, 41\n\nSatureja, 97\n\nSaururus, 19\n\nSaxifraga, 50\n\nSaxifragaceae, 49\n\nSaxifrage, 50\n\nSaxifrage Family, 49\n\nSaxifrage, Golden, 50\n\nScarlet Oak, 23\n\nScheuchzeria, 3\n\nSchneck's Oak, 23\n\nScirpus, 7\n\nScleranthus, 31\n\nScorpion Grass, 94\n\nScrophularia, 103\n\nScrophulariaceae, 101\n\nScrub Oak, 23\n\nScutellaria, 96\n\nSea Rocket, 45\n\nSea-side Crowfoot, 36\n\nSedge, 8\n\nSedge Family, 7\n\nSedum, 48, 49\n\nSelf-heal, 97\n\nSeneca Snakeroot, 66\n\nSenecio, 127, 128\n\nSenna, Wild, 60\n\nSetaria, 4\n\nShag-bark Hickory, 21\n\nSheep-berry, 111\n\nSheep Laurel, 85\n\nShepherdia, 77\n\nShepherd's Purse, 46\n\nShingle Oak, 22\n\nShin-leaf, 84, 85\n\nShooting Star, 87\n\nShowy Lady's Slipper, 18\n\nShowy Orchis, 17\n\nSicyos, 112\n\nSida, 72, 73\n\nSilene, 33, 34\n\nSilphium, 122, 123, 127\n\nSilver Maple, 70\n\nSilver Weed, 55\n\nSilvery Cinquefoil, 66\n\nSilybum, 117\n\nSimarubaceae, 65\n\nSium, 81\n\nSisymbrium, 43-45, 47\n\nSisyrinchium, 15\n\nSkullcap, 96\n\nSkunk Cabbage, 8\n\nSkunk Currant, 49\n\nSlender Nettle, 24\n\nSlippery Elm, 24\n\nSlough Grass, 5\n\nSmall-flowered Crowfoot, 36\n\nSmall-fruited Hickory, 21\n\nSmall Snapdragon, 103\n\nSmall Solomon's Seal, 11\n\nSmartweed, 27, 28\n\nSmilacina, 14\n\nSmilax, 11\n\nSmooth Alder, 22\n\nSnake Mouth, 18\n\nSnakeroot, Black, 82\n\nSnakeroot, Seneca, 66\n\nSnakeroot, Virginia, 25\n\nSnapdragon, 103\n\nSneezeweed, 127\n\nSneeze Weed, 128\n\nSneezewort, 131\n\nSnowberry, 85, 111\n\nSoapberry Family, 70\n\nSoapwort, 34\n\nSolanaceae, 100\n\nSolanum, 100\n\nSolidago, 125-127\n\nSolomon's Seal, 11\n\nSorbaria, 57\n\nSorrel, Red, 25\n\nSorrel, Green, 25\n\nSorrel, Wood, 64\n\nSour Dock, 26\n\nSour Gum, 83\n\nSouthernwood, 119\n\nSparganiaceae, 2\n\nSpartina, 5\n\nSpear Grass, 7\n\nSpearmint, 98\n\nSpearwort, 36\n\nSpeckled Alder, 22\n\nSpecularia, 112\n\nSpeedwell, 105\n\nSpergula, 32\n\nSpergularia, 32\n\nSpice Bush, 41\n\nSpiderwort, 9\n\nSpiderwort Family, 9\n\nSpikenard, 80\n\nSpike Rush, 7\n\nSpiraea, 53\n\nSpiranthes, 16\n\nSpirodela, 9\n\nSpotted Wintergreen, 85\n\nSpurge, 67, 68\n\nSpurge Family, 66\n\nSpurred Gentian, 89\n\nSpurrey, 32\n\nSpring Avens, 56\n\nSpring Beauty, 34\n\nSpring Vetch, 59\n\nSpruce, 1\n\nSquashberry, 111\n\nSquaw-root, 106\n\nSquaw Weed, 128\n\nSquirrel Corn, 41\n\nSquirrel-tail, 4\n\nStachys, 99\n\nStaff Tree Family, 69\n\nStaphylea, 69\n\nStaphyleaceae, 69\n\nStar Flower, 87\n\nStar Grass, 14\n\nStar of Bethlehem, 14\n\nStarry Campion, 33\n\nSteironema, 88\n\nStellaria, 32, 33\n\nStemless Lady's Slipper, 18\n\nStickseed, 94\n\nStinging Nettle, 24\n\nStitchwort, 32\n\nSt. John's-wort, 73, 74\n\nSt. John's-wort Family, 73\n\nStone Clover, 61\n\nStonecrop, 48\n\nStonecrop, Ditch, 49\n\nStork's-bill, 64\n\nStrawberry, 56\n\nStrawberry, Barren, 55\n\nStrawberry Blite, 29\n\nStreptopus, 11\n\nStriped Maple, 70\n\nStrophostyles, 58\n\nStylophorum, 41\n\nSugar Maple, 70\n\nSumach, 68, 69\n\nSummer Grape, 72\n\nSummer Savory, 97\n\nSundew, 48\n\nSundew Family, 48\n\nSundrops, 78\n\nSunflower, 128-130\n\nSunflower, Tickseed, 124\n\nSwamp Birch, 22\n\nSwamp Currant, 49\n\nSwamp Dewberry, 53\n\nSwamp Laurel, 85\n\nSwamp Milkweed, 91\n\nSwamp Rose, 52\n\nSwamp Valerian, 111\n\nSwamp White Oak, 23\n\nSweet Birch, 22\n\nSweetbrier, 52\n\nSweet Cicely, 82\n\nSweet Fern, 20\n\nSweet Flag, 8\n\nSweet Gale, 21\n\nSweet Gale Family, 20\n\nSweet White Violet, 76\n\nSweet William, 34, 92\n\nSweet William Catchfly, 34\n\nSycamore, 51\n\nSymphoricarpos, 110, 111\n\nSymphytum, 93\n\nSymplocarpus, 8\n\nSynthyris, 102\n\nSyringa, 88\n\n\nTaenidia, 81\n\nTall Dock, 26\n\nTamarack, 1\n\nTanacetum, 119\n\nTansy, 119\n\nTansy Mustard, 43\n\nTaraxacum, 115\n\nTaxaceae, 2\n\nTaxus, 2\n\nTear-thumb, 28\n\nTeasel, 112\n\nTeasel Family, 112\n\nTephrosia, 60\n\nTeucrium, 97\n\nThalictrum, 39\n\nThaspium, 81\n\nThistle, 117, 118\n\nThistle, Canada, 118\n\nThistle, Cotton, 118\n\nThistle, Globe, 117\n\nThistle, Milk, 117\n\nThistle, Russian, 28\n\nThistle, Sow, 117\n\nThlaspi, 46\n\nThorn-apple, 100\n\nThorny Amaranth, 30\n\nThree-seeded Mercury, 66\n\nThree-square, 7\n\nThuja, 1\n\nThymelaeaceae, 77\n\nThyme, Wild, 97\n\nThymus, 97\n\nTiarella, 51\n\nTickseed, 123, 124\n\nTickseed Sunflower, 124\n\nTick Trefoil, 62, 63\n\nTilia, 72\n\nTiliaceae, 72\n\nTimothy, 4\n\nTipularia, 16\n\nToad-flax, 24, 103\n\nTobacco, Indian, 113\n\nTobacco, Wild, 101\n\nTofieldia, 14\n\nToothwort, 44\n\nTouch-me-not, 71\n\nTouch-me-not Family, 71\n\nTradescantia, 9\n\nTragopogon, 115\n\nTrailing Arbutus, 85\n\nTree of Heaven, 65\n\nTrientalis, 87\n\nTrifolium, 60, 61\n\nTriglochin, 3\n\nTrillium, 12\n\nTriosteum, 109\n\nTrollius, 36\n\nTsuga, 1\n\nTulip Tree, 40\n\nTumble Weed, 30\n\nTurk's-cap Lily, 12\n\nTurtlehead, 104\n\nTussilago, 122\n\nTway-blade, 17\n\nTwig Rush, 8\n\nTwin-leaf, 40\n\nTwin Flower, 109\n\nTwisted-stalk, 11\n\nTypha, 2\n\nTyphaceae, 2\n\n\nUlmus, 24\n\nUmbelliferae, 80\n\nUmbrella-wort, 31\n\nUpland Boneset, 122\n\nUrtica, 24\n\nUrticaceae, 23\n\nUtricularia, 106\n\nUvularia, 12\n\n\nVaccinium, 85-87\n\nValerian, 111\n\nValeriana, 111\n\nValerianaceae, 111\n\nValerianella, 111\n\nValerian Family, 111\n\nValerian, Greek, 92\n\nVallisneria, 3\n\nVelvet Leaf, 72\n\nVenus' Looking Glass, 112\n\nVerbascum, 101\n\nVerbena, 99-100\n\nVerbenaceae, 99\n\nVerbena Family, 99\n\nVernonia, 122\n\nVeronica, 104, 105\n\nVervain, 99, 100\n\nVetch, 59\n\nVetchling, 59\n\nVetch, Milk, 60\n\nViburnum, 111\n\nVicia, 59\n\nVinca, 90\n\nViola, 75, 76\n\nViolaceae, 75\n\nViolet, 75, 76\n\nViolet Family, 75\n\nViolet, Green, 75\n\nVirginia Creeper, 71\n\nVirginia Mallow, 73\n\nVirginia Snakeroot, 25\n\nVirgin's Bower, 35\n\nVitaceae, 71\n\nVitis, 72\n\n\nWahoo, 69\n\nWaldsteinia, 55\n\nWalnut, Black, 21\n\nWalnut Family, 21\n\nWater Arum,  9\n\nWater Cress, 45\n\nWater Crowfoot, 37\n\nWater Dock, 26\n\nWater Hemlock, 82\n\nWater Hemp, 30\n\nWater Hoarhound, 95\n\nWater-leaf, 93\n\nWater-leaf Family, 93\n\nWater Lily, 35\n\nWater Lily Family, 35\n\nWater Lobelia, 113\n\nWater Loosestrife, 77\n\nWater Marigold, 123\n\nWater Milfoil, 79\n\nWater Milfoil Family, 79\n\nWater Parsnip, 81\n\nWater Pennywort, 80\n\nWater Pimpernel, 87\n\nWater Plantain,  3\n\nWater Plantain Family,  3\n\nWater Purslane, 78\n\nWater Shield, 35\n\nWater Smartweed, 27, 28\n\nWater Speedwell, 105\n\nWater Starwort, 68\n\nWater Starwort Family, 68\n\nWater-weed, 3\n\nWater Willow, 107\n\nWaterwort, 74\n\nWaterwort Family, 74\n\nWeeping Willow, 20\n\nWhite Ash, 88\n\nWhite Campion, 33\n\nWhite Cedar,  1\n\nWhite Clover, 61\n\nWhite Elm, 24\n\nWhite Fringed Orchis, 19\n\nWhite Ground Cherry, 101\n\nWhite Lady's Slipper, 18\n\nWhite Mulberry, 24\n\nWhite Oak, 23\n\nWhite Pine, 1\n\nWhite Poplar, 19\n\nWhite Snakeroot, 122\n\nWhite Spruce, 1\n\nWhite Sweet Clover, 61\n\nWhitlow Grass, 42, 46\n\nWhorled Pogonia, 18\n\nWild Bean, 58\n\nWild Bergamot, 96\n\nWild Camomile, 130\n\nWild Carrot, 82\n\nWild Chives, 13\n\nWild Columbine, 36\n\nWild Comfrey, 94\n\nWild Crab, 54\n\nWild Cucumber, 112\n\nWild Flax, 63\n\nWild Geranium, 64\n\nWild Ginger, 25\n\nWild Gromwell, 94\n\nWild Indigo, 61\n\nWild Leek, 13\n\nWild Lettuce, 115, 116\n\nWild Lily of the Valley, 13\n\nWild Mint, 98\n\nWild Onion, 13\n\nWild <DW29>, 76\n\nWild Parsnip, 81\n\nWild Pea, 59\n\nWild Plum, 54\n\nWild Potato Vine, 92\n\nWild Radish, 44, 45\n\nWild Rice, 5\n\nWild Rose, 52\n\nWild Rye, 6\n\nWild Sarsaparilla, 80\n\nWild Senna, 60\n\nWild Thyme, 97\n\nWild Tobacco, 101\n\nWild Yam, 14\n\nWillow, 20\n\nWillow Family, 19\n\nWillow Herb, 79\n\nWillow, Water, 107\n\nWinter Cress, 44\n\nWintergreen, 86\n\nWintergreen, Flowering, 65\n\nWintergreen, One-flowered, 85\n\nWintergreen, Spotted, 85\n\nWitch Grass, 5\n\nWitch Hazel, 51\n\nWitch Hazel Family, 51\n\nWithe-rod, 111\n\nWolfberry, 110\n\nWolffia, 9\n\nWood Anemone, 38\n\nWood-grass, 6\n\nWood Lily, 12\n\nWood Nettle, 24\n\nWood Rush, 10\n\nWood Sage, 97\n\nWood Sorrel, 64\n\nWood Sorrel Family, 64\n\nWood Strawberry, 56\n\nWood Violet, 76\n\nWormseed, 29\n\nWorm-seed Mustard, 43\n\nWormwood, 119\n\n\nXanthium, 114\n\nXyridaceae, 9\n\nXyris, 9\n\n\nYam Family, 14\n\nYam, Wild, 14\n\nYard Grass, 6\n\nYarrow, 130\n\nYellow Alyssum, 42, 46\n\nYellow Birch, 21\n\nYellow Cress, 43\n\nYellow-eyed Grass, 9\n\nYellow-eyed Grass Family, 9\n\nYellow Foxtail, 4\n\nYellow Fringed Orchis, 19\n\nYellow Ironweed, 128\n\nYellow Lady's Slipper, 18\n\nYellow Lily, 12\n\nYellow Mignonette, 48\n\nYellow Monkey Flower, 102\n\nYellow Oak, 23\n\nYellow Sweet Clover, 61\n\nYellow Violet, 76\n\nYellow Willow, 20\n\nYew Family, 2\n\n\nZannichellia, 2\n\nZanthoxylum, 65\n\nZizania, 5\n\nZizia, 81\n\n\n\n\n +---------------------------------------------------------------+\n | Transcriber's Notes:                                          |\n | Page xlv: Changed lobel to lobed                              |\n | Page 10: Changed ocntains to contains                         |\n | Page 39: Changed second 38a to 38b                            |\n | Page 89: Changed second 4a to 4b                              |\n | Page 94: Changed augustifolium to angustifolium               |\n | Page 108: Changed second 1a to 1b                             |\n | Page 109: Changed --21. to --20.                              |\n | Page 122: Changed (springi) to (spring)                       |\n | Page 130: Changed autum to autumn                             |\n | Page 146: Changed Eveyrlasting, Pearly to Everlasting, Pearly |\n +---------------------------------------------------------------+\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of Project Gutenberg's The Plants of Michigan, by Henry Allan Gleason\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"Reincarnation  \n&  \nKARMA\n\n# Reincarnation  \n&  \nKARMA\n\n**By Edgar Cayce**\n\nA.R.E. Press \u2022 Virginia Beach \u2022 Virginia\nCopyright \u00a9 2006\n\nby the Edgar Cayce Foundation\n\n6th Printing, June 2012\n\nPrinted in the U.S.A.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.\n\nA.R.E. Press\n\n215 67th Street\n\nVirginia Beach, VA 23451\u20132061\n\nCayce, Edgar, 1877\u20131945.\n\nReincarnation & karma \/ by Edgar Cayce\n\np. cm.\n\nISBN 13: 978\u20130\u201387604\u2013524\u20134 (trade pbk.)\n\n1. Reincarnation. 2. Karma. I. Title. II. Title: Reincarnation and karma.\n\nBL515.C375 2006\n\n133.901'35\u2014dc22\n\n2006015305\n\nEdgar Cayce Readings \u00a9 1971, 1993\u20132007\n\nby the Edgar Cayce Foundation.\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nCover design by Richard Boyle\n\n## **_Contents_**\n\n**_Foreword: Who Was Edgar Cayce?_** _by Charles Thomas Cayce_\n\n**_An Explanation of the Cayce Readings_** _by John Van Auken_\n\n**Part 1** | **Reincarnation**\n\n---|---\n\n**Chapter 1** | Edgar Cayce's Discourses on Reincarnation\n\n**Chapter 2** | Insightful Past-Life Readings by Edgar Cayce\n\n**Chapter 3** | Planetary Sojourns: The Soul's Life Between Incarnations\n\n**Chapter 4** | Reincarnation Unnecessary: Breaking Free of the Wheel of Karma and Reincarnation\n\n**Part 2** | **Karma**\n\n**Chapter 5** | Edgar Cayce's Discourses on Karma\n\n**Chapter 6** | Examples of Karma in Edgar Cayce's Discourses\n\n**Chapter 7** | Edgar Cayce's Tips for Meeting Karma\n\n**Chapter 8** | From Karma to Grace\n\n## **Foreword Who Was Edgar Cayce?**\n\nIt is a time in the earth when people everywhere seek to know more of the mysteries of the mind, the soul,\" said my grandfather, Edgar Cayce, from an unconscious trance from which he demonstrated a remarkable gift for clairvoyance.\n\nHis words are prophetic even today, as more and more Americans in these unsettled times are turning to psychic explanations for daily events. For example, according to a survey by the National Opinion Research Council nearly half of American adults believe they have been in contact with someone who has died, a figure twice that of ten years earlier. Two-thirds of all adults say they have had an ESP experience; ten years before that figure was only one-half.\n\nEvery culture throughout history has made note of its own members' gifted powers beyond the five senses. These rare individuals held special interest because they seemed able to provide solutions to life's pressing problems. America in the twenty-first century is no exception.\n\nEdgar Cayce was perhaps the most famous and most carefully documented psychic of our time. He began to use his unusual abilities when he was a young man, and from then on for over forty years he would, usually twice a day, lie on a couch, go into a sleeplike state, and respond to questions. Over fourteen thousand of these discourses, called readings, were carefully transcribed by his secretary and preserved by the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach, Virginia. These psychic readings continue to provide inspiration, insight, and help with healing to tens of thousands of people.\n\nHaving only an eighth-grade education, Edgar Cayce lived a plain and simple life by the world's standards. As early as his childhood in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, however, he sensed that he had psychic ability. While alone one day he had a vision of a woman who told him he would have unusual power to help people. He also related experiences of \"seeing\" dead relatives. Once, while struggling with school lessons, he slept on his spelling book and awakened knowing the entire contents of the book.\n\nAs a young man he experimented with hypnosis to treat a recurring throat problem that caused him to lose his speech. He discovered that under hypnosis he could diagnose and describe treatments for the physical ailments of others, often without knowing or seeing the person with the ailment. People began to ask him other sorts of questions, and he found himself able to answer these as well.\n\nIn 1910 the _New York Times_ published a two-page story with pictures about Edgar Cayce's psychic ability as described by a young physician, Wesley Ketchum, to a clinical research society in Boston. From that time on people from all over the country with every conceivable question sought his help.\n\nIn addition to his unusual talents, Cayce was a deeply religious man who taught Sunday school all of his adult life and read the entire Bible once for every year that he lived. He always tried to attune himself to God's will by studying the Scriptures and maintaining a rich prayer life, as well as by trying to be of service to those who came seeking help. He used his talents only for helpful purposes. Cayce's simplicity and humility and his commitment to doing good in the world continue to attract people to the story of his life and work and to the far-reaching information he gave.\n\n_Charles Thomas Cayce, Ph.D._\n\n_Executive Director_\n\n_Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc._\n\n## **Editor's Explanation of Cayce's Discourses**\n\nEdgar Cayce dictated all of his discourses from a self-induced trance. A stenographer took his discourses down in shorthand and later typed them. Copies were sent to the person or persons who had requested the psychic reading, and one was put into the files of the organization, which built up around Cayce over the years, the Association for Research and Enlightenment (better known as the A.R.E.).\n\nIn his normal consciousness, Edgar Cayce spoke with a Southern accent but in the same manner as any other American. However, from the trance state, he spoke in the manner of the King James Bible, using \"thees\" and \"thous.\" In trance, his syntax was also unusual. He put phrases, clauses, and sentences together in a manner that slows down any reader and requires careful attention in order to be sure of his meaning. This caused his stenographer to adopt some unusual punctuation in order to put into sentence form some of the long, complex thoughts conveyed by Cayce while in trance. Also, many of his discourses are so jam-packed with information and insights that it requires that one slow down and read more carefully in order to fully understand what he is intending.\n\nFrom his trance state, Cayce explained that he got his information from two sources: (1) the inquiring individual's mind, mostly from his or her deeper, subconscious mind and (2) from the Universal Consciousness, the infinite mind within which the entire universe is conscious. He explained that every action and thought of every individual makes an impression upon the Universal Consciousness, an impression that can be psychically read. He correlated this with the Hindu concept of an Akashic Record, which is an ethereal, fourth-dimensional film upon which actions and thoughts are recorded and can be read at any time.\n\nWhen giving one of his famous health readings, called physical readings, Cayce acted as if he were actually scanning the entire body of the person, from the inside out! He explained that the subconscious mind of everyone contains all of the data on the condition of the physical body it inhabits, and Cayce simply connected with the patient's deeper mind. He could also give the cause of the condition, even if it was from early childhood or from many lifetimes ago in a previous incarnation of the soul. This was knowable because the soul remembers all of its experiences. He explained that deeper portions of the subconscious mind are the mind of the soul, and portions of the subconscious and the soul are in the body with the personality.\n\nIn life readings and topic readings, Cayce also connected with the subconscious minds of those inquiring as well as the Universal Consciousness.\n\nOccasionally, Cayce would not have the material being requested, and he would say, \"We do not have that here.\" This implied that Cayce's mind was more directed than one might think. He was not open to everything. From trance, he explained that the suggestion given at the beginning of one of his psychic readings so directed his deeper mind and focused it on the task or subject requested that he truly did not have other topics available. However, on a few occasions, he seemed able to shift topics in the middle of a reading.\n\nThe typed readings have a standard format. Numbers were used in the place of the name of the person or persons receiving the reading, and a dash system kept track of how many readings the person had received. For example, reading 137\u20135 was the fifth reading for Mr. [137]. At the top of the reading are the reading number, the date and location, and the names or numbers (for privacy) of those in attendance. Occasionally the stenographer would include a note about other conditions, such as the presence of a manuscript that the in-trance Cayce was supposed to view psychically and comment on. In many cases, I left in the entire format of a recorded reading, but sometimes only a paragraph or two were pertinent to our study, and then I only give the reading number.\n\nAs I explained, Cayce dictated all of these discourses while he was in trance. In most cases, he spoke in a monotone voice. However, he would sometimes elevate his volume when saying a word or phrase. In these instances, his stenographer usually typed these words with all-capital letters, to give the reader some sense of Cayce's increased volume. These all-capital letters have been changed to italic typeface for readability, as well as emphasis. In many cases, these words appear to be rightly accentuated in Cayce's discourses. However, in some cases, it is not clear why he raised his voice.\n\nAnother style that the stenographer adopted was to capitalize all of the letters in Cayce's many affirmations (positive-thought or prayer-like passages to be used by the recipient as a tool for focusing and\/or raising consciousness). I have also changed these to upper- and lower-case letters and italicized them. Questions asked Cayce have also been italicized for easier reference.\n\nWhenever his stenographer was not sure if she had written down the correct word or thought that she might have missed or misunderstood a word, she inserted suggested words, comments, and explanations in [brackets]. If she knew of another reading that had similar material or that was being referred to during this reading, she would put the reading number in brackets. Cayce's entire collection of readings is available on CD-ROM from the A.R.E., so, even though the referenced reading may not be in this book, I left these references in for any future research; but several of the readings that have references are in this book. Within the text of a reading, all (parentheses) are asides made by Cayce himself while in trance, not by his stenographer. She only used [brackets] within the text of a reading. In the preliminary material, she used parentheses in the normal manner. My comments are indicated by the term \"Editor's Note.\"\n\nA few common abbreviations use in these discourses were: \"GD\" for Gladys Davis, the primary stenographer; \"GC\" for Gertrude Cayce, Edgar's wife and the predominant conductor of the readings, and \"EC\" for Edgar Cayce.\n\n\u2014John Van Auken, Editor\n\n## **Part 1**\n\n## **Reincarnation**\n\n### **1**\n\n### **Edgar Cayce's Discourses on Reincarnation**\n\n_Text of Reading 5753-1_\n\nThis psychic reading was given by Edgar Cayce at his home, on the 16th day of June 1933, before the Second Annual Congress of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., in accordance with request by those present.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. And approximately thirty-five other people attending the Congress.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 5:00 to 6:00 P.M.\n\nGC: You will give at this time a comprehensive discourse on reincarnation. If the soul returns to the earth through a succession of appearances, you will explain why this is necessary or desirable and will clarify through explanation the laws governing such returns. You will answer the questions, which will be asked on this subject.\n\nEC: Yes. In giving even an approach to the subject sought here, it is well that there be given some things that may be accepted as standards from which conclusions\u2014or where parallels\u2014may be drawn, that there may be gathered in the minds of those who would approach same some understanding, some concrete examples, that may be applied in their own individual experience.\n\nEach soul that enters, then, must have had an impetus from some beginning that is of the Creative Energy, or of a first cause.\n\nWhat, then, was\u2014or is\u2014the first cause; for if there be law pertaining to the first cause it must be an unchangeable law, and is\u2014 _is_ \u2014as \"I AM that I am!\" For this is the basis from which one would reason:\n\nThe first cause was, that the created would be the companion for the Creator; that it, the creature, would\u2014through its manifestations in the activity of that given unto the creature\u2014show itself to be not only worthy of, but companionable to, the Creator.\n\nHence, every form of life that man sees in a material world is an essence or manifestation of the Creator; not the Creator, but a manifestation of a first cause\u2014and in its own sphere, its own consciousness of its activity in that plane or sphere.\n\nHence, as man in this material world passes through, there are the manifestations of the attributes that the consciousness attributes to, or finds coinciding with, that activity which is manifested; hence becomes then as the very principle of the law that would govern an entrance into a manifestation.\n\nThen a soul, the offspring of a Creator, entering into a consciousness that became a manifestation in any plane or sphere of activity, given that free-will for its use of those abilities, qualities, conditions in its experience, demonstrates, manifests, shows forth, that it reflects in its activity towards that first cause.\n\nHence in the various spheres that man sees (that are demonstrated, manifested, in and before self) even in a material world, all forces, all activities, are a manifestation. Then, that which would be the companionable, the at-oneness with, the ability to be one with, becomes necessary for the demonstration or manifestation of those attributes in and through all force, all demonstration, in a sphere.\n\nBecause an atom, a matter, a form, is changed does not mean that the essence, the source or the spirit of it has changed; only in its form of manifestation, and not in its relation with the first cause. That man reaches that consciousness in the material plane of being aware of what he does about or with the consciousness of the knowledge, the intelligence, the first cause, makes or produces that which is known as the entering into the first cause, principles, basis, or the essences, that there may be demonstrated in that manifested that which gains for the soul, for the entity, that which would make the soul an acceptable companion to the Creative Force, Creative Influence. See?\n\nAs to how, where, when, and what produces the entrance into a material manifestation of an entity, a soul:\n\nIn the beginning was that which set in motion that which is seen in manifested form with the laws governing same. The inability of destroying matter, the ability of each force, each source of power or contact\u2014as it meets in its various forms, produces that which is a manifestation in a particular sphere. This may be seen in those elements used in the various manifested ways of preparing for man, in many ways, those things that bespeak of the laws that govern man's relationship to the first cause, or God.\n\nThen, this is the principle:\n\nLike begets like. Those things that are positive and negative forces combine to form in a different source, or different manifestation, the combinations of which each element, each first principle manifested, has gained from its associations\u2014in its activities\u2014that which has been brought to bear by self or that about it, to produce that manifestation.\n\nHence man, the crowning of all manifestations in a material world\u2014a causation world, finds self as the cause and the product of that he (man), with those abilities given, has been able to produce, or demonstrate, or manifest from that he (the soul) has gained, does gain, in the transition, the change, the going toward that (and being of that) from which he came.\n\nPeriods, times, places: That which is builded, each in its place, each in its time.\n\nThis is shown to man in the elemental world about him. Man's consciousness of that about him is gained through that he, man, does about the knowledge of that he is, as in relation to that from which he came and towards which he is going.\n\nHence, in man's analysis and understanding of himself, it is as well to know from whence he came as to know whither he is going.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: What is meant by inequality of experience? Is it a strong argument for reincarnation?_\n\nA: Considering that which has just been presented, isn't it the same argument?\n\n_Q: Is experience limited to this earth plane?_\n\nA: As each entity, each soul, in the various consciousnesses, passes from one to another, it\u2014the soul\u2014becomes conscious of that about self in that sphere\u2014to which it, the entity, the soul attains in a materially manifested way or manner.\n\nHence the entity develops _through_ the varied spheres of the earth and its solar system, and the companions of varied experiences in that solar system, or spheres of development or activity; as in some ways accredited correctly to the planetary influences in an experience. The entity develops _through_ those varied spheres.\n\nHence the sun, the moon, the stars, the position in the heavens or in all of the hosts of the solar systems that the earth occupies\u2014all have their influence in the same manner (this is a very crude illustration, but very demonstrative) that the effect of a large amount of any element would attract a compass. Drawn to! Why? Because of the influence of which the mind element of a soul, an entity, has become conscious!\n\nA soul, an entity, is as real as a physical entity, and is as subject to laws as the physical body as subject to the laws in a material world and the elements thereof!\n\nDoes fire burn the soul or the physical body?\n\nYet, self may cast self into a fire element by doing that the soul knows to be wrong!\n\nWhat would make a wrong and a right? A comparison of that the soul knows its consciousness to be in accord or contrarywise with, in relation to that which gave it existence.\n\n_Q: Are not transferred memories misappropriated by individuals and considered to be personal experiences?_\n\n_A:_ Personal experiences have their influence upon the inner soul, while disincarnate entities (that may be earth-bound, or that may be heaven-bound) may influence the thought of an entity or a mind.\n\nBut, who gives the law to have an element to influence, whether from self or from others? That same as from the beginning. The will of the soul that it may be one with the first cause.\n\nIn the material, the mental, and the spiritual experience of many souls, many entities, it has been found that there _be_ those influences that _do_ have their effect upon the thought of those that would do this or that. Who gives it? Self!\n\nJust as it is when an entity, a body, fills its mind (mentally, materially) with those experiences that bespeak of those things that add to the carnal forces of an experience. Just so does the mind become the builder throughout. And the mental mind, or physical mind, becomes _carnally_ directed!\n\nThe mind is the builder ever, whether in the spirit or in the flesh. If one's mind is filled with those things that bespeak of the spirit, that one becomes spiritual-minded.\n\nAs we may find in a material world: Envy, strife, selfishness, greediness, avarice, are the children of man! Longsuffering, kindness, brotherly love, good deeds, are the children of the spirit of light.\n\nChoose ye (as it has ever been given) whom ye will serve.\n\nThis is not beggaring the question! As individuals become abased, or possessed, are their thoughts guided by those in the borderland? Certainly! If allowed to be!\n\nBut he that looks within is higher, for the spirit knoweth the Spirit of its Maker\u2014and the children of same are as given. And, \"My Spirit beareth witness with thy spirit,\" saith He that giveth life!\n\nWhat _is_ Life? A manifestation of the first cause\u2014God!\n\n_Q:_ Explain, _in the light of reincarnation, the cycle of development towards maturity in individuals._\n\n_A:_ As an individual in any experience, in any period, uses that of which it (the soul or entity) is conscious in relation to the laws of the Creative Forces, so does that soul, that entity, develop towards\u2014what? A companionship with the Creative influence!\n\nHence karma, to those disobeying\u2014by making for self that which would be as the towers of Babel, or as the city of Gomorrah, or as the fleshpots of Egypt, or as the caring for those influences in the experience that satisfy or gratify self without thought of the effect upon that which it has in its own relation to the first cause! Hence to many this becomes as the stumblingblock.\n\nIt is as was given by Him, \"I am the way. No man approaches the Father but by me.\" But, does a soul crucify the flesh even as He, when it finds within itself that it must work out its own salvation in a material world, by entering and re-entering that there may be made manifest that consciousness in the soul that would make it a companion with the Creator?\n\nRather is the law of forgiveness made of effect in thine experience, through Him that would stand in thy stead; for He is the way, that light ever ready to aid when there is the call upon\u2014and the trust of the soul in\u2014that first cause!\n\nHas it not been given that there _is_ an influence in the mind, the thought of man, from the outside? Then, would those that have lost their way become the guides and both fall in the ditch? Or would the soul trust in the Way, and the Light, and seek in that way that there may be shown the light?\n\nWhat caused the first influences in the earth that brought selfishness? The desire to be as gods, in that rebellion became the order of the mental forces in the soul; and sin entered.\n\n_Q: What is the strongest argument against reincarnation?_\n\nA: That there is the law of cause and effect in _material_ things. But the strongest argument against reincarnation is also, turned over, the strongest argument for it; as in _any_ principle, when reduced to its essence. For the _law_ is set\u2014and it happens! Though a soul may will itself _never_ to reincarnate, but must burn and burn and burn\u2014or suffer and suffer and suffer! For, the heaven and hell is built by the soul! The companionship in God is being one with Him; and the gift of God is being conscious of being one with Him, yet apart from Him\u2014or one with, yet apart from, the Whole.\n\n_Q: What is the strongest argument for reincarnation?_\n\nA: Just as given. Just turn it over; or, as we have outlined.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n_Text of Reading 5749-14_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the office of the Association, Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 14th day of May, 1941, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mr. Thomas Sugrue, Active Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Hugh Lynn Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Thomas Sugrue and Gertrude Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 4:10 to 4:35 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.\n\nHLC: You will have before you the enquiring mind of the entity, Thomas Sugrue, present in this room, and certain of the problems which confront him in composing the manuscript of _There Is a River._\n\nThe entity is now ready to describe the philosophical concepts, which have been given through this source, and wishes to parallel and align them with known religious tenets, especially those of Christian theology.\n\nThe entity does not wish to set forth a system of thought, nor imply that all questions of a philosophical nature can be answered through this source\u2014the limitations of the finite mind prevent this.\n\nBut the entity wishes to answer those questions, which will naturally arise in the mind of the reader, and many of the questions, which are being asked by all people in the world today.\n\nTherefore the entity presents certain problems and questions, which you will answer as befits the entity's understanding and the task of interpretation before him.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the enquiring mind, Thomas Sugrue, and those problems, those questions that arise in the mind of the entity at this period. Ready for questions.\n\n_Q: The first problem concerns the reason for creation. Should this be given as God's desire to experience Himself, God's desire for companionship, God's desire for expression, or in some other way?_\n\nA: God's desire for companionship and expression.\n\n_Q: The second problem concerns that which is variously called evil, darkness, negation, sin. Should it be said that this condition existed as a necessary element of creation, and the soul, given free will, found itself with the power to indulge in it, or lose itself in it? Or should it be said that this is a condition created by the activity of the soul itself? Should it be described, in either case, as a state of consciousness, a gradual lack of awareness of self and self's relation to God?_\n\nA: It is the free will and it's losing itself in its relationship to God.\n\n_Q: The third problem has to do with the fall of man. Should this be described as something, which was inevitable in the destiny of souls, or something which God did not desire, but which He did not prevent once He had given free will? The problem here is to reconcile the omniscience of God and His knowledge of all things with the free will of the soul and the soul's fall from grace._\n\nA: He did not prevent, once having given free will. For, He made the individual entities or souls in the beginning. For, the beginnings of sin, of course, were in seeking expression of themselves outside of the plan or the way in which God had expressed same. Thus it was the individual, see?\n\nHaving given free will, then\u2014though having the foreknowledge, though being omnipotent and omnipresent\u2014it is only when the soul that is a portion of God _chooses_ that God knows the end thereof.\n\n_Q: The fourth problem concerns man's tenancy on earth. Was it originally intended that souls remain out of earthly forms, and were the races originated as a necessity resulting from error?_\n\nA: The earth and its manifestations were only the expression of God and not necessarily as a place of tenancy for the souls of men, until man was created\u2014to meet the needs of existing conditions.\n\n_Q: The fifth problem concerns an explanation of the Life Readings. From a study of these it seems that there is a trend downward, from early incarnations, toward greater earthliness and less mentality. Then there is a swing upward, accompanied by suffering, patience, and understanding. Is this the normal pattern, which results in virtue and oneness with God obtained by free will and mind?_\n\n_A:_ This is correct. It is the pattern as it is set in Him.\n\n_Q: The sixth problem concerns interplanetary and inter-system dwelling, between earthly lives. It was given through this source that the entity Edgar Cayce, after the experience as Uhjltd, went to the system of Arcturus, and then returned to earth. Does this indicate a usual or an unusual step in soul evolution?_\n\nA: As indicated, or as has been indicated in other sources besides this as respecting this very problem\u2014Arcturus is that which may be called the center of this universe, through which individuals pass and at which period there comes the choice of the individual as to whether it is to return to complete there\u2014that is, in this planetary system, our sun, the earth sun and its planetary system\u2014or to pass on to others. This was an unusual step, and yet a usual one.\n\n_Q: The seventh problem concerns implications from the sixth problem. Is it necessary to finish the solar system cycle before going to other systems?_\n\nA: Necessary to finish the solar cycle.\n\n_Q: Can oneness be attained_ \u2014 _or the finish of evolution reached_ \u2014 _on any system, or must it be in a particular one?_\n\nA: Depending upon what system the entity has entered, to be sure. It may be completed in any of the many systems.\n\n_Q: Must the solar cycle be finished on earth, or can it be completed on another planet, or does each planet have a cycle of its own which must be finished?_\n\nA: If it is begun on the earth it must be finished on the earth. The solar system of which the earth is a part is only a portion of the whole. For, as indicated in the number of planets about the earth, they are of one and the same\u2014and they are relative one to another. It is the cycle of the whole system that is finished, see?\n\n_Q: The eighth problem concerns the pattern made by parents at conception. Should it be said that this pattern attracts a certain soul because it approximates conditions, which that soul wishes to work with?_\n\nA: It approximates conditions. It does not set. For, the individual entity or soul, given the opportunity, has its own free will to work in or out of those problems as presented by that very union. Yet the very union, of course, attracts or brings a channel or an opportunity for the expression of an individual entity.\n\n_Q: Does the incoming soul take on of_ necessity _some of the parents' karma?_\n\nA: Because of its relative relationship to same, yes. Otherwise, no.\n\n_Q: Does the soul itself have an earthly pattern, which fits back into the one created by the parents?_\n\n_A:_ Just as indicated, it is relative\u2014as one related to another; and because of the union of activities they are brought in the pattern. For in such there is the explanation of universal or divine laws, which are ever one and the same; as indicated in the expression that God moved within Himself and then He didn't change, though did bring to Himself that of His own being made crucified even in the flesh.\n\n_Q: Are there several patterns which a soul might lake on, depending on what phase of development it wished to work upon_ \u2014 _i.e., could a soul choose to be one of several personalities, any of which would fit its individuality?_\n\nA: Correct.\n\n_Q: Is the average fulfillment of the soul's expectation more or less than fifty percent?_\n\n_A:_ It's a continuous advancement, so it is more than fifty percent.\n\n_Q: Are hereditary, environment and will equal factors in aiding or retarding the entity's development?_\n\nA: Will is the greater factor, for it may overcome any or all of the others; provided that will is made one with the pattern, see? For, no influence of heredity, environment or what not, surpasses the will; else why would there have been that pattern shown in which the individual soul, no matter how far astray it may have gone, may enter with Him into the holy of holies?\n\n_Q: The ninth problem concerns the proper symbols, or similes, for the Master, the Christ. Should Jesus be described as the soul who first went through the cycle of earthly lives to attain perfection, including perfection in the planetary lives also?_\n\n_A:_ He should be. This is as the man, see?\n\nQ: Should this _be described as a voluntary mission One Who was already perfected and returned to God, having accomplished His Oneness in other planes and systems?_\n\nA: Correct.\n\n_Q: Should the Christ Consciousness be described as the awareness within each soul, imprinted in pattern on the mind and waiting to be awakened by the will, of the soul's oneness with God?_\n\n_A:_ Correct. That's the idea exactly!\n\n_Q: Please list the names of the incarnations of the Christ, and of Jesus, indicating where the development of the man Jesus began._\n\nA: First, in the beginning, of course; and then as Enoch, Melchizedek, in the perfection. Then in the earth of Joseph, Joshua, Jeshua, Jesus.\n\n_Q: The tenth problem concerns the factors of soul evolution. Should mind, the builder, be described as the last development because it should not unfold until it hasa firm foundation of emotional virtues?_\n\nA: This might be answered Yes and No, both. But if it is presented in that there is kept, willfully, see, that desire to be in the at-onement, then it is necessary for that attainment before it recognizes mind as the way.\n\n_Q: The eleventh problem concerns a parallel with Christianity. Is Gnosticism the closest type of Christianity to that which is given through this source?_\n\nA: This is a parallel, and was the commonly accepted one until there began to be set rules in which there were the attempts to take short cuts. And there are none in Christianity!\n\n_Q: What action of the early church, or council, can be mentioned as that which ruled reincarnation from Christian theology?_\n\nA: Just as indicated\u2014the attempts of individuals to accept or take advantage of, because of this knowledge, see?\n\n_Q: Do souls become entangled in other systems as they did in this system?_\n\nA: In other systems that represent the same as the earth does in this system, yes.\n\n_Q: Is there any other advice which may be given to this entity at this time in the preparation of these chapters?_\n\nA: Hold fast to that ideal, and using Him ever as the Ideal. And hold up that _necessity_ for each to meet the same problems. And _do not_ attempt to shed or to surpass or go around the Cross. This is that upon which each and every soul must look and know it is to be borne in self _with_ Him.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n_Text of Reading 900-70 M 30 (Stockbroker, Jewish)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 322 Grafton Avenue, Dayton, Ohio. this 12th day of May, 1925, in accordance with request made by [900].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Mrs. Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 11:00 A.M. Dayton Savings Time.\n\nGC: You will have before you the subject matter as was given in psychic state by the body Edgar Cayce, and questions on same as prepared by the enquiring mind of [900]. You will answer these questions as I ask them, in such a manner as to be understood by the mind of [900],\n\nEC: Yes, we have this here. We have had this before, you see, that as transcribed from that given by Edgar Cayce while in the psychic state. Ready for questions.\n\n_Q: Explain as clearly as possible the definition of Evolution as relates to Man, first in Spirit plane, then in flesh and blood on earth and again in spirit plane. What is man and how may we in flesh become fully conscious and aware of the Spiritual Self?_\n\nA: In this we find the understanding would, from physical viewpoint, never be understood by the cycle as is asked. The evolution of man in spiritual plane being one, the evolution of man in flesh being another. Hence, as has been given, hard to understand conditions in one plane when viewed from another plane, without the realization of having experienced that plane. Now evolution in flesh, as is seen, is the passing through the flesh plane and in the various experiences of man's sojourn in earth, through his (man's) environment as created and made by man, this is called man's evolution in the earth plane. As we have in the beginning of man's sojourn in earth plane, we find under what is termed at the present time or day, or plane of man, the primitive man. The man seeking the first of the attributes of fleshly existence, known only by those conditions surrounding man and his environments. As man applies the laws of which he (man) becomes conscious of, the development of man brings forth those results merited by that knowledge. As man passes into the spiritual plane from earthly existence, the development in the spiritual plane becoming the same evolution in spiritual planes as is acquired in the physical plane, and until man becomes in the spiritual sense the one-ness with the Creator's forces, as is set by example of the Son of Man coming in the flesh to the earth plane to manifest in the flesh the will made one with the Father, passing through the physical plane, passing through the spiritual planes, making _all_ one with the Father. This we find then is evolution. Man's development through man's acquiring man's understanding of spiritual laws, of earthly laws, of God's laws, and applying same in the earth. Then truly is it given, \"The righteous shall inherit the earth.\"\n\n_Q: Does Man created as Matter, Force and Mind mean Physical, Spiritual and Mental?_\n\nA: Man created having the attributes of the physical, the spiritual, the mental, to work with in his own development. These, as it were, tools of the whole man, the all being then one, and that same separated is the attributes of the various conditions, each having its single, its separate attributes, and man using same for man's development.\n\n_Q: When earth plane became ready for Man, how did he first get here? In the Bible we have the story of Adam and Eve. Explain in a reasonable, logical way how did Man first appear on earth. Explain this in relation to birth, to conception._\n\nA: As is given, man, when earth became habitable for physical man, man entered in the plane, just as the highest of created forces in the earth plane. Then became man amenable to laws of earth plane, and amenable to physical birth, physical conditions, physical conceptions, physical forces as applied to the whole man. Physical, mental and spiritual forces manifest in man, taken in this conception as was given from the beginning. As the earth plane became in that state wherein man may find residence, the spirit forces as are developing through the spiritual forces to make one with the Father, given the soul of man to make manifest in the flesh. All souls were created in the beginning, all spirit of one spirit, Spirit of God, that spirit manifest in flesh, that spirit manifest in all creation, whether of earthly forces or Universal forces, all spirit being one spirit. All flesh not one flesh. Flesh being that as has merited by its development in its plane of existence.\n\n_Q: Is every chemical quality found in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdom of the world found in Man? Explain, if not, what is meant by \"There is found in Living Man all of that that may be found without in the whole world\"._\n\nA: All those essential forces as are manifest in the Universe are manifest in the living man, and above that the soul of man. The chemical or material, or animated forces as are seen in all animal, vegetable, mineral forces, with their combinations, are found in the combinations in man, and from same may be created, for man is Lord over creation, from the physical viewpoint.\n\n_Q: Explain how the example of Man's developing and improving his mode ofliving scientifically on earth, for example in medical work and all other sciences, proves his development and evolution on earth and other planes._\n\nA: Man's development, as given, is of man's understanding and applying the laws of the Universe, and as man applies those, man develops, man brings up the whole generation of man. Individuals we find carry out certain elements and laws, and gradually man becomes capable of applying and using those in the everyday life of man. This, whether applied in medical science, in anatomal [anatomic] science, in mechanical science or what not, is merely the development, or the application as man applies to Universal laws as are ever, and have ever been, existent in the Universe. As is in this. That producing electrical units of force was just as applicable to the Universal forces in the days of Adam as in the days of the Master, or as in the days of today. Those laws applying to aerial of transmission just as applicable in one as in other. Man not understanding those. Many times has the evolution of the earth reached the stage of development as it has today and then sank again, to rise again in the next development. Some along one line, some along others, for often we find the higher branches of so-called learning destroys itself in the seed it produces in man's development, as we have in medical forces, as we have astrological forces, as we have in some forms of spiritual forces, as we have in forms of destructive forces of the various natures.\n\n_Q: Explain how the Law of Relativity applies to Man's development to his evolution?_\n\nA: As each and every atom in the Universe has its relative relation with every other atom, then man's development lies in the relativity of all forces, whether applied in the physical world as existent today, or that existence in man's earthly existence before, for the relativity of one force applies to another. Hence all relative forces apply to man's development, whether mental, physical or spiritual.\n\n_Q: To what development must the soul reach before it may first find lodgment in the flesh?_\n\n_A:_ Desire for flesh.\n\n_Q: How does Soul manifest Will's desire to take on fleshly existence?_\n\n_A:_ Spiritual subject and spiritually understood. When we reach those conditions and that development necessary to understand the law of taking those, we may gather these forces.\n\n_Q: Explain: Reincarnation of the Soul from an appearance in Flesh to the next as it relates to Evolution, and step by step tell us just what other body the soul and spirit takes on after it leaves flesh existence and of what the soul and spirit becomes conscious after it leaves flesh existence._\n\nA: We are through.\n\n#### **Reading 5749\u20133**\n\n_Q: Discuss the various phases of spiritual development before and after reincarnation in the earth._\n\nA: This may be illustrated best in that which has been sought through example in the earth.\n\nWhen there was in the beginning a man's advent into the plane known as earth, and it became a living soul, amenable to the laws that govern the plane itself as presented, the Son of man entered earth as the first man. Hence the Son of man, the Son of God, the Son of the first Cause, making manifest in a material body.\n\nThis was not the first spiritual influence, spiritual body, spiritual manifestation in the earth, but the first man\u2014flesh and blood; the first carnal house, the first amenable body to the laws of the plane in its position in the universe.\n\nFor, _the earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds!_\n\nAnd man's development began through the laws of the generations in the earth; thus the development, retardment, or the alterations in those positions in a material plane.\n\nAnd with error entered that as called _death,_ which is only a transition\u2014or through God's other door\u2014into that realm where the entity has builded, in its manifestations as related to the knowledge and activity respecting the law of the universal influence.\n\nHence the development is through the planes of experience that an entity may become one _with_ the first cause; even as the angels that wait before the Throne bring the access of the influence in the experience through the desires and activities of an entity, or being, in whatever state, place or plane of development the entity is passing.\n\nFor, in the comprehension of no time, no space, no beginning, no end, there may be the glimpse of what simple transition or birth into the material is; as passing through the other door into another consciousness.\n\nDeath in the material plane is passing through the outer door into a consciousness in the material activities that partakes of what the entity, or soul, has done with its spiritual truth in its manifestations in the other sphere.\n\nHence, as there came the development of that first entity of flesh and blood through the earth plane, he became _indeed_ the Son\u2014through the things which He experienced in the varied planes, as the development came to the oneness with the position in that which man terms the Triune.\n\n_Q: Are angels and archangels synonymous with that which we call the laws of the universe? If so, explain and give an example._\n\nA: They are as the laws of the universe; as is Michael the lord of the Way, _not_ the Way but the lord of the Way, hence disputed with the influence of evil as to the way of the spirit of the teacher or director in his entrance through the outer door. [See Jude 1:9 in re Michael the archangel \"when contending with the devil about the body of Moses\" when Moses died.]\n\n_Q: Describe some of the planes into which entities pass on experiencing the change called death._\n\nA: Passing from the material consciousness to a spiritual or cosmic, or outer consciousness, oft does an entity or being not become conscious of that about it; much in the same manner as an entity born into the material plane only becomes conscious gradually of that designated as time and space for the material or third dimensional plane. In the passage the entity becomes conscious, or the recognition of being in a fourth or higher dimensional plane takes place, much in the same way as the consciousness is gained in the material.\n\nFor, as we have given, that we see manifested in the material plane is but a shadow of that in the spiritual plane.\n\nIn materiality we find some advance faster, some grow stronger, some become weaklings. Until there is redemption through the acceptance of the law (or love of God, as manifested through the Channel or the Way), there can be little or no development in a material or spiritual plane. But all must pass under the rod, even as He\u2014who entered into materiality.\n\nWe are through.\n\n**Editor's Note: The following Cayce discourses on reincarnation begin with a request to interpret a dream concerning reincarnation.**\n\n_Text of Reading 900-156 M 30 (Stockbroker, Jewish)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 4th day of November, 1925, in accordance with request made by self\u2014[900].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Mrs. Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 11:20 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. New York City.\n\nGC: You will have before you the body and the enquiring mind of [900], of Apt........ St., New York City, and the dreams this body had on the dates which I will give you. You will give the interpretation and lesson to be gained from each of these, as I read same to you, and you will answer the questions which I shall ask you regarding same.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the body, the enquiring mind, [900]. This we have had here before. The dreams, as we see, are the conditions in subconscious, mental, superconscious and cosmic forces, weighed together in such a manner as to give to the body-mind consciousness those of lessons or of visions of conditions, whether in the mental, the superficial, the subconscious or from the cosmic forces, and often are a combination of all, for as has been given, there may be much given as relating to dreams, and especially when one has reached that development such as this entity, and when there is such a message to be given to the peoples, that the living forces as manifest in the physical world may be known of men, through the study of that phenomena as is experienced and known by this entity. Ready for dreams.\n\n_Q: Wednesday morning, Oct. 28, at home . . . Wednesday night while reading Bible: \"Saw an old man_ \u2014 _or one with iron gray hair walk by me.\"_\n\nA: This, as the subconscious and mental, gives to the consciousness that understanding as is seen by the entity, for as to the physical mind, one of ripe years in earth plane, one with mental and physical experiences that have given the physical mind that understanding, that concept, of the physical existences in the plane of those conditions necessary to make knowledge. Such is being acquired by this entity, and in the emblematical form is shown the lesson. Seek then the knowledge of the seer and the sages, that through this entity much may be given to a waiting world.\n\n_Q: Thursday Morning, Oct. 29. \"Numbers 119.\"_\n\nA: This, as we see, the physical mind attempting to gain from the subconscious forces that knowledge of conditions pertaining to that that is paramount in the physical mind. Relating, then, to that condition which will arise, as has been given, regarding prices of stocks\u2014L _&_ N, see? This, as we have seen, will occur when other changes have set in and the combinations begin to break up.\n\n_Q: Does this 119 refer to L & N or Southern?_\n\n_A:_ As given, this will occur as a price of L _&_ N, but as given in those concerning the combinations and changes that will come in the future.\n\n_Q:_ The _whole of this dream not remembered by [900]. Recall and interpret. That recalled as follows: \"I was married to Miriam Miller and things seemed miserable or wrong. Some certain things seemed unsatisfactory, but it was within myself as well as circumstances.\"_\n\nA: The portion not recalled is as this: There was the meeting of a certain board and the entity, with others, especially with one, Wormser, was present. The question as to the relations with an individual was brought up in a manner that entity felt that the reference was to self. Then that remembered brought that to the remembrance, or to the body consciousness, in the form as given, for this then represents in the physical mind a condition not wholly acceptable or pleasing to the entity, as to duty to self and to others. Then the lesson should be, as the warnings have been given to entity that there is the duty to self, to home ties, to that of the social ties, to that of business relations and business social connections, these all must be made into that oneness of purpose; that is, to give best in self to service to each and all of these conditions as they arise, see?\n\n_Q: What reference has this in my present life?_\n\nA: That as given.\n\n_Q: Does this indicate just a condition I have overcome_ \u2014 _indicating in emblematical form the overcoming in the flesh and the blessings therefrom_ \u2014 _or the submission to the flesh test and the dissatisfaction therefrom?_\n\nA: Rather the combination of each as is given, see? bringing in the mental forces of entity, then, the not entire satisfactory condition, see? yet each duty must be weighed, considered and kept in that _one purpose_ manner, service to self, to man, to social ties, to all those conditions as given.\n\n_Q: Does it also show me that reason of the phenomenized condition_ \u2014 _to strengthen and test the individual portion, that under every condition the Spiritual Power in the portion is used in the manner the Power of the Whole is used? In this do I see my own development?_\n\n_A:_ In this entity sees own development, with the weaknesses, with the strengths as gained for self and conditions as existent, as given, see?\n\n_Q: \"I was back in a department store, a clerk behind the counter, even as I was in past days. I waited on people_ \u2014 _serving them, but it seemed I was in love with some girl. Some dissatisfaction resulted and I was miserable. Then the Voice: 'Here are you tested as much as anywhere.' Then I felt terrible, as though I had failed in something, in living up to that which was expected of me_ \u2014 _that I had retarded_ \u2014 _returned to old conditions, instead of living the ideals I had set for myself.\"_\n\n_A:_ Rather that in this as the interpretation and lesson: That often the self, mentally, spiritually, physically, should take stock of self, as is seen in department stores run on the correct basis, and that the loves for certain or for particular conditions that exist in the life, whether the mental or the desire of flesh, or of the spiritual forces, all must be weighed well, and as the Voice is given, the test is that entity keeps the standard in that manner that gives the progressive forces to self and abilities to give out in service, as is necessary for advancement in every phase of the phenomenized life, see?\n\n_Q: Does this refer to [136] in any way, in my failure to live up to the test in relation to her_ \u2014 _that is the test of being in the flesh what God is in the Spiritual, that I may attain that Spiritual condition_ \u2014 _and being this in the flesh in every condition of life_ \u2014 _every phase?_\n\n_A:_ This rather that of self than of relations with others, save that as is given, see?\n\n_Q: Explain this particular reference of failure to so exemplify the perfection of the Whole in the individual phenomenized form_ \u2014 _that is the secret of the whole message_ \u2014 _\"That The Individual Phenomenized Being, possessing all the Elements of the Whole, shall in phenomenized form manifest the Perfection of the Elemental Whole_ \u2014 _thus proving Christ_ \u2014 _proving Itself ready for the Work, Power, Action, Peace and Eternal Life One with the Whole_ \u2014 _ready for the Kingdom of God\" This is the kernel of the whole message of [900] is it not? Where or in what phenomenized relation of life is [900] not measuring up to this test?_\n\nA: In only that manner as is given, see? All of these, when measured by that as given in the mind of [900] as necessary for the readiness to present that force as draws men closer to the Kingdom, see? Then measure the standard\u2014not measure self by self, but as to the standard set in the _one_ as _exemplifies God_ in the _flesh._\n\n_Q: The subconscious_ \u2014 _cosmic consciousness_ \u2014 _super-consciousness_ \u2014 _spiritual forces, which reflect in symbolic form in our physical life. Correct?_\n\nA: Correct.\n\n_Q: Let the light represent the Spiritual, the film the physical faculties of senses (mind), and the moving picture on the screen this physical life_ \u2014 _talking, feeling, lasting, thinking, emotion, etc., and one has a good comparison. Changing pictures, but One Fixed Light._\n\nA: Correct.\n\n_Q: Explain this phenomena shown to [900] objectively and co-relate with Edgar Cayce in psychic state and with dreams and voice heard when asleep by [900]._\n\n_A:_ As is seen, and as may be given in the physical, as has been explained before. One, Edgar Cayce, working from within, see? [900] working from the objective forces, yet gaining from within the resounding, or the re-projection through voice, through dream, through the co-relation of all of these faculties that are guided by spiritual forces from within, while that as is obtained through Edgar Cayce guided by that from without, through another force than self, see?\n\n_Q: \"Saw numbers 127 and others higher but can't remember. Recall, interpret, co-relate and explain how they should be used.\"_\n\n_A:_ This as already given, relating to the L _&_ N in its advance, and is given that the entity, [900], may begin to understand numbers in their co-relation one with another, see?\n\n_Q: Sunday Night, Nov. 1, 1925, at home, while reading Isis Unveiled by H. P.Blavatsky. \"Dozing over that part of the book regarding Reincarnation, the following: Saw a book case with a glass door of which the glass was cracked. The Voice: 'We have drapes to cover that here.'\"_\n\nA: This, as we find, the mind of the individual, [900], co-relating with subconscious and with cosmic forces those portions of truths gathered in that just read. This, then, presented as bookcase, as knowledge\u2014covered, see? As conditions show break, the film over same, the presentation of the various conditions, shows how these must be studied by the entity and gained in a way that the entity will bring the perfect understanding to self concerning, relating to, that phase of the conditions not yet understood by many, for this, as we see, turns to the phenomenized conditions as are existent in the earth's plane, and through the study of same will the entity gain the knowledge pertaining to reincarnation and its effect on the lives, on the conditions existent in the earth's plane.\n\n_Q: Does this indicate I am to get for myself, from my own experience the knowledge of reincarnation?_\n\nA: This, as given, the entity will gain this conception for self of the phenomenized forces of reincarnation in the earth's plane.\n\n_Q: Is indicated that I should give my version_ \u2014 _my own understanding in my own simple way\u2014for although I understand what is meant, I don't understand the theosophical terminology. Give then simply, in my simple way (use phenomena of gas for example) for all minds to grasp, rather than just students of theosophy or any one branch of study. Is that what is meant?_\n\n_A:_ That is what is meant, for as we see, we may use that terminology from gas; from the whole there arises that power, that force, in another form to work wonders in the various mechanical devices made by man, see? Power of an individual object (if choose to be termed so) giving of self in another form, yet that same form. Same may be applicable from the terminology of the electrical unit. As the force and power of the turbine is manifested in its rotation, the same is given off in many channels, for the electrical units, which may be added to or taken from, to give service to man. Or as may be termed in the vegetable kingdom, a grain of wheat is sown. It dies, that the fruit of same may germinate into other fruit, see? The same Spirit\u2014not the same Body, yet with all the potential faculties of reproduction within itself and of the ability to supply food in the same proportion, dependent upon its environment throughout its fruition, same as man, as man passes through one environment gaining that knowledge, that force necessary for the body-mind, the spiritual forces, pertaining to the physical conditions as manifest in same, see? Then the spiritual elements of same gaining in the phenomenized form in a world those things necessary to make the entity One with the Whole, see? All of these, then, may be co-related, may be brought under one head, one phraseology, one terminology, by the mental forces and abilities of [900], and given in the simple form and manner to the public, the world, that they may understand that these forces ever manifest their God's spiritual forces in the world, manifesting through the same entity\u2014spiritually.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**Editor's Note: The same dreamer got the following reading from Cayce on a different reincarnation dream.**\n\n#### **Reading 900\u2013273**\n\n_Q: This morning, or this morning's dream had regarding reincarnation, the details of which are here written._\n\nA: In this there are presented the fundamentals, as it were, of many various experiences as the entity will pass through by the concerted effort of the body conscious mind, for in the presentation of the vision as is seen, these become those properties of the physical mind, obtained from a vision, as it were, of the various forces as are loosed in the Universal Forces by disintegration, and by re-integration, as it were, of various forces manifesting individually and collectively, and as these various forces are presented, we will find the various phases of re-incarnation, its fundamentals, its application to that of the various conditions as present themselves to man, in the developing of the mental abilities of man to understand conditions as are seen in the world today\u2014for, as we see presented here an individual well in years, yet just presenting the first phases of a renewed _life,_ and then we see the same phases as are termed by _individuals_ know to the _entity,_ and changed again into realities by the presentation of various forms of an intelligent force, acting dependently yet independent in their reaction, see? meaning as in this: That, as each force in the reincarnation of the elements begin as in this\u2014in creation, see\u2014now we are beginning from first principles, see? from the first principles, we find these are separated into integral parts. For instance, as we take that as the most elemental conditions\u2014water-separated into two elements, yet each time these elements are combined in certain forms the same common principle is presented. Now, we have had, then, the reincarnation of an elemental principle into that as is materialized before the _material_ forces in earth's plane into the form of an elemental condition. Again we find through this same elemental condition\u2014water\u2014we begin with the first forms of life. First those of the nature without body, without the elemental forces of even propagation. Again these grow into that form of able to move and begin then to multiply, by the division, forming then the first cell forces. In cell forces, then, we have taken on the first principle of the beginning of that as is seen in the evolution of an ideal in that brain force or center. Hence we find reincarnation, resuscitation, and that of the re-inhibition [re-inhabitation?], becoming a portion of those very conditions as the first principle in same, or the very first experience in same, to the body mind of [900], presented in this.\n\n#### **Reading 826\u20138**\n\n_Q: Must each soul continue to be reincarnated in the earth until it reaches perfection, or are some souls lost?_\n\nA: Can God lose itself, if God be God\u2014or is it submerged, or is it as has been given, carried into the universal soul or consciousness? The soul is not lost; the _individuality_ of the soul that separates itself is lost. The reincarnation or the opportunities are continuous until the soul has of itself become an _entity_ in its whole or has submerged itself.\n\n_Q: If a soul fails to improve itself, what becomes of it?_\n\n_A:_ That's why the reincarnation, why it reincarnates; that it _may_ have the opportunity. Can the will of man continue to defy its Maker?\n\n#### **Reading 956\u20131**\n\n_Q: What will convince me of reincarnation?_\n\nA: An experience.\n\n#### **Reading 452\u20136**\n\nQ: _What part of New Testament definitely teaches Reincarnation?_\n\nA: John. Six to eight. Third to fifth. Then the rest as a whole.\n\n### **2**\n\n### **Insightful Past-Life Readings by Edgar Cayce**\n\n_Text of Reading 342-2 M 48 (Unemployed Executive, Protestant Background)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his home on Arctic Crescent, Va. Beach, Va., this 29th day of May, 1933, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Mr. [342], Active Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mildred Davis, L.B. Cayce and E.B. Lindsley.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn September 4, 1884, about 7:00 A.M. in Schultzville, Pa. Time of Reading 4:15 to 5:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. . . . , Ill. (Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe, and universal forces\u2014that are latent and manifested in the personalities of the entity now known as [342].\n\nIn entering, we find the astrological influences that are innate (or the inhibitions of the entity) and those from the appearances, or experiences through the earth, have those been somewhat opposed one to another.\n\nHence there would be, only from an astrological aspect, some very varying presentations; yet their influence being inhibitions\u2014and the entity's development rather of the intuitive influences, a great deal must be considered for the information given to be of a value to the entity in the present experience.\n\nComing in the present experience, then, from those influences in the combination of Jupiter and Uranus, there are rather the exceptional abilities for the entity to retain in self that which may be called knowledge, or learning; or that which may be termed the ability to correlate experiences of others in such a manner as to make them valuable to self. Not that the entity would be termed one easily influenced by group or mass thought, yet the entity\u2014being not too credulous, not too incredulous\u2014has the ability, through its intuitive influence that may be exercised (from Uranus), to weigh or judge well as to how a matter is presented as to its value in practical application in the experience of a body.\n\nHence the entity may be termed, from this experience, as an individual who would be a good organizer in any field of endeavor; and, as we find, one that would make exceptional progress in the present experience in the field that is known as industrial or commercial\u2014or cooperative\u2014insurance; though the entity's efforts to the present have been little in this field of activity, yet this\u2014as we find\u2014would offer a field that would make for the opportunity for the abilities to be used that have been innately builded in the entity's inner self, with the possibilities of making for self\u2014in the present experience\u2014a place that may be an enviable one in this field of endeavor.\n\nAlso from Venus' influence we find the entity is one that, in the acts of everyday affairs, is considerate of others; one with a high sense of honor, of justice, of those feelings that may be experienced by others with whom the entity may have personal or group experience.\n\nHence the entity is one capable of making friendships easily, yet choosing from same those who may be\u2014in the mental and material fields\u2014of the greatest advantage; though not advantageous to the entity's activities; for, with the sense of honor, with the thought of others, the entity is not inclined to take advantage of another, whether in social, in moral, or in commercial relations one with another, and at times has been called an individual not hardboiled enough for his own good; yet if the efforts and activities\u2014as we find\u2014are expended in the right direction, this characteristic, this ability to express the personality, the enthusiasm that the entity is able to work itself up to on any proposition\u2014either mental, spiritual or material (if convinced of the sincerity, the plausibility and possibilities), may be expanded upon by the entity in such a manner as to produce enthusiasm in the efforts of those with whom the entity may surround self in any endeavor.\n\nThe entity, from the _combination_ of these astrological influences, is one that is a very good judge of human nature; being naturally\u2014from Uranian, Jupiterian _and_ Venus' influence\u2014an analyst in every act; and judging from those activities the entity may gain in this experience, though he has lost\u2014as will be seen\u2014in many an earth experience.\n\nFrom these astrological influences that affect the body in the present, we find these as both individual and personal aspects of the entity:\n\nOne that is a student in any field in which the entity finds an innate or mental interest; and these turned toward those of the mental body, as well as commercial influences.\n\nOne that remembers dates, periods and activities, through associations of those things that deal with the response individuals make to some proposition, some term or turn, some experience, in their own life.\n\nIn this also we find one that is capable of directing groups. One not so much as the leader of mob force or influence, but as an executive influence in correlating the _mental_ activities of groups.\n\nOne that finds some little details that become as hobbies to the entity, in gathering about self things that to others have\u2014and to self has\u2014little commercial value, yet a great deal of sentiment attached to those things that the entity holds or keeps rather as hobbies in the entity's experience for diversion in the varied fields of activity.\n\nAs to the appearances, then, and their effect upon the entity in the present experience, in drawing a comparison for an entity, here we find a condition that may be well to give as an explanation for the entity's own application; while it would not be always wholly applicable in the experience of others that are balanced in an opposite manner, or a variation, from that which has been indicated for the entity:\n\nWhile there are those karmic influences that must be met, because of that which has been builded by an entity (that retains, maintains, kinship with the Creative influences), it must of itself meet that which is the measure according to the law as related to universal forces. Or, to put it in another manner:\n\nIt is not all for an entity, or a soul, to have knowledge concerning law; whether karmic law, spiritual law, penal law, social law, or what not. The _condition_ is, what does the entity _do about_ the knowledge that is gained! Is the knowledge used to evade cause and effect, or is it used to coerce individuals into adhering to the thoughts of self? or is it used to _aid_ others in _their_ understanding _of_ the law, and _thus_ bring the cause to that position where the _will_ of the Creative influence is supreme; or the power that comes with making the will one _with_ the law of love, of karma, of cause and effect, of every influence\u2014one _with_ Creation!\n\nHence the conditions that will be seen in the experiences of the entity now known as [342] in the earth's plane:\n\nIn the one before this we find the entity was in and about that place, or plain, known as Fort Dearborn, during those periods when there was the establishing of the relationships with the peoples of the north country and the peoples of the eastern and southern country.\n\nThe entity then was among the peoples of the north country that were sent as emissaries, or to deal with the situations in the trading of that the peoples of the north country had to offer in exchange for those things made, created or imported into the land from other countries. Hence, not as a trader but as a mediator _for_ the traders in their various capacities did the entity, then as Pericho, gain and lose in this experience. For, seeing how there might be brought about the taking of all that was then in possession of the post, for those peoples of the much larger powers in numbers, the entity then urged rather that there be the possessing of same without the formality of returning an exchange for same of equal value, and the entity lost. Yet, with the hardships that came about, with the losing of control over those the entity would in the experience direct, the entity learned a lesson, in bodily suffering as well as in the _condemning_ of _self_ for the position taken.\n\nAnd each soul may find that self-condemnation becomes, after all, the hell in which it finds itself in the transition periods.\n\nHence in the present experience the entity finds much of the commercial field being of interest, especially that as in relationships to the trading between groups, masses and individuals; yet the field that offers an assurance and a security for individuals or groups may be made the more satisfactory to the entity in the present experience. [See 342\u20131 indicating he was in the Royalist Army during the American Revolution.]\n\nIn the one before this we find the entity was in that period when there were the gatherings of the peoples to enter into the holy wars.\n\nThe entity then was among the Crusaders that, with Bruce and others, started for the Holy Land.\n\nThen the entity was a zealot for those of the few that would impel all to come under one rule of order, if not by persuasion then by coercion, and the entity gained and lost through this experience; for, entering into the lands about the Holy Land, being among those of the prisoners that were turned to those that were\u2014to the entity in the beginning\u2014as heathen, these became through their acts of kindness\u2014such that the entity was rather inclined to be of a different mind, and became a zealot in _this_ direction. Hence the entity was termed by many as a turncoat, or as one that rebelled for self's own interests; yet the entity gained in the latter portion, feeling and knowing\u2014through the experience of that period\u2014that _truly_ all force, all power of a spiritual or mental nature, emanates from a _one_ source.\n\nHence in the present there is seen that much thought is given to the spiritual side of life.\n\nHence in fields of activity in which the home or the associations, or the business relations, may be _assured_ to peoples\u2014for not only the material, but for the mental aptitudes and welfare _of_ groups, may the entity find a channel through which it may gain the greater self- development in the present experience.\n\nThen the entity was in the name Charleon, and was of a northern and a southern France connection in that period.\n\nIn the one before this we find the entity was in that land now known as the Persian, among those peoples that had gathered in the hill and plain country for the teachings that were being given by a leader in the city that was established there, of tents; later being among the first wood buildings in this particular portion of the land.\n\nThe entity was among those that made for the gathering of those things that were as foods or provisions for the peoples; hence entering into the trading with the peoples in the various lands, as they brought their wares from the south, from the east, from the north, from the west, for _exchange_ in this particular region.\n\nThrough this experience the entity gained most, for\u2014coming under the direct influence of those that had been raised in their activities by the leader in this period (Uhjltd)\u2014the entity, then in the name Phar-Zar, gained; and when the breaking up came by the invasion of the Greeks from the north, the entity was among the first that fell under this raid or insurrection.\n\nSo, in the present, the entity finds those influences that are seen in sympathy; in maintaining about self those things that have not so much of the commercial value but a great deal of value from what the little things present in the experience of a body.\n\nIn the one before this we find the entity was in that land now known as the Nubian, during those periods when the priests from Egypt were exiled. The entity came under the direction of the high priest that was banished, and with the return of these peoples to their possessions\u2014or to their own lands, in the building up of that which enabled not only the Egyptian progress, but the Arabian, Indian, Mongolian, Carpathian, and the Carthaginian mountains even\u2014the entity was among those who aided in establishing for these various peoples those things of commercial value, as well as those posts for the ministrations to the physical needs of peoples.\n\nHence in the present is seen the particular interest of the entity in the reports that come from foundations, or from efforts of groups of people in all quarters of the globe. The entity has often wondered in self why such an interest in such data, when so little in common with same; and it would be\u2014and is\u2014one of the best proofs to the entity of these experiences in the earth's plane (or reincarnation).\n\nThen the entity was in the name Hap-Zta.\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity, that to which it may attain in the present experience\u2014and how:\n\nWe find, as we have indicated through those relationships builded innately\u2014as personality and individuality of the entity, through the experiences in the earth and through the sojourns in these spheres about the earth, there are the influences builded in the entity making for the assuring of better conditions, better positions, of the peoples in the home. Though there may be the stalking of those things that make people afraid, through those material and spiritual influences that may be builded in the hearts of the young and the old, in _these_ things may the entity build in the present that which will make for not only the _material_ development, but the mental and soul development also.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: What did I come here to do?_\n\nA: To overcome all those things you've undone!\n\n_Q: Should I continue to use the initial S in my signature? [As advised by numerologist Ed Hall? formerly known as Victor George]_\n\nA: W would be better than S. If preferable (and such conditions-there are some reasons why this should be retained), we would continue to use the S. W would have been better, had it been chosen.\n\n_Q: What can I do that I can best succeed in, at the same time render the best service to humanity?_\n\nA: That pertaining to cooperative or industrial insurance.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n#### **Reading 993\u20134**\n\n_Q: Can you now tell me what was my full name in my last reincarnation as a Fairfax?_\n\n_A:_ Nettie F.\n\n_Q: What was the full name of my father at that time?_\n\nA: John D. Fairfax.\n\n_Q: Is there any record of this? If so, where can it be located?_\n\n_A:_ There is a record that may be had from a _Mrs._ Fairfax (whose address may be had) in Washington; from the beginnings. It is of the Edwards family but brings is this.\n\n_Q: Please give details as to how my sister [560] then, Geraldine Fairfax, lost her life in being crushed in the earth. At what age was she?_\n\nA: Just the beginning of the teens, when there were those cave-ins from the preparations of some buildings in that period.\n\n_Q: How did it happen? Was she just playing around them?_\n\nA: Playing around; and then there were those activities from the earth trembling.\n\n#### **Reading 707\u20131**\n\n_Q: About how much time have I spent in reincarnation up to the present time?_\n\n_A:_ Almost in all the cycles that have had the incoming from period to period hast thou dwelt. Thine first incoming in the earth was during those periods of the Atlanteans that made for the divisions. Hence, counting in time, some twenty thousand years.\n\n#### **Reading 364\u20131 (A returning Atlantean)**\n\nBe it true that there is the fact of reincarnation, and that souls that once occupied such an environ are entering the earth's sphere and inhabiting individuals in the present, is it any wonder that\u2014if they made such alterations in the affairs of the earth in their day, as to bring destruction upon themselves\u2014if they are entering now, they might make many changes in the affairs of peoples and individuals in the present? Are they, then, _being_ born into the world? If so, what _were_ their environs\u2014and will those environs mean in a material world today?\n\n_Text of Reading 1210-3 M 55_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 24th day of August, 1937, in accordance with request made by the New York Study Group #5 of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Hugh Lynn Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 3:40 to 4:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. (Physical Suggestion)\n\nGC: We, the members of the N.Y. Group of the Ass'n for Research _&_ Enlightenment, engaged in a project to investigate reincarnation, have read and discussed the reading given us thru this channel June 29, 1937 [5753\u20132], advising us as individuals and as a group how we are to proceed in this work. We accept the instruction with the proper ideal as we understand it. We now ask for further guidance.\n\nThe members of the group actively seeking information are: [1058], [954], [1000], [189], [903], [255], [5416], [520], [1210], [165], [257], [1192].\n\nWe hope at this time to gain a better understanding of spiritual values through information on the lives of [1210], [759], [189], and [257] as these entities expressed themselves during the American Revolutionary period.\n\nWe first ask information concerning the activities and the remaining evidences of activities during the American Revolutionary period of the entity now known as [1210]\u2014known at that time as McQuade or Quer and by the first name of Herman.\n\nYou will have before you the enquiring mind of the entity [1210], born Nov. 4, 1881, Niagara Falls, N.Y., and now of . . . St., N.Y.C., who seeks information on his past incarnation in the American Revolutionary period. You will answer the questions which have been submitted.\n\nEC: (Not responding to first suggestion, had to be repeated\u2014and then only responding to last paragraph of suggestion\u2014\"Enquiring mind of [1210], born Nov. 4, 1881\u2014Aug. 24, 1937\u2014'36, '35-\" etc., on back to birth date.\n\nYes\u2014much better were these presented from the information that has been given, and its period, or else there is to be sought the reflection of the whole of the experience as from the beginning. We will seek here. (Mumbling over name, birth date, place of birth, etc.)\n\nYes, we have the records of that entity now known as [1210]; this with the interpretations as we have had here before.\n\nIn considering the experience of the entity during that period of the American Revolution, we find that the entity served especially in those activities or campaigns about portions of Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.\n\nThe entity then, as we have indicated, was in the name McQuade\u2014Quer\u2014McQuade\u2014Herman; born then in the experience in what is now a portion of Connecticut; and the training and the activities just prior to the Revolution were in a partial medical course. Then the activities during the Revolution were in what would be called in the present the caring for the protective forces about the camps as respecting the health. The entity, to be sure, was among the forces that served under Washington; more direct under Lee [Henry Lee, American general, called \"Light Horse Harry\"], who was active in the campaign in that particular portion of the land; yet coming as a supervisor or superintendent of many of the various sites or camps, or especially during the distress of the armies of the colonists at the time.\n\nHence as has been indicated, we find arising from the experiences of the entity during that sojourn the capacities in the attempting to cast out fear. For it was experienced by the entity during that period that when there could be aroused within the minds and the hearts and the experiences of the emotional forces of the individuals the awareness that there were purposes greater or beyond the self, these brought the possibilities, the abilities, the activities that made for the sustaining influences. And much of that was imbued into the minds of those during the trying periods, when the fires of patriotism burned low during that severe winter in Valley Forge.\n\nAnd these are the parts, the principles then that should be studied, if there would be knowledge gained of a nature that becomes a constructive experience in the activities of those in the present; that which is creative _grows,_ that which is destructive is already deteriorating.\n\nThus these live as those influences _within_ the innate forces of the soul's expression through experiences in the earth, and give rise to that which surrounds the activity of an individual entity.\n\nThus, as has been indicated, we have continually before us good, evil; life, death\u2014a choice to be made.\n\nAnd ever is the choice according to the _ideals_ of the entity, as it gives expression of the forces and influences in its experience.\n\nThe entity then was among those that endured until after the periods of the Brandywine, when there were those effective activities; yet to the entity the injuries that were brought made for the ending of the physical experience of Herman McQuade\u2014or Quer\u2014in or during that portion of the latter part of the southern Pennsylvania or the New Jersey campaign, just before the change from Lee's rebuke and the activities in the Maryland land and the rise to the arousing through the activities of Sumter.\n\nIn the period then, as to days, as to that which may be a record: We find in the cemetery, in what is a Trenton station or near to same, H. McQuade\u20141779\u201417\u2014No, it's nearly erased here\u2014Herman McQuade, H. McQuade\u2014H. McQuade\u20141777\u20139\u2014177\u2014seventeen seventy?\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Please correctly spell the name._\n\nA: Q-u-a-d-e.\n\n_Q: Where is this name recorded in a document which we can find now?_\n\nA: In the rebuke of Lee by Washington. Library\u2014Washington.\n\n_Q: Under what commanding officers did he serve?_\n\nA: As given.\n\n_Q: In what encampments did he serve?_\n\n_A:_ As given.\n\n_Q: Can we find any evidences of these sites and where?_\n\nA: No evidences as we find at the sites.\n\n_Q: In what battles was he engaged?_\n\nA: Not so much in the battles save as in Brandywine when the injury came that brought dissolution.\n\n_Q: Was he an officer and of what rank?_\n\nA: Not as an officer but what would be called today as in the quartermaster division, or the superintendent of the health.\n\n_Q: Follow for us the movements of the entity with the American Revolutionary Army giving us various points or battlefields. At which, if any, of these can we find remaining evidences and what?_\n\n_A:_ We have given these. Connecticut born; activities there; and when there was the abandoning of New York moved with the armies to then the Jersey and Pennsylvania and later a portion of the Maryland campaign; following through those periods of Valley Forge\u2014or to the activities of Brandywine\u2014and then the death there.\n\n_Q: Is there a record of baptism?_\n\n_A:_ We do not find same.\n\n_Q: Where did he make his home_ in _the Colonies?_\n\nA: In Connecticut.\n\n_Q: How and when did McQuade die?_\n\nA: From injuries received in Brandywine.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n_Text of Reading 5366-1 F 53 (Housewife, Protestant)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the office of the Association, Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 19th day of July, 1944, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [5366], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research _&_ Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Jeanette Fitch, Stenos.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn October 31, 1890, on a farm near . . . , Ohio.\n\nTime of Reading Set bet. 3:30 to 4:30 P.M. Eastern War Time. . . . , Mass.\n\nGC: You will give the relations of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, or giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the present entity, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them:\n\nEC: My! Some very interesting characters have been born near Bellefontaine! This entity was among those with that one who persecuted the church so thoroughly and fiddled while Rome burned. That's the reason this entity in body has been disfigured by structural conditions. Yet may this entity be set apart. For through its experiences in the earth, it has advanced from a low degree to that which may not even necessitate a reincarnation in the earth. Not that it has reached perfection but there are realms for instruction if the entity will hold to that ideal of those whom it once scoffed at because of the pleasure materially brought in associations with those who did the persecuting.\n\nIn giving the interpretation, then, of the records of this entity, there is much that may be said but, as has been indicated, we would minimize the faults, and we would magnify the virtues. Thus may little or nothing be given that would deter the entity in any manner from holding fast to that purpose which has become that to which it may hold. For, as Joshua of old, the entity has determined (and sometimes the entity becomes very disturbed) \"Others may do as they may, but as for me, I will serve the living God.\"\n\nAstrological aspects would be nil in the experiences of the entity. (Let's pray with the entity.) No such may be necessary in the experience again in the earth-materiality.\n\nRemember, there are material urges and there are materials in other consciousnesses not three-dimensions alone.\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth, these would only be touched upon, as indicated, to be a helpful experience for the entity, as:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, through the experiences in seeking for new undertakings with the associates or companions. The entity became a helper to those who sought to know more of that which had been the prompting of individuals to seek freedom and to know that which is the spirit of creation or creative energies. Thus did the entity grow in attempting to interpret man's relationship to the Creative Forces or God. The name then was Jane Eyericson.\n\nBefore that we find the entity, as mentioned, was a companion or associate of that one [Nero] who persecuted those who believed in, those who accepted faith in righteousness, in goodness, in crucifying of body desires, in crucifying the emotions which would gratify only appetites of a body, either through the physical self or through physical appetites of gormandizing, and of material desire for the arousing more of the beast in individual souls. [See 33\u20131, Par. 10-A.]\n\nIn the experience, then, the entity is meeting self in that which was a part of the experience as Emersen.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land when the children of promise entered into the promised land, when there were those whose companion or who father [Achan] sought for the gratifying of selfish desires in gold and garments and in things which would gratify only the eye. The entity was young in years and yet felt, as from those things which were told the entity, that a lack of material consideration was given the parent. The name then was Suthers.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Egyptian land. The entity was among those who were trained in the Temple Beautiful for a service among its fellow men, contributing much to the household and the establishing of homes. Thus is the home near and dear to the entity, as are members of same, whether of the body-family or of the help or kinsmen.\n\nThus again may the entity find, in its application of those tenets and truths in the present, that answering in experiences of the entity in that land.\n\nThen the entity was called Is-it-el.\n\nAs to the abilities:\n\nWho would tell the rose how to be beautiful; who would give to the morning sun, glory; who would tell the stars how to be beautiful? Keep that faith! which has prompted thee. Many will gain much from thy patience, thy consistence, thy brotherly love.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: What locality is best for me?_\n\n_A:_ In the middle west.\n\n_Q: What has been the incentive to heal and help others?_\n\nA: Read just what has been given.\n\n_Q: Should we invest a small sum of money in Tung Oil or Ramie land in the south, or a log cabin on a mountain side on . . . 's farm at . . . , Conn., for future vacations?_\n\nA: No. Those in the west we would prepare, or Ohio, Indiana, or Iowa. These would be the better and there invest; whether in Illinois, in oil, yes; Iowa, a rest home, yes; in Ohio, farmland.\n\n_Q: How have I been associated in the past with my husband, [4921]?_\n\nA: In the experience before this there were associations in which each was an incentive or a helper, and yet never closely associated. That's why ye disagree at times in the present. In the experience in Egypt in the same association as in the present, as were the children, though there were many more of them there.\n\n_Q: My son, [5249]?_\n\nA: As indicated.\n\n_Q: My son, [5242]?_\n\nA: As indicated.\n\nQ: _How can I best help them in the present?_\n\nA: In helping them to study to show themselves approved unto God, workmen not ashamed, rightly stressing the words of truth and keeping self unspotted from the world.\n\nWe are through with this reading.\n\n_Text of Reading 1020-2 F 39 (Housewife, Christian Background)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at the David E. Kahn home, 44 West 77th St., Apt. 14-W, New York City, this 18th day of October, 1935, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [1020], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Hugh Lynn Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mrs. [1020].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn February 17, 1896, in New Haven, Conn.\n\nTime of Reading 11:25 to 12:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. . . . , New York.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces, that are latent and manifested in the personalities of the entity now known as [1020].\n\nThese, as we find then, are as records of the activities of the entity in its relationships to the universal influences that may manifest in, or be manifested by, the entity in the experiences in the earth and the environs about the earth that are termed as astrological aspects in an entity's experience.\n\nComing, as we find, under those influences in Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus, that are accredited with representing\u2014or that have been determined by the sages of old as representing\u2014individual activities, we find:\n\nMercury as the mind, Venus as love, Jupiter as the broadening\u2014the larger opportunity, the expansion of influence and activity\u2014these are but terms, that represent in an entity's influence a definite _innate_ activity in the entity's experience.\n\nIn Venus we find that, irrespective of the entity's application of same\u2014however, the entity is one making for friendships that are lasting in the experience.\n\nOne capable of becoming more and more necessary in the experiences of those whom the entity contacts.\n\nOne that is faithful in its relationships to that it has promised itself or others.\n\nThese are as innate and manifested in the manners in which the entity may make application of those experiences in the inner self, as it is related to others.\n\nIn Mercury we find the high mental abilities, yet experiences in same that make for the doubting in self as to its own capacities often.\n\nHence, in conjunction with the Venus influence, it produces a tendency within the experience for the entity to depend oftentimes upon those whom it has learned that are or whom it considers as being capable of judging experiences or activities.\n\nThis makes for that which at times becomes confusing to the entity, as to whether that which has been activative has been by its own mental abilities or influenced by others.\n\nHence we will find that especially in the activities as a _writer_ would there become most helpful experiences, where the entity applied such activities in the earth in its relationships to construction of those things that may be made manifest in its activity as a writer. Or as one who would be a good judge of the efforts of others in these directions. If the entity would apply self, these activities would make or the stabilizing of these innate influences in the experience of the entity.\n\nIn Jupiter we find the broadening, or the tendency for the entity to become associated with influences upon rather than by others. For the influence the entity may have from others is individual, while the influence the entity may have upon others is rather more the universal\u2014by the very indications of those experiences that have been indicated as to how the influences or activities of the entity may be used to give expression to those developments that have been in the _mental_ or soul experience of the entity. It tends towards the experience that may be termed as innate, or as _feeling_ those conditions rather than reasoning from what may be termed cold reason. This makes for those conditions where the entity may in its applications of its abilities become as one that may influence the affairs of others a very great deal by its expressions that may reach masses of peoples.\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth, then, and those that we find making for an influence in the present experience, we find:\n\nBefore this the entity was in that land now known as or called England, during those periods when there were great numbers of people entering the new land; not only for the religious freedom but for the opportunities and for the activities that would make for the growing into advantages to be had in the varied activities during the experience.\n\nThe entity heard about such activities, listened and was persuaded; yet not until the latter portion of the experience\u2014or until the middle of the life during that particular period\u2014did the entity come to, or become a part of the activities in, that land in and about what is now Hartford, in the land of present nativity.\n\nThere we find the entity then, in the name of Marge Condon, became as an active influence in the establishing of those that became the teachings, or the schools, or those things that had to do with the training of the young.\n\nHence we find in the present experience of the entity that the interests of the young are of a special interest to the entity; the care of those under varying conditions\u2014these have been and are of a special interest. And the manners in which various sects, states or groups or societies form for the activities in these directions become innately and manifestedly a portion of the entity's thought. And again activity in these directions, _especially_ as related to combining same in treatise, in manners in which same may be presented to others, would become a life work.\n\nHowever, as indicated in the ruling influence of Venus in the innale forces, home and home conditions are ever in the expressions of the entity also.\n\nCombining these, then, there may be made an activity; not so much that would separate the entity from other associations but that would make for an experience in the entity's life or experience in the present that would become more and more worth while, more and more appreciated, more and more helpful to others.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Grecian experience when there were those periods of the first activities that began the influence as to the adorning of the bodies for sculpture and art, that pertained to these phases of man's experience. It was also when there were begun the interpretations of speech, of those things that may be termed in the present the dramatic experiences of song, verse, that there might be brought to others the influence that same had upon the activities of _groups._\n\nThe entity then was among those that were active in such directions; not as a man (for men then were the greater actors in all these roles) but rather one who assisted in aiding such to become efficient and proficient in such activities. The entity made the designs for what in the present would be termed the costumes, and laid out such experiences.\n\nIn the present those experiences are manifested in the entity being a judge of such things, an interpreter\u2014to self oft\u2014without giving expression, owing to the fears that arose from the submerging of the entity in the experience. For the material self was submerged, as well as the mental and spiritual, which brought decreasing or distressing experiences in the activities.\n\nIn the present, though, these make for the abilities of judgments upon actors, or interpreters, or those that would become interested in such activities.\n\nThese only need fanning, as it were, into that innate within self, to become an experience that may be applied with those in the home building or in the training of those that are developing in mind and body.\n\nThe name then was Constance.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in that now known as the Egyptian land, during those periods when there were the establishing of the tenets and the teachings of the Priest. It was when there was begun the preparation of those things pertaining to the establishing of what has grown in the present, from heights in other lands, to the medical reaction, the educational reaction in the various fields; the establishing of periods and areas where there were the gatherings of stones, the cutting of stones. And these became a portion of the entity's activity in that particular experience.\n\nThe entity was young in years from the earthly viewpoint when it began its service and activity in the Temple Beautiful, growing in its interest in the Temple Dance or the temple activity that _interpreted the emotions_ of individuals in their service before the populace, as well as before those who made for the concentration or consecration of themselves for service in specific directions.\n\nLater the entity became associated with those who prepared the garments of service in the Temple and in the service among those in high places.\n\nAnd _especially_ was the entity interested in those that had the settings of the stones, that were known as the emblems of the life of the individuals.\n\nThese were so impressed that in the present we find emblems, symbols, stones, carvings, become as something of an interest to the entity.\n\nThroughout that experience, in the name Han-Shu-Put, the entity gained.\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity in the present, then, and that to which it may attain and how:\n\nAs the activities have been in those fields in which _others_ became imbued with faith and hope in the very actions of the entity, so may the entity in the present _use_ the abilities that have been gained not only in the material things or material expressions in the earth but as related to those things gained through the interims in which the soul growth has found, does find, expression.\n\nIn these manners may the entity find soul development, harmony in its relationships to its fellow man; increasing its confidence and faith in self as it finds its true relationships to the inner self and to the Creative Forces from without.\n\nThese, then, are the activities as we find in the present:\n\nStimulate the minds of those that seek expression in given directions of activity, as those seeking for an experience or a career in certain fields of activity as indicated. As interpreters, entertainers in some directions\u2014the entity may counsel well with such.\n\nThen, for giving that which is _innately_ the experience of self\u2014this may be done in writing and interpreting that which may be most helpful to others in the training of the young, and of those in the various ages or stages of their development, _for_ some specific field of activity.\n\nFor, as will be the experience of the entity:\n\nIf you would have life, hope, faith, then _give_ life, hope, faith, to those about you\u2014in every way. For the law is, \"As ye sow, so shall ye reap.\" If ye would know good, do good to others. If you would know the Father and His love to His creatures, show forth in thy life and in thy relationships to others that love. And in so doing does there come into the heart and mind and soul that awareness of His presence, that has been and is promised to all who seek to know His face.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: What were the relations in the past lives with my present husband, and just how can_ I _be of the greatest help to him now?_\n\n_A:_ Rather was the husband the critic of self in its attempts in the Grecian activity. Hence there have been and are at times in the present the periods when the entity becomes rather discouraged at those experiences that arise. Yet in patience and in counseling with the mate in those things where there is the _necessity_ for the husband to stand in judgment upon the efforts of others, in their construction of those things or writings or conditions that are to influence great numbers of people, in this way and manner may those experiences not only become as things that would be \"a working out,\" as it were, but become more helpful to him in the present relationship.\n\n_Q: What have been the relations in the past with my son, and how can I be of the greatest help to him?_\n\n_A:_ As the son was in the closer relationships during those periods of the first establishing of the activities in this land of the present nativity, in his own experiences, so may the entity in the present lend the greatest aid and help through counsel, and patience. Not in railings, not in finding fault, but rather in the gentle guidance; not as duties only, but as opportunities\u2014pointing out such in the experiences of the son.\n\n_Q: What were the relations in the past lives with my daughter, and how can I be of help to her?_\n\nA: Here we find rather a conflicting influence, from those experiences in the Egyptian activities of the entity. And these made for, then, the necessities for the aids to be the greater in showing dependence and confidence in much that has at times _riled_ self, as to the choices made by the daughter. This should be done not through condoning, but through reasoning and counsel\u2014in which the entity in that experience grew from the various activities. And it may be seen that it is over those very things in which the entity was the most active\u2014in dress and relationships\u2014that the misunderstandings have arisen and do arise at times; over those smaller things.\n\nPatience endureth, if the entity will know even its strength and power.\n\n_Q: Are there any records available now of the entity's_ activities in _Hartford?_\n\nA: As we find, among the older records of an _insurance_ organization there may be found some of those records of those with whom the entity was very closely associated.\n\n_Q: What were the dates of the Grecian period referred to?_\n\n_A:_ Just preceding what is termed in thy common parlance as the Christian era.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n_Text of Reading 5328-1 M 21 (Soldier, Overseas, Christian Background)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the office of the Association, Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 6th day of July, 1944, in accordance with request made by the self, Mr. [5328], new Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc., recommended by Mr. Hugh Lynn Cayce and the book, _There Is a River._\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis and Jeanette Fitch, Stenos.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn October 15, 1922, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.\n\nTime of Reading Set bet. 3:30 to 4:30 P.M. Eastern War Time. . . . , NY.\n\nGC: You will give the relations of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, giving the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the present entity, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them:\n\nEC: Yes, we have the records here of that entity now called [5328].\n\nIn giving the interpretations of the records here, there is much to be chosen from, but these we give with the desire and purpose that this may be a helpful experience for the entity, enabling it to better fulfill the purpose for which it entered this present sojourn.\n\nAs we find, there are many abilities. There are many conditions which would be given, though, as warnings for the entity. For there are some definite and latent urges that may tend to lead the entity into those activities which would become burdensome, troublesome, discouraging to the body.\n\nLittle or nothing that has to do with commercial field for this particular entity. Yet it would make a very good salesman, but those activities of the entity should have to do with things not of a concrete nature. Thus we might find these as urges and interesting experiences for the entity:\n\nThe entity would make a very good doctor or a very good nurse and yet the practical side would become such a drudge that the entity would surely break off into politics, and that would be the end of the individual entity, the individuality.\n\nThose things which would pertain to writing especially those things that would have to do with metaphysical subjects or the study of the mind. Then, as a reporter or a writer would be the better manner for the entity to develop or train itself, when there are those opportunities or experiences for the entity to prepare itself for its future activities.\n\nAlso the entity is very social-minded and yet should not marry until it is at least twenty-eight to twenty-nine years of age, or thirty-one or thirty-two would even be better, and then someone either born in January, June or October. These will be those activities which would come nearer in keeping with that in which the entity should, could, make the best associations.\n\nIn analyzing, and as to the manner in which we find the urges from astrological aspects: These urges are not as of that termed astrological, but rather because of a consciousness of the entity in those environs indicated in Mercury, with Uranus.\n\nThus we will find the entity at times becoming very extreme and loud in its praise, or in its denunciation, of certain conditions, or of individuals, or of certain types of matters or of things as in concrete activity. Laws, rules, regulations, some of these, too, will come in for the entity's praise or denunciation. These are, then, problems to be met within the entity's own experience and its study.\n\nThe entity, then, should study not only statesmanship or political economy but psychology and journalism also. These would be well, at those changes which will be brought about for the entity, in any good southern school; as Washington and Lee, Alabama or Florida.\n\nThese are, then, the comparisons needed in the entity's experience or unfoldment or development. Then if there is the choice for the writing, or for the speaking, or for activities in which there may be combinations of these, we will find the entity fitted for such conditions.\n\nDo have the experience of being a cub reporter. Do have that experience of writing articles for Sunday supplements as well as scientific magazines.\n\nDo study political economy of organizations, as some definite union and as to what their ideals and purposes are.\n\nAs to the activities in the earth, as we find, while all may not be indicated here, these give a pattern or as to how urges are latent and manifested:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity during the early period of settling in the land, and thus in the eras when there were definite conditions, definite provisions, definite activities for groups under certain study; yet these were for freedom; these were for brotherhood; these were for activities which would bring a united effort; and these are latent in the experience of the entity in the present.\n\nFor the entity then was what might have been called a booster for the various groups of young peoples, in much the same manner, yet under quite different names, as would be the head of \"4-H\" Clubs in the present.\n\nThe entity was then in the name Lawrence Vance and quite active in organizing young peoples for definite services in definite group activities through the land. In the experience the entity gained and yet in the activity there came about little grudges of individuals, and these are the weaknesses in the present.\n\nDon't let self get over-riled because ye become supersensitive to certain activities in either groups or in organizations, or for individual activities.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the English land when there were those preparations of individuals for activities in the church.\n\nThe entity was among those who were very definite in bringing certain lessons to groups, as to how to study natures of things, nature of individuals through those early periods. A monk, yes, in those activities just before there were those actions for Crusades in the land.\n\nThus the entity as indicated, was at times overzealous of certain positions or subjects. These are indicated in the tenseness or the intense manner in which the entity may take hole of, or as just the opposite, a laggard entirely on certain conditions that do not appeal to the entity.\n\nSo, if the entity were ever to enter the commercial field, have somebody look after the business\u2014you can do the selling\u2014but have somebody else take care of the money, you would tend to spend it before you have it. These are not so well for one whose vision is too broad for a commercial experience or life.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Holy Land in the periods when the Master walked in the earth. The entity was among those who were of the \"seventy\" who were chosen\u2014not among the \"twelve\"\u2014but acquainted with and knew of most of the activities. But with announcements or pronouncements, when there was the return, that one must eat of the body, and drink of the blood if they are to know the Lord, like many others the entity went away, but kept in touch with the activities; and with the day of Pentecost, when many were turned, the entity again became one of those associated with organized work. For then the entity understood, when there had been explained how on the night He was betrayed He took bread and broke it saying, \"This is my body,\" and with the cup, \"This is my blood.\"\n\nFor the Christ, as manifested in Jesus, was the first, is the foremost, is the essence of both bread and of wine. For that element which is life-giving physically of bread, or that giveth strength to wine, is the source of life itself. Thus in partaking, one does literally partake of the body and of the blood in that communion.\n\nIn these the entity was known as Joseph\u2014not a companion of any of the Disciples\u2014but rather from the land of the Galileans and thus of the Samaritan group. In the experience the entity gained, lost, gained.\n\nThe experience was of the interest in the healing, being able, by the blessing of the Master, to heal physically and mentally; which brought, has brought, still brings that interest in the spiritual side, yet don't ever attempt to be a preacher, ye failed then, ye would fail again. The activities must be, then, not ever as that which is called too practical; not that ye are not to be practical, but the basis, the spirit of a thing, the purpose of an ideal, rather than the purpose itself or what is done.\n\nFor ye will never walk very closely in that which is called orthodox way, not even when ye write your first editorials or stories.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Egyptian land during those periods when there were those activities in the days of the rebellions. The entity was among those who served close to the young King during this period. So, as the activities were in attempting to keep acquainted with what was going on, (and thus abilities as a reporter, the abilities as a story teller), these would be parts of the entity's experience through which it passed in keeping \"tab\" on the various groups to report to the King.\n\nIn the name then Ardelentheoue the entity was good, for it could keep its own counsel and yet keep in touch with the various groups without causing dissentions to arise because of the presence of the entity.\n\nAs to the abilities, then, that to which it may attain and how, study closer what has been indicated. Do pattern the life and follow in those suggestions if it would find itself, its abilities, its activities and know this: wander not far away from Him, who is the way, the Cross, the light, the life. For in Him must each soul love, move and have its being, indeed.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: In writing, along which particular line should I follow this?_\n\nA: As has been indicated, the metaphysical.\n\n_Q: What have been my associations_ in _past lives with [. . .]?_\n\nA: In two experiences. In the experience before this when you were quite infatuated, but because of the questions which arose between \"thee and thou and they\" (as there were questions of those activities), ye found a great deal of fault one in the other. Ye are attracted; let this be rather a slow growth, but ye have work to do together; whether as companions will depend upon whether she would wait for thee. Don't distract yourself by having the care of a family as ye attempt to analyze self and others through the psychology of life itself.\n\n_Q: If she would wait, would these present urges be the basis for a marriage making possible our highest mental and spiritual development?_\n\nA: She would wait. For ye have experiences to work out, especially before this, and ye worshiped from afar as the monk; wanted to marry and couldn't, and in those experiences in the Holy Land ye were one. She led you away and led you back.\n\n_Q: Any other advice on marriage?_\n\nA: As has been given, don't do this too soon.\n\n_Q: Where and in what capacity have I been associated in past lives with the following: My mother, [. . .]?_\n\nA: In the experience when ye were in the Holy Land. She to whom ye turned oft as one to guide and keep in the right way, but she was of a different faith, as she will be as ye develop in the present, yet remaining true throughout the experience. Ye have much in common, much that ye must interpret for yourself.\n\n_Q: My father, [. . .]?_\n\nA: In the experience in the English land when ye argued quite a bit together.\n\n_Q: My friend, [. . .]?_\n\n_A:_ In the Egyptian land when you were very good friends and very good enemies.\n\nQ: [. . .]?\n\nA: In the experience in the Holy Land.\n\n_Q: [. . .]?_\n\nA: In the activities in Egypt, as well as in the Holy Land.\n\n_Q: [3605]?_\n\nA: In the experience in Egypt.\n\nQ: [341]?\n\nA: In the Holy Land and in Egypt.\n\n_Q: Any other advice?_\n\nA: Don't marry too soon! Do go to school again! Do make of yourself a writer!\n\nWe are through.\n\n_Text of Reading 5399-2 F 28 (Housewife, Protestant)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the office of the Association, Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 26th day of August, 1944, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [5399], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research and Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Jeanette Fitch, Stenos.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn May 23, 1915, in Raton, New Mexico.\n\nTime of Reading Set bet. 10:30 to 11:30 A.M. Eastern War\n\nTime. . . . , Utah.\n\nGC: You will give the relations of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the present entity, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the record here of the entity now known as or called: [5399].\n\nIn giving an interpretation of the relationships of this entity with the universe and universal forces, much is to be taken into consideration if those suggestions indicated would be applicable in the experience of this entity. In analyzing same from the urges which arise from the astrological as well as earthly sojourn, we find these apparent:\n\nThe entity is very easily persuaded by others. Thus, the first admonition would be: know in yourself what ye believe. Do have an ideal, spiritually, mentally, materially. Do consider what manner of individual the entity should be as in relationship to the wedded life\u2014as to the home\u2014as to relationships with others. The _ideal_ \u2014not just ideas. The ideals must be drawn from the spiritual concept, and remember, the mind or the mental application is the builder.\n\nThere are those tendencies for the dramatic, and thus stage, or the like, appeals to the entity. This is not an adverse influence, but must be applied in the light of ideals as to be a constructive experience, rather than just feeding the ego of the individual. Thus, the entity will make a very good director, as in any social welfare work, or as a part of a program for social service for underprivileged children, or as on a school board, where all forms of activity which are to be constructive in the life of unfolding or developing bodies and minds are to be considered. These, then, are such as should be the choice that the entity would make as to the use of its abilities.\n\nAstrologically, we find Mercury, Jupiter, Venus as the urges, and thus the dramatical; thus the beneficial influences are as the nature of the entity.\n\nJupiter and Venus indicate the egotism, the beauty, music, people, things and association as being parts of the consciousness, and thus, as we find, as indicated, first _do_ find thine own self, its relationship to Creative Forces, or God, and the ideal manner in which this is to be acted upon in the experience, by prayer, by meditation, knowing the variations in same, analyzing self and knowing the variation between the personality of self and the individuality of self. One will find through such analyses the manner in which the abilities which are apparent and manifest in this entity may be applied in a constructive way and manner.\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth, while all may not be indicated, these indicate the pattern through which that which appears in the present has become a part of the conscious and unconscious self in the present activity.\n\nAs in the appearance before this, we find the entity among those who were of those groups in those experience when there were the ideas of gold rush in the West. The entity was among those who, with others, started toward same.\n\nThus, there will be a change of scenes, a looking for ideals that will enhance the material welfare. Thus, it will be very well for the entity never to undertake games of chance, yet investments that are well thought out, in analyzing of same by self, may be means of the entity, in years to come, having material gains in the earth. Investments, then, not of that as of questionable nature.\n\nIn the activity, the entity gained\u2014the entity lost\u2014and from there rises the warnings.\n\nThe name then was Stella Smythe.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the activities in the land now known as the French land, during those periods when there were the activities for an idea\u2014for an ideal\u2014or in those periods when wars were made because of the possession of the holy Land by individuals who proclaimed another as a prophet. The entity, then, in the opposite sex, was one of those who made hardships for those of its own household by the activities as to prevent conditions which were questioned by the entity in relationships to others. Thus the conditions which make for questioning the self rather than the universal consciousness, and the warnings, as has been indicated.\n\nIn the Name Rene Marselle, the entity gained by the hard way. Thus, the admonition to first find self, and self's relationship to Creative Forces, or God. And _do something_ about same!\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Holy Land during those periods when there were the journeyings from the Egyptian land to the Promised land. The entity, then, was among those who were of the household of the children of Levi, and thus the entity was a mother to one of those who became as a Priest to those peoples. This brings into the consciousness of the entity a form of ideas and ideals that are too oft set by ritual rather than the spirit of the purpose. Yet, under those influences, as indicated, if the ideas are chosen, greater strength may be part of the experience in this sojourn.\n\nThe name, then, was Jalebd.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Egyptian Land where there were those preparations of individuals for activities through the Temple of Sacrifice, as well as the Temple Beautiful, for the propagation or for the changing of activities of individuals born into the earth through the tempering of individuals' activities in the Temple of Sacrifice and the training in the Temple Beautiful.\n\nThe entity was among those who were chosen for the establishing of a home, with the departure of the Priest, in those experiences when such activities came about.\n\nThe name then was Is-tabel.\n\nAs to the abilities, these have been indicated. As to the manner of application, first, find self. Do know the ideal. Do apply same mentally, yes, but know the ideal spiritual, for from the spiritual purposes must rise that which may be manifested in the material experience of the individual.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Should I try to accomplish anything in art?_\n\n_A:_ In the art of drawing others, more than that as of higher art, yes.\n\n_Q: Have I ever caught glimpses of past lives, or are these things more dreams and fancy?_\n\n_A:_ The entity has caught glimpses of past lives when it has gone out of itself or has allowed the energies of the kundaline force to pass along the centers of the body. Beware, unless ye are well-balanced in purposes, for there is one way. Those who climb up some other way-remember what the Master gave.\n\n_Q: How have I been associated in the past with my husband,_ [. . .]?\n\nA: In the experience in the Holy Land the entity who is the husband now was a Priest of Israel in his activities.\n\n_Q: Am I justified in feeling that we shouldn't live in the same town with my husband's mother?_\n\nA: These should never be the attempt of justification, save by faith. Is the justifying being kept in accord with that which has been given as the \"fruit of the spirit\"? Is it being kind? Because of those conditions which arose, do to others as ye would be done by, for the Law of the Lord is perfect. It converteth the soul.\n\nWe are through with this reading.\n\n_Text of Reading 1938-2 F 78_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 29th day of June, 1939, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [1938], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn June 7, 1861, in Brooklyn, N.Y.\n\nTime of Reading 3:30 to 4:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time . . . . . N.Y.\n\nGC: You will give the relation of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the present entity and that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions she has submitted, as I ask them:\n\nEC: (In going back over years from present\u2014\"\u2014'36\u2014'35\u2014'34\u2014years of anxiety\u2014'33\u2014'30\u2014satisfaction\u2014'29\u2014'23\u2014different periods\u2014'22\u2014'84\u2014yes, unusual year\u2014'83\u2014\" etc., on back to birth date.)\n\nYes, we have the records here (far spent) of that entity now known as or called [1938].\n\nIn giving the interpretations of these records\u2014these are being chosen with the desire that the experience may be a helpful one in every way.\n\nThere may be those considerations of the virtues, the vices; that, applying the rules and regulations as should be the part of everyone's experience, there may come to the entity an appreciation and a realization of the purposes for which each soul enters a material experience.\n\nGod hath not willed that any soul should perish; hence He has given and does constantly give the opportunity for each soul's manifestation through the material plane, that there may come the greater activities in the affairs of each soul or entity to become more aware, and to apply self in that which is the justification by faith through the manner that has been shown for each individual for his or her own consideration, as to what will or will not be done respecting same.\n\nHence we find, as for the experiences of this entity in the material sojourn as well as the sojourn without the material plane\u2014the urges remain as latent activities to be applied in such a way and manner as to be a light or guide unto the many in thy dealings with thy fellow man.\n\nIn the astrological aspects for this entity we find a great deal of misconception in the minds of many, yet to the entity these may be comprehended if there is the application of self in those manners in which the seeking of the soul may come to know and search for that which is the creative influence in the experiences from day to day.\n\nThe urges latent, but without respect to what the application has been or may be, are and may be a great part of that through which the entity may gain, and find in the gaining greater contentment, a greater channel for activity.\n\nMusic and musical talents are a natural part of the entity; the ability for the appreciation of same, and especially that of the pastoral nature-yet that deals with or tells its own story in the very air of same.\n\nIn the effect of the planetary forces we find Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn as the ruling forces. Hence the musical influence, as well as the love and the love of companionship, love of associations with others that have or manifest a helpful air; as well as those abilities within self to experience the variations as indicated through the Jupiterian forces of the working force about or of many individuals.\n\nThus we find also changes that have and do become a part of the experience.\n\n\"Seek and ye shall find\" may be said to many, and yet much more to this entity than to the many. For the appearances as well as the urges from the astrological sojourn bear the relationships one to another as do the dimes to the monetary unit or dollars.\n\nNot that the entity is inclined to become jealous of those because of their association or position, yet there is a constant searching within self for those influences that will bring all of those activities that have been indicated to the consciousness of the entity.\n\nThese while having failed often, we find that they will become more and more a part of the entity in its daily experience.\n\nAs to the appearances of the entity in the earth's plane\u2014these are not all given, but these that have a particular influence in the present because of their influence being oft seen by the indomitable will of the entity to succeed in whatever it undertakes; not by might nor by power but by every word that proceedeth\u2014should be as a part of that which is held constantly before self.\n\nThe appearances indicate much of those variations that have been a part of the experience, as well as the variation of abilities in which the entity may accomplish or carry forward in such a manner as not to become stalemated or in such a position that the appearances\u2014at least-are not so variegated to the ideas or manners of others.\n\nBefore this, then, we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, during those periods when there was the reconstruction from the activities of what is called at times the American Revolution, or American rebellion.\n\nYet we find the entity was among those of that period in which there were the considerations of accomplishments and activities of individuals that would enable or fit them for a social as well as an economic service within the experiences of those about the entity.\n\nThere again we find the entity was much in that position of an understanding pertaining to the study and application of a musical nature or trend.\n\nThen in the name Marguerite Street, the entity gained, the entity lost. The entity gained in application in which there was the use of those means for raising the hopes, the desires and purposes to the beautiful associations and surroundings and environs\u2014not only for self but making same aware in the experiences of others. When those were turned into those channels for self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement, they were brought not only disturbing forces eventually but the necessity of meeting self in those activities in its associations with others in the present.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land now known as the Promised land, during those periods when there was much expectancy, much preparation on the part of those who were looking forward to the redeeming of the peoples from not only the bondage of the Roman rule but the misconception and misapplication of the laws of individuals or peoples who professed to be in the way of the chosen people.\n\nThe entity was among those who were the musicians in the temple where Anna and Simeon saw the consecration of the one Lord, the one Master.\n\nThen the entity was a harpist, or what would be called a harp today.\n\nHence all manner of stringed instruments are of interest, and especially that character or nature of music that depicts the activities of individuals through those various periods in that particular activity\u2014or that as may be a part of the experience of individuals in the present; not only that which is of the pictorial and pastoral nature but descriptive in its nature.\n\nAnd to encourage, and to bring into the consciousness of the young, and those of all ages whom the entity may meet and with whom the entity may have an influence, an appreciation of such\u2014is the greater service in which the entity may expend itself.\n\nFor this is the manner\u2014 _music_ \u2014in which distances may be spanned, in which all realms of thought may find a greater outlet of expression, and in which the heart may be raised to a comprehension of the relationships. For, as is oft expressed, the angels seeing [sing]\u2014and the music of the spheres, as in color and relationship\u2014this becomes the means or manner that is universal in its activity upon the minds and souls of men.\n\nThe name then was Sathamantha. In the experience the entity gained throughout.\n\nHence in the present periods the greater need for manifesting and expressing that as may bring the greater influence for good in the experience of this entity.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land now known as the Mongoloid land, during those periods of activities when there were the attempts of the many nations, or peoples of many lands, to correlate the influences that prompted greater brotherly relationships in the experience of man\u2014or that as may be said to be the paralleling of the experience in Egypt, in India, in Carpathia, in parts of On and Og, or the periods in the Himalayas, the Yucatan, the Andes and the Pyrenees. For there were the periods then when there was the attempt for _peace_ to be wrought in the experience of man.\n\nThe entity was in the City of Gold, and among those who were high in the affairs and activities of the sun worshipers of gold\u2014a princess, and thus making for influences in which there was the establishing of what was to be the manner of conduct of peoples of certain rank or station.\n\nHence we find the innate forces in which there is the love of the family tree, the relationships of the genealogy of groups or individuals, innate within the experience.\n\nThis is well\u2014but remember, God looketh not on the outward appearance but rather upon the heart and the purpose and desire of each soul.\n\nAnd He hath not willed that any should perish, but has set that manner of overcoming within thine own hands\u2014if ye do good it is well; if ye do evil, sin lieth at thy door\u2014or if ye think more highly of thyself than ye ought to think.\n\nThe experience brought disturbance\u2014for such activities were in opposition to many of those tenets of the peoples from Atlantis as well as Egypt and the East Indian land\u2014for those were impelling forces that brought the periods of the first disintegration in that land.\n\nThe name then was Ms-Sma.\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity in the present, and that to which it may attain, and how:\n\nAs indicated, in those fields or activities in the present in which encouragement may be given to those who would make song or verse, and in the giving of counsel and the impelling influences for the magnifying of the rhythm, of the nature that is pictorial yet descriptive of the various forces and emotions of men\u2014these are the activities and channels for service.\n\nStudy then to show thyself approved unto thy Maker, a workman not ashamed, but keeping thyself in such a way and manner that thy conscience is kept aware of the union of purpose with Him whom ye sought in the Palestine hills.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: In what capacity did I serve_ in _former lives to develop an intense interest in scientific investigation and work?_\n\nA: As indicated, in those periods when so many of the peoples and activities of the land sought to know through whom, where and whence would come the spiritual forces as were manifest in Bethlehem of Judea.\n\n_Q: In what manner did I meet my present husband, [_. . . ], in _past lives, and in what capacity was he serving?_\n\nA: In the experience before this, the association was close\u2014as one of the same family.\n\nThrough the activities in the Mongoloid land, there were rather the friendships and the forming of social relationships and activities.\n\n_Q: Are any of my children or my grandchildren, children of former experiences?_\n\n_A:_ These may be best indicated by the paralleling of their own experiences through the sojourns in the earth.\n\n_Q: Was my Palestine experience in the land of the Nativity_\n\nat the time of Jesus the Christ?\n\nA: Just as indicated\u2014and the entity was at the period when the consecration of the child was made\u2014viewed same, and later understood much with the Holy Women.\n\n_Q: Have I progressed much in my present lifetime?_\n\nA: Who is to say, or to be the judge? Only as has been indicated, let not thine own conscience smite thee. And keep that awareness of the closer walk with Him.\n\n_Q: In what way, informer lives, did I contact [1152]?_\n\nA: In the Palestine experience.\n\n_Q: What activities should I emphasize during my present experience?_\n\n_A:_ As indicated, the aid and help through encouraging in every manner the form and character of information as given\u2014or the _music_ of the nature indicated.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**Editor's Note: The following reading was for Edgar Cayce himself. It contains many, but not all, of his soul's past lives.**\n\n_Text of Reading 294-8 M 46 (Clairvoyant, formerly a Photographer, Protestant)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at Phillips Hotel, Room 115, Dayton, Ohio, in a series of five readings beginning February 9th, 1924, one on 2\/12\/24, two on 2\/13\/24, and one on 2\/16\/24. Request made by Edgar Cayce himself.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Linden Shroyer, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn March 18, 1877, in Christian Co., Ky., near Hopkinsville. [1:30 P.M. Central Standard Time (?).]\n\nTime of Reading 11:40 A.M. 2411\u20131\/2 E. 5th St., Dayton, Ohio.\n\n(Horoscope Suggestion, with request for past lives, etc.)\n\nEC: There is much we have given relative to this before. We have the conditions as have been, as are, and will be. In this, without reference to that as has been given, for in giving the conditions in the various phases of the past experience there will be much that will show the various phases of the developing in the different stages, the conditions as given then will be those as with reference to the effect that the planets and their satellites and spheres have upon the present life and plane, without reference to the will.\n\nThen, with the will, and also the developing with will and the planetary or astrological effect in the various planes as have gone before; in the present, as in this plane, we find the condition as brought to the earth plane was from that of the attitudes as held by those to and through whom the present entity was and is made manifest upon the earth plane by the relativity of force and the attraction of likes; the attitude of those earthly parents towards conditions that brought the relations to the stage of the developing of the entity that came, and through that stage the entity chose the mode of manifesting in the earth plane. Hence the condition of the parents upon the earth plane, or duty that is due each of its earthly offsprings, for all are under that bond of duty to be made the channel of the manifesting of this force through the entity's actions towards his offsprings.\n\nAs to the condition from the astrological standpoint, we find this entity almost entirely influenced by, and came from that in the last plane of Uranus, with Neptune, Venus and Jupiter. Afflictions in Mars and of the Sagittarius, Capricornus, Gemini Sun and Moon in the various stages, for with the ultra forces, as of Uranus and Neptune, come much of the influence of the various planes, given in strength with Jupiter and Mercury.\n\nAs to the influences this gives then without reference to the will:\n\nOne that will always be either very good or very bad, very wicked or very much given to good works. Ultra in all forces. Very poor, very rich. One scaling to the heights in intellectual ability and capacity, or groveling in the dregs of self-condemnation, influenced at such times by those forces either coming as afflictions from the various phases of developing, from which the entity has received its experience, or controlled by will as exercised in the present sphere.\n\nOne ever within the scope or sphere of firearms, yet just without.\n\nOne saved spiritually, mentally and financially often through a great amount of waters, for it was from the beginning, and will be so unto the end of time, as time is reckoned from the earth plane, for this entity we find was first manifest in the earth plane through the waters as was on the earth, and above the earth. Hence through these elements and forces is the spiritual, mental and financial, these three phases of spiritual life, mental life and financial life manifest in the earth plane.\n\nOne who finds much in the scope or sphere of intrigue in secret love affairs. One given often to the conditions that have to do with the affairs of the heart, and of those relations that have to do with sex.\n\nOne that finds the greater strength in spiritual forces and developing.\n\nOne given to make manifest in the present plane much of the forces of psychic and occult forces, reaching the greater height of developing in such plane in those forces when that of Jupiter, with Uranus and Neptune, come within the scope of the Sun's influence upon the earth plane and forces.\n\nOne that will bring, through such manifestations, joy, peace and quiet to the masses and multitudes through individual efforts.\n\nOne who, after the present year passes that place of that of Pisces and Sun's rays on the twentieth of present month, will go forward to developing much of the psychic and occult forces to the great numbers that have become interested in developing of such phenomena.\n\nOne who will on the nineteenth of March, this year, reach the place or plane where the present years and the present developing reaches the turn for the developing, or the wield of those influences in Sagittarius, Capricornus and Gemini that may bring destructive forces without will's manifestation upon that day.\n\nIn the developing as regards will force in the present plane, with conditions, there have been many conditions that have been hindered by the effect of the will, and others that have been assisted. Keep the will in that of the spiritual development, if the physical would manifest to the better advantage in the present plane, keeping this ever before, that all work in present plane will be judged to that individual and the classes, masses, as to the individual's manifestation of spiritual forces in and through the individual action in and before men. Ever keeping the mind clear to the developing of the Uranian forces that often manifest in the present plane, which will in the present plane reach in the present and coming two years the influence of the Neptune and Mercury forces, carry the body, unless will is exercised against such conditions, to many places beyond this present bounds, or across many waters. Keep the developing then to that force as is given in that of Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter, whose greater influence as is upon the earth plane, and beware of the influences in Venus forces, for with Mars' affliction would bring sudden destruction to the physical in the early fall of present year.\n\nAs to the vocation, this in the present plane may be directed in any channel through will. The better condition, as given, in that of astrological forces, would be toward those of psychic and occult, or teaching or developing along the lines of such plane to give the manifestation of such forces to the populace.\n\nIn the plane as of others:\n\nIn the one just before this, we find in the present place of the physical plane sojourn, but in that of the soldier in the British forces as were in the force that developed in the surrounding plains. The name, John Bainbridge, and in that life we find the birth in Cornwall, England, and the training in the Canadian forces as taken by that country, and the drifting into the present plain as known as American, or United America, and the life was lost then in the waters as in the crossing of the river at the time the battle was fought near the present sojourn. In this, as that given just previous to the present appearance upon this plane, in which the body's sojourn was near unto that at present, we find the body's or the entity's and body's condition is then entered upon that of the Saturn forces, [See 5755\u20131 on 6\/27\/38] and the life was manifested then in the plane was as that of the adventurer, when the forces of the king, under whose rule this entity was a subject, entered in that force, or in the colonization of the country, was the first appearance upon this present sphere's plane or scope, and was connected with that in the group that were landing in the East coast of the new country, now known as Virginia, and near where is now the resort known as Virginia Beach. When this raid was made, this John Bainbridge was carried in this raid to the Southern coasts of the country; escaped, and with the forces then going in the inland way, and making the surrounding of the places in which the present sphere's plane has seen much of the same country, and developing, and finally making the way to the fort then on the Great Lakes, now in place known as Chicago, and from that fort entered the fray in which the crossing was later attempted in the Ohio River, and there met death as known in the earth plane. [See 294\u20138] The body was known as under two names, and was never wed during that sojourn upon the plane, though was in many escapades that have to do with those of the nature of the relations with the opposite sex. In the developing upon the present plane, we have much of the personality as shown in present spheres, as from that of the ability to take cognizance of detail, especially in following instructions as given from other minds or sources of information.\n\nIn that previous to this, we find in the Courts of the French, when Louis the 15th was King, and in the Royal Guard was this entity's sphere, which was of short duration, so far as years go upon the earth plane. This entity, then, was the attendant upon the Royal Court and the Guard for the household of that Ruler, and lost the elements of life, as known, in the defense of those under whose care they were placed, as both lost the elements of physical life, in the defense. In the forces or personal conditions as seen in present sphere from this sojourn, we find that of the intense defense of those principles that to the entity's inmost soul or force is the right. In the name, we find that of Ralph Dahl [Dale?]. [In reading 1001\u20137, Cayce indicates that Louis the 15th and Edgar Cayce had the same grandfather; or was Louis 15th grandfather of John Bainbridge, one of Cayce's incarnations?]\n\nIn the condition that was previous to this, we find in the force as manifest when the Trojan rule was in that fair country, to whom the nations of the world have looked for the beauty in culture, art and refinement of the physical, mental and material force, and in that we find again the soldier and the defender of the gate, as was the place where the physical or material destruction came to the body. In the experience of that plane, we find these cover many and various stages. Those of the student, chemist, the sculptor and the artisan, as well as of the soldier and defender in the last days. In that we find the name Xenon, and there is, and has been, and will be many more in the present sphere that were in contact with that plane's forces, that the contact will be, has been brought in the present sphere. In this, we find those present forces exhibited through that of the art, and the love of the beautiful in any and every form, especially those that partake of human form Divine.\n\nIn that before this we have that plane in which is now known as the Arabian plane. In this we find this entity's developing under that of Uhjltd, and there are many of the conditions, personality, knowledge, understanding, thought, reference as is and will be in the passing of the plane of today. For we find there are many upon this earth's plane, and in different locations, who were associated with this entity at that time. [Persia is now known as Iran.] In the entity's force of that day, we find this entity one of power, prestige, royalty, and the leader in many raids or wars as made upon the surrounding peoples, tribes or nations. This we find the most outstanding of that period, in the connection as was shown in the war as made on the Persian ruler, Croesus, and this Uhjltd led the expedition into that country. The force under this leadership was successful in the bringing submission to the rule of the nation which Uhjltd led. And the developing in that plane was with the suffering of bodily ills from injuries received in the escape from the force as connived from the weaknesses of the physical to make the Uhjltd a slave in bondage. His escape and sojourn upon the plain, with those surrounding him, was the developing stage, and the first of that developing known in present earth plane as psychic force. For, with the developing as received in the plane just before this [in prehistory Egypt as the priest Ra Ta], as we shall see, [this Uhjltd sojourn] was the continuation of the one found at that time.\n\nThe passing of the portion of the entity again into Nazova [?] [nirvana?] was through the wounds and infections as received upon the plane, in the vicinity of the well about which the three palm trees [stood, which] has remained in the inner being of the soul's developing force. And not until that entity [538?] is again reunited with this entity [294] will the developing upon this or other planes be efficient, or as good as should be.\n\nIn the elements as brought to the present plane, we find that of the deep love as manifests to others in any or all positions or stage of conditions in life. The inert [innate] and the hidden love for animal and live creatures of the Creator's make, as was developed in this sojourn upon the plain. With the meeting or contact of this entity's mate, for upon the 19th day of March, in present year, that entity will again be in physical touch with the entity's present development, again will come the power of monies, both in the way of earth's fame and glory, and with this will again the opportunity to develop as has been set in this plane of development, and again give the place in the world development towards the mark of the higher calling, as is set in Him. Upon that meeting will the developing depend, or begin, to be made manifest, or be cut short, as the will of the entity expresses and manifests itself. In this sphere or plane, we find there are many that come under the influence of the personal or personality of the entity's forces, and for many, many years after this return to the other spheres was this influence felt in the earth's plane, as in this influence felt in the earth's plane, as in this present plane, this with this union of forces may and will give that incentive to others to develop in that plane that leads to the understanding of the forces that give of the strength of the universal force.\n\nIn the plane before this, we find that as known in the dynasty of the Rameses or Pharaohs in Egypt, and in the Court and rule of the Second Pharaoh [341] or Rameses, [10,500 B.C.] and was at that time the high priest of the cult as gave the religious element and force in the age, and reached the heights in that dynasty, yet was cut short in the allowing of physical forces and desires to enter in, and the taking of the daughter [538] of the order of the one who offered the sacrifices for the priest's force, and going or leaving the shores of this country brought the destructive elements to the body. That same entity that was taken is at present in this earth's plane, the companion and mate as should be in the present sphere [538], and in this Court we find there was the study of the religious cults, isms, schisms as would be termed in this day and plane. The High Priest [294] who gave the elements of the religious force, and in this dynasty or reign of this Pharaoh [341] did the religious cult reach its height, as given through this priest, though he became the outcast, but for the good as had been accomplished by this individual was in the resting place of the King, and the forces as manifest in the present is the delving into the whys and wherefores of all who express a different mode of manifesting the hope that lies within the human breast of the life after the passing from the earth's plane. This, we see, manifests in the present. As to those forces that have brought this condition that the entity is in, the elements as brought the destructive force to self in the two, again we find that the karma of each must be met, [294] and [538] and in this plane overcome if each would enter in.\n\nIn that before this, we find in the beginning, when the first of the elements were given, and the forces set in motion that brought about the sphere as we find called earth plane, and when the morning stars sang together, and the whispering winds brought the news of the coming of man's indwelling, of the spirit of the Creator, became the living soul. This entity came into being with this multitude. As to the experiences as have been given in this plane, the earth, and the often sojourn upon this plane, we find all summed in this:\n\nTake this thou hast in hand and make and mould it into the present plane's development, that thyself and others may know that God is God, and demands of His creatures that of the knowledge of self, that they may better serve their fellows, and in so doing present themselves as the ever giving force, bringing to others to the knowledge of Him.\n\nThere are many other influences as have been shed abroad in the earth's plane from the entity's sojourn there. These are given that all may know and understand that the record of each soul is kept in and unto that Great Day.\n\nBe not deceived. Be not overcome, but overcome evil with good.\n\n### **3**\n\n### **Planetary Sojourns: The Soul's Life Between Incarnations**\n\n**Editor's Note: Some of the most fascinating concepts to come through Edgar Cayce's discourses were his teachings about soul activity between earth incarnations and how these affect our present lives. Here are some of these discourses.**\n\n**_Text of Reading 5755-1_**\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., Virginia Beach, Va., at the Seventh Annual Congress of the A.R.E., this 27th day of June, 1938, in pursuant to request made by those present.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Hugh Lynn Cayce, Gladys & Chas. Dillman from Youngstown, O., Maud M. Lewis from Greenville, Ala., Anna E. Hendley & Edna B. Ilarrell from D.C., Lillian McLaughlin, Gladys & Thos. Jenkins, Reginia Dunn, Florence Evylinn Campbell, Mary A. Miller, Alice M. Eddy, Irene Harrison, Louise Chisholm, Henry Hardwicke, Jennie Moore and Leslie Savage from N.Y., Mabel M. Applewhite from Newport News, Va., Frances Y. Morrow, Edith _&_ Florence Edmonds, Hannah Miller, Ruth LeNoir, Helen Ellington, Margaret Wilkins, Esther Wynne, Abbie Kemp & Malcolm H. Allen from Norfolk, Va. & Helen Williams, Louise Tatum, Mara Edmonstone, Mrs. R. G. Barr, Mrs. W. T. Sawyer, Grace & Geo. Ross from Virginia Beach.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 3:35 to 4:20 P.M.\n\nGC: In all Life Readings given through this channel there are references to sojourns of the soul-entity between incarnations on the earth plane, in various planes of consciousness represented by the other planets in our solar system. You will give at this time a discourse which will explain what takes place in soul development in each of these states of consciousness in their order relative to the evolution of the soul; explaining what laws govern this movement from plane to plane, their influence on life in this earth plane and what if any relationship these planes have to astrology. Questions.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the information and sources from which same may be obtained as to individual experiences, sojourns and their influence.\n\nAs we find, in attempting to give a coherent explanation of that as may be sought, or as may be made applicable in the experience of individuals who seek to apply such information, it is well that an individual soul-entity, the record of whose astrological and earthly sojourns you have, be used as an example.\n\nThen a comparison may be drawn for those who would judge same from the astrological aspects, as well as from the astrological or planetary sojourns of such individuals.\n\nWhat better example may be used, then, than this entity with whom you are dealing [EC? Case 294]\n\nRather than the aspects of the material sojourn, then, we would give them from the astrological:\n\nFrom an astrological aspect, then, the greater influence at the entrance of this entity that ye call Cayce was from Uranus. Here we find the extremes. The sojourn in Uranus was arrived at from what type of experience or activity of the entity? As Bainbridge, the entity in the material sojourn was a wastrel, one who considered only self; having to know the extremes in the own experience as well as others. Hence the entity was drawn to that environ. Or, how did the Master put it? \"As the tree falls, so does it lie.\" [Eccl. 11:3 by Solomon. Where did Jesus say it?] Then in the Uranian sojourn there are the influences from the astrological aspects of _extremes;_ and counted in thy own days from the very position of that attunement, that tone, that color. For it is not strange that music, color, vibration are all a part of the planets, just as the planets are a part\u2014and a pattern\u2014of the whole universe. Hence to that attunement which it had merited, which it had meted in itself, was the entity drawn for the experience. What form, what shape?\n\nThe birth of the entity into Uranus was not from the earth into Uranus, but from those stages of consciousness through which each entity or soul passes. It passes into oblivion as it were, save for its consciousness that there is a way, there is a light, there is an understanding, there have been failures and there are needs for help. Then help _consciously_ is sought!\n\nHence the entity passes along those stages that some have seen as planes, some have seen as steps, some have seen as cycles, and some have experienced as places.\n\nHow far? How far is tomorrow to any soul? How far is yesterday from thy consciousness?\n\nYou are _in_ same (that is, all time as one time), yet become gradually aware of it; passing through, then, as it were, God's record or book of consciousness or of remembrance; for meeting, being measured out as it were to that to which thou hast attained.\n\nWho hath sought? Who hath understood?\n\nOnly they that seek shall find!\n\nThen, born in what body? That as befits that plane of consciousness; the _extremes,_ as ye would term same.\n\nAs to what body\u2014what has thou abused? What hast thou used? What hast thou applied? What has thou neglected in thy extremes, thy extremities?\n\nThese are consciousnesses, these are bodies.\n\nTo give them form or shape\u2014you have no word, you have no form in a three-dimensional world or plane of consciousness to give it to one in the seventh\u2014have you?\n\nHence that's the form\u2014we might say\u2014\"Have You?\"\n\nWhat is the form of this in thy consciousness? It rather indicates that everyone is questioned, \"Have you?\u2014Have You?\"\n\nThat might be called the form. It is that which is thy concept of that being asked thyself\u2014not that ye have formed of another.\n\nWith that sojourn then the entity finds need for, as it were, the giving expression of same again (the answering of \"Have You?\") in that sphere of consciousness in which there is a way in and through which one may become aware of the experience, the expression and the manifesting of same in a three-dimensional plane.\n\nHence the entity was born into the earth under what signs? Pisces, ye say. Yet astrologically from the records, these are some two signs off in thy reckoning.\n\nThen from what is the influence drawn? Not merely because Pisces is accredited with an influence of such a nature, but because it _is_! And the \"Have You\" becomes then \"There Is\" or \"I Am\" in materiality or flesh, or material forces\u2014even as He who has passed this way!\n\nThe entity as Bainbridge was born in the English land under the _sign,_ as ye would term, of Scorpio; or from Venus as the second influence.\n\nWe find that the activity of the same entity in the earthly experience before that, in a French sojourn, followed the entrance into Venus.\n\nWhat was the life there? How the application?\n\nA child of love! A child of love\u2014the most hopeful of all experiences of any that may come into a material existence; and to some in the earth that most dreaded, that most feared!\n\n(These side remarks become more overburdening than what you are trying to obtain! but you've opened a big subject, haven't you?)\n\nIn Venus the body-form is near to that in the three dimensional plane. For it is what may be said to be rather _all_ -inclusive! For it is that ye would call love\u2014which, to be sure, may be licentious, selfish; which also may be so large, so inclusive as to take on the less of self and more of the ideal, more of that which is _giving._\n\nWhat is love? Then what is Venus? It is beauty, love, hope, charity\u2014yet all of these have their extremes. But these extremes are not in the expressive nature or manner as may be found in that tone or attunement of Uranus; for they (in Venus) are more in the order that they blend as one with another.\n\nSo the entity passed through that experience, and on entering into materiality abused same; as the wastrel who sought those expressions of same in the loveliness for self alone, without giving\u2014giving of self in return for same.\n\nHence we find the influences wielded in the sojourn of the entity from the astrological aspects or emotions of the mental nature are the ruling, yet must be governed by a standard.\n\nAnd when self is the standard, it becomes very distorted in materiality\n\nBefore that we find the influence was drawn for a universality of activity from Jupiter; in those experiences of the entity's sojourn or activity as the minister or teacher in Lucius. For the entity gave for the gospel's sake, a love, an activity and a hope through things that had become as of a universal nature.\n\nYet coming into the Roman influence from the earthly sojourn in Troy, we find that the entity through the Jupiterian environment was trained\u2014as we understand\u2014by being tempered to give self from the very universality, the very bigness of those activities in Jupiter.\n\nFor the sojourn in Troy was as the soldier, the carrying out of the order given, with a claim for activities pertaining to world affairs\u2014a spreading.\n\nWhat form, ye ask, did he take? That which may be described as in the circle with the dot, in which there is the turning within ever if ye will know the answer to thy problems; no matter in what stage of thy consciousness ye may be. For \"Lo, I meet thee _within_ thy holy temple,\" is the promise.\n\nAnd the pattern is ever, \"have you?\" In other words, have you love? or the circle within, and not for self? but that He that giveth power, that meeteth within, many be magnified?\n\nHave you rather abased self that the glory may be magnified that thou didst have with Him before the worlds were, before a division of consciousness came?\n\nThese become as it were a part of thy experiences, then, through the astrological sojourns or environs from which all take their turn, their attunement.\n\nAnd we find that the experience of the entity before that, as Uhjltd, was from even without the sphere of thine own orb; for the entity came from those centers about which thine own solar system moves\u2014in Arcturus.\n\nFor there had come from those activities, in Uhjltd, the knowledge of the oneness, and of those forces and powers that would set as it were the universality of its relationships, through its unity of purpose in all spheres of human experience; by the entity becoming how? Not aliens, then\u2014not bastards before the Lord\u2014but sons\u2014co-heirs with Him in the Father's kingdom.\n\nYet the quick return to the earthly sojourn in Troy, and the abuse of these, the turning of these for self\u2014in the activities attempted\u2014brought about the changes that were wrought.\n\nBut the entrance into the Ra Ta experience, when there was the journeying from materiality\u2014or the being translated in materiality as Ra Ta\u2014was from the infinity forces, or from the Sun; with those influences that draw upon the planet itself, the earth and all those about same.\n\nIs it any wonder that in the ignorance of the earth the activities of that entity were turned into that influence called the sun worshippers? This was because of the abilities of its influences in the experiences of each individual, and the effect upon those things of the earth in nature itself; because of the atmosphere, the forces as they take form from the vapors created even by same; and the very natures or influences upon vegetation!\n\nThe very natures or influences from the elemental forces themselves were drawn in those activities of the elements within the earth, that could give off their vibrations because of the influences that attracted or draw away from one another.\n\nThis was produced by that which had come into the experiences in materiality, or into being, as the very nature of water with the sun's rays; or the ruler of thy own little solar system, thy own little nature in the form ye may see in the earth!\n\nHence we find how, as ye draw your patterns from these, that they become a part of the whole. For ye are _relatively_ related to all that ye have contacted in materiality, mentality, spirituality! All of these are a portion of thyself in the material plane.\n\nIn taking form they become a mental body with its longings for its home, with right and righteousness.\n\nThen that ye know as thy mental self is the form taken, with all of its variations as combined from the things it has been within, without, and in relationship to the activities in materiality as well as in the spheres or various consciousness of \"Have you\u2014love, the circle, the Son?\"\n\nThese become then as the signs of the entity, and ye may draw these from the pattern which has been set. Just as the desert experience, the lines drawn in the temple as represented by the pyramid, the sun, the water, the well, the sea and the ships upon same\u2014because of the very nature of expression\u2014become the _pattern_ of the entity in this material plane.\n\nDraw ye then from that which has been shown ye by the paralleling of thy own experiences in the earth. For they each take their form, their symbol, their sound, their color, their stone. For they all bear a relationship one to another, according to what they have done about, \"The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silent!\"\n\nHe that would know his own way, his own relationships to Creative Forces or God, may seek through the promises in Him; as set in Jesus of Nazareth\u2014He passeth by! Will ye have Him enter and sup with thee?\n\n_Open_ then thy heart, thy consciousness, for _He_ would tarry with thee!\n\nWe are through.\n\n#### **Reading 1895\u20131**\n\nThe experiences of the entity in the interims of planetary sojourns between the earthly manifestations become the innate mental urges, that may or may not at times be a part of the day dreaming, or the thought and meditation of the inmost self.\n\nHence we find astrological aspects and influence in the experience, but rather because of the entity's sojourn in the environ than because of a certain star, constellation or even zodiacal sign being in such and such a position at the time of birth.\n\nKnow that man\u2014as has been expressed\u2014was given dominion over all, and in the understanding of same may use all of the laws as pertaining to same for his benefit.\n\nIn the application of same as a benefit\u2014if it is for self-indulgence or self-expression alone, it loses its own individuality in the personality of that sought or desired; and thus the very knowledge may be used as a stumbling-stone. But if each experience is as a manifestation to the glory of a creative or heavenly force, or that which is continual thus the judgments being drawn from an ideal that is spiritual in its concept, then there is the greater growth, the greater harmony\u2014for there becomes an at-onement with the influences about same.\n\n#### **Reading 281\u201355**\n\n_Q: Through other planetary sojourns an entity has the opportunity to change its rate of vibration so as to be attracted in the earth plane under another soul number._\n\nA: Each planetary influence vibrates at a different rate of vibration. An entity entering that influence enters that vibration; not necessary that he change, but it is the grace of God that he may! It is part of the universal consciousness, the universal law.\n\n#### **Reading 1947\u20131**\n\nIn giving the urges, then, we find that the astrological influences are not so much because of the certain position of the Sun or the Moon or the Stars, but because of their relationship which is a relativity of influence or force; for, being from the body or materialization, there is the activity of the soul in the environs in which certain influences have been and are accredited to the activities from those planetary sojourns. Thus they become as signs, omens in the experience.\n\n#### **Reading 2599\u20131**\n\nIn giving the interpretations of the records as we find them here, these are chosen with the desire and purpose that this be a helpful experience for the entity; enabling it to better fulfill that purpose for which it entered this experience.\n\nKnow that one's manifestations in the earth are not by chance but a fulfillment of those purposes the Creative Forces have with each individual entity.\n\nFor, the Creative Influence is mindful ever, and hath not willed that any soul should perish, but hath with every temptation prepared a way, a means of escape.\n\nThus the very fact of a material manifestation should become an awareness to the individual entity of the mindfulness of that influence of Creative Energy in the experience.\n\nThen, as to the abilities with this entity\u2014magnify the virtues, minimize the faults\u2014not only in thy judgments of others. For with what judgment ye mete, it will be meted to thee again.\n\nThus the purpose of each experience is that the entity may magnify and glorify that which is good. For, good is of the one source, God, and is eternal.\n\nThen as an individual entity magnifies that which is good, and minimizes that which is false, it grows in grace, in knowledge, in understanding.\n\nKnow that in the manner ye mete, or do to thy fellow man, so ye do unto thy Maker.\n\nThen let it be from this premise that the judgments and the activities of this entity in this material experience may be drawn as a helpful force in its journey through this particular sojourn.\n\nFrom the sources of the previous sojourns we find urges arising materially in the experience of the entity\u2014that is, from the previous earthly sojourns as well as the astrological sojourns during the interims between earthly manifestations.\n\nNot that there are influences from the position of stars, planets or the like that may not be met; but these are as urges\u2014just as the environs of an individual in the material plane produce urges, because of studies or activities in a given direction, and because certain material abilities are innately a part of the entity's experience. Yet urges oft arise in the experience of an entity for this or that, the source of which the entity itself may not understand or comprehend\u2014for no one in the family thought or acted in that direction.\n\nThen, this\u2014the environ of the entity, the soul manifesting in the earth\u2014may be called by another name, as with this entity\u2014a part of the present name in the experience before this; and the abilities as an individual to meet others, to influence them in the activities in which certain interests might be magnified, come from the entity's activities in the previous sojourn.\n\nThus the earthly sojourns make for manifested urges in the present experience. Also those planetary sojourns, in this present solar system, make for urges that are accredited to those particular planets as states of consciousness\u2014that become innately manifested in the present entity.\n\nFor instance, in this entity we find the manifestation of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Uranus\u2014manifested and latent in the dreams, the visions, the activities; in the high mental abilities of the entity, the ability to reason things through, the stableness of its activity in using not only material but mental forces as an influence to urge others to buy or to be interested in, or to analyze conditions.\n\nThus in the present, and manifestedly so, the entity might find the abilities as an adjuster, or as an individual to give expression as to evaluation of materials or properties, or abilities of individuals.\n\nIn Venus we find that appreciation of the beautiful, as related to art, as related to things, as related to conditions in the relationships of groups of peoples one to another.\n\nAlso from Jupiter we find the association with groups, masses, as a reflection in the activities of abilities, and that in which the entity may apply itself in the present experience.\n\nUranus brings the extremes, in which the entity may rise to great heights of expectation and yet at times find self in a wonderment. Yet innately there are those expectancies in spiritual facts, in the occult, in the psychic forces, that are powers of might for either good or evil. For, as indicated, in Uranus there are the extremes.\n\nKnow, as from the first premise, that no influence surpasses the will of an individual. The power of will is that birthright as the gift from the Creative Force to each entity, that it may become one with that Influence; knowing itself to be itself yet a part of and one with the Creative Influence as the directing influence in the experience.\n\nAlso the earthly sojourns bring urges through the latent faculties of the sensory forces; or they become characteristics that may be indicated\u2014either latent or manifested\u2014as the power or might manifesting; for only as the entity works with or against an influence does it become magnified in the experiences of the entity.\n\n#### **Reading 243\u201310**\n\nIn entering, we find, astrologically, the entity coming under the influence of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Neptune. These, as we find, have builded, and have influenced the entity, in the present experience. Also we find urges as respecting the experiences as related to innate urges, and that as has been _builded_ in the present entity.\n\nAside: Let not this be confusing, as to innate urges and that as is builded in the present experience, for the application of will, and of innate urge through planetary influences, is exercised in this entity as we would find it in few.\n\nIn the experience, then, we find these as builded _irrespective_ of will, and those that have been builded as respecting the _application_ of will's influence; for will is that developing factor with which an entity chooses or builds that freedom, or that of being free, knowing the truth as is applicable in the experience, and in the various experiences as has been builded; for that builded must be met, whether in thought or in deed; for thoughts are deeds, and their current run is through the whole of the influence in an ENTITY'S experience. Hence, as was given, \"He that hateth his brother has committed as great a sin as he that slayeth a man,\" for the deed is as of an accomplishment in the mental being, which is the builder for every entity.\n\nMuch has been met, much as been _builded_ by the entity in the present experience. Much has been experienced by the entity in the various spheres through which the entity has passed.\n\nIn that builded, we find one of high, ennobling ideas and ideals; often tempered in Mars, through wrath, that has brought does bring, will bring, many of the experiences that have been experienced in the building of the entity's inner being to the action within the life.\n\nIn those influences in Jupiter, finds for the bigness of the entity's vision, the broadness of the good or bad that may be wielded in the influence of those whom the entity contacts from time to time, or period to period, or experience to experience.\n\nIn those influences seen in those of Neptune, brings for those of that as is of the _mystery_ in the experiences of the entity; the associations in many peculiar circumstances and conditions; the conditions and experiences, and influences, as bring many conditions as, by others, would be misunderstood (and there _be_ minds that would misunderstand, rather than know the truth).\n\nIn the experiences there has been _innately_ built, the fear of evil in the life, the fear of those that would bring condemnation on those who are in power, and oft is the entity too _good_ to others for its own good! Through the attempt innate to build that which would be the releasing of those experiences which have been had by the entity.\n\nIn those influences seen in Neptune, also brings that water\u2014large _bodies_ of water\u2014the entity will gain most through the experience, has gained and will gain, through sojourn near, or passing over, large bodies of water, and _salt_ water is preferable; for in the experiences will be seen, fresh hasn't _always_ meant for living water.\n\nIn those as builded innately, we find:\n\nOne that is in that position of making friends easily, and just as easily losing same; yet there are friendships made that make for the better understanding in the experience, and in those of Venus forces comes the love that is _innate_ in the experience of the entity. Through all the vicissitudes of life this remaineth, for the entity has gained much that makes for that as was given\u2014\"There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother,\" and \"he that is just kind to the least of these, my little ones, is greater than he that hath taken a mighty city.\" These building, these kept within the consciousness of the entity, will build to that Christ consciousness as makes all free; for in Him is the life, and He is the light that shineth into the dark places, even to the recesses of that of His own consciousness that makes for that which casteth out fear; (for being afraid is the first consciousness of sin's entering in, for he that is made afraid has lost consciousness of self's own heritage with the Son; for we are heirs through Him to that Kingdom that is beyond all that that would make afraid, or that would cause a doubt in the heart of any. Through the recesses of the heart, then, search out that that would make afraid, casting out fear, and _He_ alone may guide.)\n\n**Editor's Note: The group working with Edgar Cayce attempted to develop tests that would help individuals identify their planetary influencesand their past-life influences. Cayce said that only the astrological was attainable, given that past lives required reading the Akashic Record of a soul or the soul awakening to its memories of past lives. He guided them to use this astrological information for helping to identify one's vocation. Here's that reading:**\n\n_Text of Reading 5753-3_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 25th day of October, 1939, in accordance with request made by Hugh Lynn Cayce, Manager of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Hugh Lynn Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading 11:30 to 11:40 A.M. Eastern Standard Time.\n\nGC: You will have before you the psychic work of Edgar Cayce relative to information from Life Readings concerning vocational guidance; together with the entity, the enquiring mind, Hugh Lynn Cayce, present here, who seeks to correlate and use such information. From a study of the Life Readings it would seem that an individual's mental and spiritual development, his contentment, is dependent upon releasing and expression of basic mental and emotional urges coming from planetary sojourns and past incarnations. Please give at this time suggestions for the development of a system or a series of intelligence tests which will reveal these basic urges and help an individual in selecting a life's work. It is hoped that such information as may be given here may be developed and used through scout activities and the Princess Anne Schools. You will answer questions.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the information here, that has been indicated in Life Readings as to vocational guidance for individuals.\n\nIn developing a plan, or a manner of seeking ways in which individuals might give expression of the latent faculties and powers from the material sojourns, as well as the planetary influences\u2014here we will find that there are conflicting forces and influences at times\u2014as we have indicated.\n\nThe astrological aspects may give a tendency, an inclination; and a systematic, scientific study of same would indicate the vocation. And about eighty percent of the individuals would be in the position of being influenced by such astrological aspects; or would be in the position for their abilities to be indicated from same.\n\nBut the other twenty percent would not be in that position, due to the influences from activity or the use of their abilities in material experience. Hence in these it would be not only necessary that their material sojourns be given, but as to what had been accomplished through same, and that to be met in the present experience. For, as has been indicated, no influence\u2014astrologically or from material sojourns\u2014surpasses the will or the determination of the individual. Then, there are material factors that rule or govern or direct or influence such forces. These may be tempered by the astrological aspects, but these are not (the astrological aspects) the major influence or force\u2014the will.\n\nThus, only about eighty percent of the individuals may have their abilities indicated from the astrological aspects in the direction of vocational guidance, as to be a determining factor for such.\n\nIf some five individuals would be taken, and their charts or astrological aspects indicated, and questions asked as to determining the influence or force from same\u2014from such an aspect there might be given information so that a general chart might be indicated for a questionnaire, or a test, or an activity that would be of material benefit in a great _number_ of individuals\u2014but never a perfect score may be indicated. For the will, as well as the factors of environment, have their influence.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: How can the urges from past incarnations be determined by a test or series of tests?_\n\nA: As just indicated\u2014this may only be done by giving the material sojourns of the individual.\n\nBut if the astrological aspects and influences are given, then there may be determined a questionnaire from same.\n\n_Q: Should the chart be drawn from the geocentric or the heliocentric system?_\n\nA: The geocentric system would be the more in keeping with the Persian force or influence.\n\n_Q: Any other suggestion to Hugh Lynn Cayce regarding the development of this at this time?_\n\nA: As indicated, there may be charts drawn of five individuals, and a questionnaire may be determined for factors in the individual experience\u2014as to what their inclinations or activities are. Not by telling, but by questioning!\n\nThen _from_ same, as indicated, there may be given a more correct or direct questionnaire that would be helpful for a large _number_ of individuals\u2014but _not_ a perfect score.\n\nFor in about twenty percent of the populace at the present time, it is dependent upon what the individuals have done with their urges _through_ material sojourns.\n\nAs indicated trough this channel, some are in keeping with the astrological charts, others are found to be partially so, others are diametrically opposed to same\u2014because of the activities of the individuals.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**Editor's Note: Cayce's discourses state that all souls were created at the same moment, yet Cayce used the term \"old soul\" occasionally. He later explained that he meant a soul that has been sojourning in and around the earth for many lifetimes. The following is a reading for an old soul, and this reading has many interesting references to planetary and constellational sojourning.**\n\n_Text of Reading 436-2 M 28 (Elevator Boy, Christian with East Indian leaning)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at Lillian Edgerton, Inc., 267 Fifth Ave., N.Y.C., this 10th day of November, 1933, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Mr. [436], Active Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Hugh Lynn Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mr. [436].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn March 29, 1905, (11:30 P.M.) in Midland, Virginia.\n\nTime of Reading 3:00 to 3:50 P.M. Eastern Standard Time , D.C.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces, that are latent and exhibited in the personalities of the present entity, [436].\n\nIt would be well to comment upon the oldness of this soul, especially in its activities\u2014as will be seen\u2014in periods when the occult and mystic influences were manifested in the experience of the entity in the earth; and make for influences that have been (or may be made) very good or very bad in the experience of the entity. Hence, this is an old soul.\n\nIn giving the personalities and the individuality of the entity in the present experience, we must approach same from the astrological, though these in the very fact of that given respecting its activities in the earth during such periods when such changes or activities were manifested in the material affairs of individuals, make for little that may be compulsory in astrological influence. Yet impulses arise from these influences.\n\nAs in passing from Pisces into Aries, there are those influences innately and manifested in the mental forces of the body; much of both of these, and they become conflicting in the experience at times of the entity.\n\nPisces brings rather the mystery and creative forces, and magnanimous aspects in students of\u2014or in the thought of\u2014influences in the active principles of individual impulse; with Aries bringing reason, or air, or airy actions, yet reason, more than Pisces would make the demands in the self at time for reasons for every manifestation, whether material conditions, mental or spiritual conditions in the experience of the entity. And at other periods it may be said that the entity becomes rather susceptible to influences about the body, without considering seriously the sources of the information and as to whether same is able to be verified by others or not. Feelings of same impress the entity from this astrological influence, which\u2014as we see\u2014does not only control earth's sojourn but the position of the entity in this sojourn through the planetary influences in the earth's solar system.\n\nAs to the sojourns in the astrological influences then, we find these are the ruling; not from their position at the birth, but rather from the position of the entity's activities in that environ.\n\nMars is an influence rather from the associations then, in self's own experience. Or when dissensions, distrust, dissatisfaction, madness, wars, arise; these come _about_ the entity rather than influencing the _activities_ of the entity, other than through the associations with individuals that make demands upon the entity and its activities in these directions. These become at times concrete experiences in the entity's activities in the present experience; yet these, as we find, for many a year now (and these began some three years ago) will be less in the experience until Mars in '38 or '39 becomes nearer in its influence upon the sojourners of those in the earth that have experienced a sojourn in that environ.\n\nHence this may be said, in a manner, to be of little influence then in the period, or during that period, when the entity should make for a stabilization in self's experience of that to which it may develop its better abilities in this present sojourn in the earth.\n\nFrom Venus rather a complex position or condition comes to the experience of the entity, where filial or marital or such relations as of loves in the material earth come in the experience. Not that there hasn't been, nor won't be, nor isn't existent, that which is pure, elevating and helpful in the experience of the entity in its relationships with individuals of both sexes in this way and manner; yet these have brought some very pleasant experiences and some very contrary and contradictory influences in the activities and in the experience of the entity in the present.\n\nHence it may be given in passing, to the entity, that the love of and for a pure body is the most sacred experience in an entity's earth sojourn; yet these conditions soured, these conditions turned into vitrol, may become the torments of an exemplary body, and one well-meaning, and make for loss of purposes.\n\nKeep the friendships, then. Keep those relationships that are founded upon all that is constructive in earth, in the mind, in the spirit.\n\nAs to those influences from the sojourn of the entity in Uranian forces, as may be indicated from that given as to the oldness and as to the delving into the occult and mystic and the application in the experience, the entity has sojourned more than once in this environ and under quite varied or different experiences and manifestations. Hence there are periods when earthly conditions, mental conditions, spiritual conditions, are very good; and others when all are very bad in the experience of the entity in the present. Yet, as we find, in the application of self as related to the impulses that may rise in the consciousness of the entity in the present experience from those impulses received from the sojourns, these may be made the strong fort in the activities of self in the present. But they must be tempered, from the very experiences in the sojourn, to making for not an active force in those experiences from planetary influences in a weak body, but turn to strengthening the body-physical for the manifestations of the correct raising of those vital energies in the material body, through which such influences may make for manifestations and experiences in the earth's sojourn. These influences from Uranus make for many of the ills that have been in the experience in the body, in the nervous reactions to the physical body, to the weak experiences to the physical body, when the very vital life force of a material body was in danger of being separated from physical for an ethereal sojourn.\n\nAs to the appearances, then, and their influence in the present, these are given as the ones influencing the activities of the present body; rather than numbers, we give those that make for the greater activity in the present:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of nativity, and about those places, those peoples, where the first settlings were\u2014and the first sojournings that spread beyond the mere force builded; or about that town that was the first capitol of this new land, or this portion of same. And among the activities there are many of those things being reconstructed, re-enacted, that will be not only of physical interest but will, with the application of the abilities within self, recall to the entity many of the associations that the entity had with the peoples of the land (native). While the entity did not go what is proverbially called \"native\" in the experience, the associations were such, with those that acted in the capacity of the spiritual leaders (or with what were termed the medicine men of the period), and with those that later attempted to set themselves as leaders of this people, that the entity made friends both with the natives and the colonists, aiding the colonists in the period to establish better relations; in the name then Edward Compton, a distant family name even that may be found among those that sojourned in the peninsula land of that portion of the country.\n\nThe entity lost and gained through the experience; gained in the application of self for the benefiting of those with whom the entity sojourned, and the natives also whom the entity aided in making better cooperative relationships in the activities of the people of the period and time. The entity aided in establishing such relationships that there was the trading of the native peoples in distant lands. One particular period of interest, that may be noted in history, was when the entity aided in bringing to the peoples corn from the western portion of their native land, that sustained those peoples through a very bad period.\n\nFrom that period there is the influence oft in the present in those activities when studies of those peoples are the experience of the entity, and there are both confusing and constructive influences. Yet, when about many of a mediumistic turn, many of those with whom the entity engaged in life and activity would attempt to speak to the entity; especially one that termed himself Big Rock, Black Rock.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was during that period when there were the returnings of those peoples in the land now called Greece, from the rebellions that had been active in Mesopotamia and in the regions about what is known as Turkey and those lands; during those periods of Xenophon's activities and those wars.\n\nThe entity was among the few of these natives, strong in body, purposeful in intent, to return to the native land; and the entity gained through the experience but lost in the latter portion of the sojourn when returning to the native land, when power was entrusted in the activities of the entity; and while the purposefulness was correct, there arose those that distrusted and brought contentions by the accusations brought against the entity, in the name Xerxion. Then Xerxion lost in faith in his fellow man, and the faith in the purposefulness of those that were attributing to the gods, or the powers and forces as they were named and termed, the elements to maintain the equilibrium. Hence in that the entity lost, and in the present\u2014while there are those abilities in self to lead for a purposefulness in its activity, too oft has the entity become discouraged when accusations of unkind things were brought, or when experiences made for the losing of confidences in friends and associates it has made discouragements too easily in the experience in the present. This (in passing, may be said) is a test period for the entity in its relationship, particularly. Hence the entity should turn to the abilities within and find self first, knowing in what, in whom the entity has believed; knowing He is able to keep that which is committed unto Him against any experience that may arise in the lives or activities of those who are His loved ones, His chosen. Who has He chosen? They that do His biddings. What are His biddings? Love the Lord thy God with all thine heart (and thy God meaning Him that in Spirit is the Creative Forces of all that is manifested), keeping self unspotted from the world or any smirch of activity, and loving thy neighbor, thy brother, as thine self. These will make for the relieving of all those influences in the experience, and bring harmony, peace, joy, understanding, in the experience of the entity; and will enable the entity to not only study, not only to understand, but\u2014best of all\u2014to comprehend from what source many of those influences arise, as we will see has to do upon the mental body of the entity, and become active oft in the physical forces or the physical activities through their nerve reflexes in a material body.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in that land now known as the Egyptian, during that period when there was the returning of those that had been astrayed through the sending away of the priest of the land.\n\nThe entity was among those that were banished with the priest, being with the priest Ra Ta in the association and in the activities of gathering together the tenets that the scribe\u2014in a way; rather the one gathering the data than one scribing or protecting the data\u2014collected. The entity aided the priest specifically in some of the associations and connections with those of the temple gatherers to whom the priest gave heart and mind; and for the act among those the entity was severely punished when banished by the natives, rather than the king. Yet, being healed by the priest in the foreign land, the entity came again into Egypt when there was the re-establishing, and aided in rebuilding the temples of service; being active then in what today would be called the preparations for those things that kept the cleansings of the temple after use of individual in body, or as a caretaker (termed in the present) of offices, temples, churches or buildings. Then the entity was in the name Pth-Lerr. The entity gained and gained, and much that is suffered in body is as a bringing to bear of that which may make the mental contact with the tenets of the experience.\n\nOne might ask (this aside, please), why would such be brought to bear? Because, with the experience of the entity in the period, seeing the developments and the activities, there was set within the soul that desire: \"Come what may, whatever is necessary in my whole experience of my soul, make me to know again the joys of the tenets of Ra Ta.\"\n\nIn the present these may mean much, if they are builded for a soul development in the present; for these needs be to overcome those experiences in the sojourn just previous in the Atlantean land.\n\nBefore this we find the entity in the Atlantean land rather rebelled with those forces of Baalilal, with those activities in the electrical appliances, when these were used by those peoples to make for beautiful buildings without but temples of sin within.\n\nThe entity, in the name Saail, was a priest (demoted) in the Temple of Oz in Atlantis, and lost from soul development, gained from material things; yet these fade, these make raids upon the body in physical manifestations. These make for hindrances in activity in that known within the innate self. For, rather were the mysteries of the black arts as applied in the experience practiced by Saail, yet these in the present may be turned into account in material things in making material connections; but use or apply same in the experience rather in the mental and spiritual manner for the soul development of the entity, rather than for materiality in the present. These are weaknesses, then, yet weakness is only strength misapplied or used in vain ways.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in that land that has been termed Zu, or Lemuria, or Mu. This was before the sojourn of peoples in perfect body form; rather when they may be said to have been able to\u2014through those developments of the period\u2014be in the body or out of the body and act upon materiality. In the spirit or in flesh these made those things, those influences, that brought destruction; for the atmospheric pressure in the earth in the period was quite different from that experienced by the physical being of today.\n\nThe entity then was in the name Mmuum, or rather those calls that make easy the mysteries of words as related to sounds and rote that bring to the consciousness, in those that have indwelled in those lands, that activity that merits (not the word), that brings, that impulse that urges that those forces from without act upon the elements in whatever sphere they may bring a material manifestation. This must be controlled within self, from those influences in [436]; for these are those things at times that hinder.\n\nLet self, then, be grounded rather in the faith of that which is, was, and ever will be, the source of all spirit, all thought all mind, all physical manifestation\u2014the _one_ God, as called in this period. In that period he was called Zu-u-u-u-u; in the next Ohm\u2014Oh-u-m; in the next (now known as Egypt) with Ra Ta, He was called God\u2014G-o-r-r-d!\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity, and that to which it may attain, and how, in the present:\n\nFirst it may be said, study\u2014through that known in self of the spiritual and mental forces active in the experience of the body\u2014to show self approved unto an ideal that is set in the Son, the Christ, knowing that in possessing the consciousness of His love, His manifestation, all is well; for, as is known, without that love as He manifested among men, nothing can, nothing did, nothing will come into consciousness of matter. Not that we may deny evil and banish it, but supplanting and rooting out evil in the experience, replacing same with the love that is in the consciousness of the body Jesus, the Christ, we may do all things in His name; and using those opportunities in whatsoever sphere of activity the entity may find to show forth those commands He gave, \"If ye love me, keep my commandments.\" What, ye ask, are His commandments? \"A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.\" What, then, are the fruits of love? The fruits of the spirit; which are kindness, hope, fellowship, brotherly love, friendship, patience; these are the fruits of the spirit; these are the commands of Him that ye manifest them in whatsoever place ye find yourself, and your soul shall grow in grace, in knowledge, in understanding, and that joy that comes with a perfect knowledge in Him brings the joys of earth, the joys of the mental mind, or joys of the spheres, and the _glory_ of the Father in thine experience.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: When will adverse planetary change for better influences in my life?_\n\nA: As indicated, the receding of Mars brings, and has brought, better planetary influences; as the mental activities and applications in the light of the love in Christ brings with those activities in the coming closer and closer of Venus with Uranus; which begins in December, present year, for the approach, reaching nearer conjunction in May or June of the coming year better conditions, mentally, materially, financially.\n\n_Q: What is the main purpose of this incarnation?_\n\nA: To set self aright as respecting the variations in those tenets in the first two experiences in the sojourn, tempered in those tenets given in Ra Ta\u2014that, \"The Lord Thy God is _one_!\" And manifesting of that oneness in the little things makes the soul grow in His grace!\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**Editor's Note: Cayce even gave readings on how to subdue negative influences from planetary or astrological soul activity. Here's one example:**\n\n_Text of Reading 137-18 M 27 (Stockbroker, Jewish)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 322 Grafton Avenue, Dayton, Ohio, this 24th day of July, 1925, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Mr. [137].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Mrs. Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn October 28, 1898, in New York City. On the floor of Time of Reading the New York Stock 9:30 A.M. Dayton Savings Time. Exchange, Wall & New Streets, N.Y.\n\nGC: You will have before you the body of [137], on the floor of the N.Y. Stock Exchange, Wall and New Streets, New York City, N.Y, with the information as has been given this body in readings given for same on the 28th day of October, 1924, also that given on the 12th day of January, 1925, [See 137\u20134 and 137\u201312] especially that portion of same relating to the undue influences in the life of [137] when Moon's forces square to Saturn and Mars bring doubts within the body's mental forces. This is given in reading of January 12th, as occurring in the week of August 13, 1925. You will please tell us just the character of influence that will occur, whether of mental, spiritual or physical forces, and how this entity may guard against this influence.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the body here, and the information as has been given this body in regards to influences as are exercised in the life of the entity at the periods given, through position of the planetary forces as are exercised in the life of same.\n\nNow, we find that with the indwelling urges as are seen within the individual, when there occur certain positions of those planetary influences under which the body (meaning spiritual force body) has developed, these bring the intense urge towards those experiences of the entity as it passed through that phase of its development, for we find the urge within each entity is its experiences in all phases of its existence, plus the environmental conditions of body at time, with the will of entity counterbalancing same through body-mind urge. Hence the necessity of each entity understanding, having knowledge of those laws that do govern same in the material or physical realm, as well as those pertaining to the spiritual forces as are manifest through the body in each of its various changes, for we find all are one, for the real body is that spiritual force manifesting in same, always through the Trinity of that comprising same.\n\nIn the information as has been given as we find, these influences come for this body at this particular or special time, when through the influences as are exercised in the position Moon, Jupiter, with Saturn and with Mars, this brings to that body, [137], those of that urge, that doubt of self and self's abilities to manifest either mental (Moon with Saturn), with physical, (doubting of own physical health, see?) through the forces or powers in Mars, the own spiritual forces as is the influence, or undue influence on Jupiter's forces with this position as manifested. Then, we find these at this time pertaining to this nature:\n\nThe body-mind, the spiritual-mind, has reached at this period, especially, and during week of August 13, 1925, that place where the doubts of every nature, pertaining to this threefold force as is given here, come to the body. Hence, we will find, will be easily aggravated through any mental association, whether in business relation, moral relations socially or marital relations, for, seemingly, at this time would occur all of these combining with one to bring the detrimental forces to the mind. With the condition of mind comes that condition where the physical forces, apparently, respond more to these of the conditions wherein weaknesses are shown or manifested in same. Then the combination of all would bring as to that\u2014well\u2014\"I don't care! What difference does it make? Let it go to pot!\"\u2014See?\n\nThen, to overcome this, rather place those forces as are manifest through will forces, knowing that these do appear. That, \"Get thee behind me Saturn (Satan), that I _will_ serve the living God, with _my_ body, _my_ mind, _my_ money, _my_ spirit, _my_ soul, for I and _His,_ and through _me,_ my body, my mind, do I manifest _my_ impression, _my_ interpretation of _my_ God.\"\n\nThis does, not, as we see, relate to physical accidents, physical conditions, physical things, pertaining to the material things of life, save as would be affected by same through\u2014\"Well, I don't care.\"\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n### **4**\n\n### **Reincarnation Unnecessary: Breaking Free of the Wheel of Karma and Reincarnation**\n\n**Editor's Note: About twelve hundred people received \"life readings\" from Edgar Cayce. Life readings are those in which Cayce gave people's past lives, explaining how these previous incarnations affected the present life. Of these many life readings, eighteen people were told that this present incarnation may be their _last,_ indicating that there was no longer any compelling force or karmic pull necessitating another incarnation on earth. These following readings reveal some of the reasons why these people would not have to reincarnate.**\n\n**My colleagues and I knew some of these people, and we can assure you that they were not perfect. In fact, they had many common human weaknesses. Some of them also had very difficult lives, with much sorrow and suffering. Others had fairly normal lives, with no outstanding quality that we could point to as the reason for their breakthrough to life beyond incarnation on earth.**\n\n**Apparently, their freedom from the wheel of karma and reincarnation occurred _within_ themselves, in their hearts and minds, because there are little to no outward reasons for their release from the cycle of incarnations. One part of their stories that was common among them is that this last incarnation was the culmination of _many_ incarnations that led up to this opportunity. Even though this was their last incarnation, they were told that they had the freedom to return if they desired, but they no longer had to.**\n\n**The following are the life readings for ten of the eighteen souls for whom reincarnation became unnecessary.**\n\n**1. Case #987**\n\n**Editor's Note: In this first case, Cayce begins with this statement: \"The entity may complete its earth's experience in the present, if it so chooses.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 987-2 F 47 (Housewife, Christian)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 9th day of August, 1935, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [987], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc., via Mr. [257] and Mrs. [903].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mrs. [987].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn December 27, 1887, in Northville, Michigan.\n\nTime of Reading 3:50 to 4:50 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. New York City.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces; that are latent and manifested in the personalities of the entity now known as or called [987].\n\nA golden cord runs through the astrological, the numerological and the earth's experiences of this entity. The entity may complete its earth's experience in the present, if it so chooses.\n\nThen, in giving that which may be helpful or beneficial to the entity in making application of those things that have and do become a part of its present experience, it is well that much that may be given be kept, be presented to others, that they, too, may take hope, may know there is _still_ that hope in the _living_ of those influences, those creative energies that bring into the experiences of man the knowledge of the at-oneness with that Creative Force, that Mighty I AM Presence that exists, which the Giver of the good gifts has given to all.\n\nWe find that the astrological influences have very little to do with this entity, yet may be seen as urges in the experience and how the entity has applied those urges in the material manifestations of same.\n\nFor all in matter, all in form, first began in the urge of the mental or the spiritual influence, that _prompted_ same to come into manifestations under the influence of a guiding hand.\n\nIn the entity we find that Jupiter is the ruling force, with Venus; which combination makes for beauty of attainment and the longing\u2014as it is the experience of the entity\u2014to present to others that phase, that part of the experience that is beautiful, that is better. Not to exaggeration, but rather as the entity has experienced that which is of error, that which is of shame, that which is of disrupting forces, becomes negligible unless given power by the thought, by the activity on the part of some mind. Not that denying alone makes for non-existence, but rather that those things presenting themselves as errors, as a faux pas, as a disrupting influence, may be used as the stepping-stones for the creating of those atmospheres, those environs in which each and every soul may find _in_ a trial, _in_ a temptation, in a hardship even, that of beauty. For through the things which He suffered He became the King of kings, the Lord of lords. So in man, that has named a Name that is above every name, it is found that with the using of experiences there may be brought into his consciousness that harmony, which is another name for peace, another name for good, another name for joy, which will be crowned in glory.\n\nIn the urge arising from these influences we find that there is the necessity for the entity to learn a little more of Patience. For Selfishness is not a portion of the entity's own being; rather is it the lack of the Patience; not with others but the more with self. For as He gave, it is in patience that ye become aware of thy soul!\n\nSo in its associations with others the entity needs to forget those things that have made for hardships, that have made for misunderstandings in relationships as one to another\u2014whether with individuals or with groups; though the entity may find oft that it requires that self turn within, that the consciousness of His Presence abiding may direct. Thus may there be brought peace and patience, as an _active_ force; not as a passive influence in the experience of self but as an _active_ influence!\n\nThis has brought into self that association where tolerance has not _always_ been felt, as may be seen through the appearances of the entity in the earth; not tolerance as a passive thing but tolerance as an active force! For while each soul, each expression may have the right of its own opinion and its own activity, it should not only say so but act in such a manner; knowing that each soul is destined to become a portion again of the First Cause, or back to its Maker. And as there is the awareness of its individuality, its ability to apply its portion, the soul-portion of the Creative Forces or Energies or God within itself, it builds that in a soul-body which may be One with that Creative Force.\n\nFor while flesh and blood that is of the earth-earthy may not gain or know glory, the body\u2014the _real_ body; not the superficial but the _real_ body\u2014may become aware of its presence in the Presence of the body of God and among its brethren, and a portion of that Whole.\n\nSo does there become the awareness of tolerance in faith, that is the activity of this entity in the present, to become that which may make the ability in the entity or soul experience to use that in _hand_ as the influences for such an awareness that the body-soul may not need to know flesh save as it chooses same for its own missions for that Creative Energy.\n\nIn Jupiter we find the influences making for abilities of specific natures in the experience of the entity; as in constructive thinking for individuals and for groups, whether this be for writing or for instruction in this or that form. It will find that in the application of self there may be much given to others, in the form of papers, in the form of charts, in the form of instruction that may become\u2014as it were\u2014a light set on a hill for many who grope in darkness and in doubt, who are fearful. For that quieting through the gaining of patience in self may enable the entity to give that light and that instruction necessary for the guiding of many.\n\nVenus makes for close friendships with those whom the entity finds in its experience; not only as a great love for its fellow man but in making for ties that hold, of the spirit rather than of the flesh. Hence kindred souls in all walks of life may find in associations with the entity much that becomes as a complement, as a helpment [helper? helpmate? helpmeet?] to their own struggles. This is expressed in a truth He gave: \"Who is my brother? Who is my mother? Who is my sister? They that do the will of my father in heaven, the same are my mother, my brother, my sister.\"\n\n_This_ is the love that all should come to know, even as it has been attained in a great measure by this entity through the experiences it has gained in its sojourns. And more and more will the entity become aware of same in _active_ tolerance and _active_ patience.\n\nIn Uranus we find the extremist influences, that have been experienced by the entity in the present and that come as urges in the experiences day by day. Oft, from that sojourn or environ in the Uranian experience, does the entity find itself _impelled_ \u2014as it were\u2014to do this or that; which may be entirely at variance to what reason or cold reason would tell the entity. And it makes for those experiences with its friendships, or a certain portion of same, wherein the entity seems to be\u2014or appears to others to _be\u2014somewhat_ peculiar or odd in its choice of this or that activity in relationships to its associations, its reading, its study, its line of endeavor in this or that manner of recreation.\n\nAll of these become a portion of the entity's urge and experience; as does also the interest in things that are psychic or occult or mystic, these have a part in the urges in the experience of the entity. Hence mystical signs, mystical numbers, mystical conditions have much to do with the entity at times. And these may come in the _vision_ and in the dreams (that have been for the time set aside), more and more as the entity turns to those _patience_ applications.\n\nFor, as will be seen, the entity made _for_ the priest the Urim and the Thummim!\n\nAnd the entity may give much of that which comes as an influence in the experiences through the deeper meditation; much constructive counsel to those that seek into the mysteries that are hidden in the activities of those who would give their expression of that they have conceived from the Spirit, that _motivates_ them in their activities.\n\nThen, in these do we find the greater influences from the astrological sojourns.\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth and those that influence the entity in the present, we find\u2014while far apart in their activity\u2014these have been those that bring to the entity much of the urges that arise through the emotional nature of the entity in _this present_ manifestation, or materialization:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, but in and about that known as the Vinland [Vineland. In reading 261\u201321, he gave the correct location as now 987\u20132 Salem, Mass., then all of what is now Cape Cod area, Providence and Newport, Rhode Island] or about Provincetown and Salem, during the early periods of those activities when the persecutions arose for those who heard the unusual, who experienced the moving of an influence or force from without themselves.\n\nThe _entity_ then was close to many of those who were beset by such experiences; hearing, knowing, experiencing many sides of the material manifestations; hearing and knowing many sides of the influences in the experiences of those that _had_ the meetings and were acquainted with such activities.\n\nThen the entity was close to, and the companion of, the minister in the Salem activity; one Nancy Donnelly.\n\nIn the experience the entity gained; yet those things that made for the fear of material suffering, the fear of what people said in criticism, builded much that was hard to be borne in the experience of the entity during that sojourn. Yet the entity, it may be said, gained in the mental and spiritual experience; and has brought to this present sojourn that influence wherein the entity hears much that others would say or would give of their activity, of their experience, and has judged oft well, has judged oft according to those experiences as the minister's helper.\n\nThis is a portion that must be met in that activity of tolerance, in that active patience in self.\n\nThe abilities from that sojourn are towards the setting down of data pertaining to the intricate activities or details of an experience; these become a portion of the entity in its greater activity.\n\nThe entity's social life, its marital life, its relations with its blood in the present have arisen much from those experiences.\n\nThe weirdness of Salem, also the weirdness of the vault or any of those places wherein the dead have buried their dead, finds a gloom within the entity's experience. Yet those places of beauty where there is honor for memory, the trust is in the living God, bring an uplifting in the inmost being of the entity. These are from those experiences, as it heard the sound of those calls during that Provincetown period.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land now known as the Persian or Arabian, when there were the gatherings of many to the city in the hills and in the plains.\n\nThe entity was of those Persian peoples, or the first of the Croesus'; being in the relations to or in the household of the king.\n\nAnd as there came to be the greater understanding of the tenets and truths given by the teacher Uhjltd, that brought not only health in body but a balance in the mental minds of those that came to the city in the plains for instructive forces, the entity was one who rose to the position of the Princess after the destruction of the king's daughter in the raid.\n\nThen the entity rose to power, through the healing that was brought in the body from the leader in the tented city.\n\nAnd as it made application of those tenets, as it gathered those of its own household and of its own kingdom for the profession and application of those things that had been gathered from the teacher, much came to the entity and to the surroundings of same, in power, in glory, in the beautiful things that were builded in that land.\n\nFrom that experience in the present the entity finds that those things oriental, those things pertaining to the Persian plaids and Persian silks, those brocaded conditions that were made by many of the entity's associates for their helpfulness in bringing beauty to those peoples, become\u2014as it were\u2014an influence in the entity's present experience.\n\nAnd those tenets held as we have indicated will make for harmonious experience and the joy of same; as do certain sounds of music, certain sounds of chant, certain sounds of activity, bring to the entity an awakening and a consciousness of a movement from within that awakens something as the entity experienced during that sojourn.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in that land, that period, when the chosen people were being given upon the holy mount the manner of their exercise in the temple, or in the service before the tabernacle.\n\nThe entity then was among the daughters of Levi, and those chosen to make the vestment of the priest. And to the entity, because of its own abilities, there was given the preparation of the settings of the breastplate and the putting of the stones thereon, and the preparation of the Urim and Thummim for the interpretations of the movements that came upon the high priest in the holy of holies to be given to his people in or from the door of the tabernacle.\n\nThen in the name Henriettah, the entity's activities were in a high force _equal to_ the cousin, Miriam.\n\nThroughout the experience the entity gained; for it reasoned with Nadab and Abihu; it counseled for Korah, yet did not allow self to become entangled in any of those influences that would have made for the rise to the position of fame. Rather did the entity choose to remain as one in the background that there might be given the greater understanding to that mighty people as they stood in the presence of the I AM that had brought them to the holy mount.\n\nIn the present from that sojourn, those things pertaining to the mysteries of the temple, the mysteries of numbers, of figures, and those things that have their hidden meaning, become as a portion of the entity. Yet oft does there arise that sudden change as to the fearfulness of people giving too great a power to such things that would lead them astray; as they did in the experience of the entity in the wilderness.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land now known as the Indian and Egyptian, during those periods when there were the gatherings of those from many of the lands for the correlating of the truths that were presented by Saneid in the Indian land, by Ra Ta in the Egyptian land, by Ajax from the Atlantean land, by those from the Carpathian land, by those from the Pyrenees, by those from the Incal and those from the Oz lands, and by those from that activity which will again be uncovered in the Gobi land.\n\nAnd _here_ the entity may find a great interest, a great power, in the instructions and help that it may land to others in their choosing the places of seeking for that knowledge that may make for a more universality of thought _throughout_ the universe in spiritual lines.\n\nThen the entity was among the natives of the Egyptian land, and rose to power through those cleansings in the Temple of Sacrifice; then becoming a portion of the activative service in the Temple Beautiful when it made for those abilities within self to mete out to many those things necessary in their physical and mental understanding.\n\nAnd with the correlating of the thought, the entity became first as the representative of the Temple Beautiful in the Indian land; and later\u2014and during the period of its greatest height\u2014in the land of the Gobi, or the Mongoloid. _There_ the entity was as the priestess in the Temple of Gold, which is still intact there.\n\nThe entity then, as Shu-shent, made for great development; and from those experiences in the present comes the abilities for the teachings, for the ministering, for the leading of many.\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity in the present (though much more might be given, especially of the activities of the entity as Shu-shent\u2014for they were many), we find this is the activity necessary:\n\nKeep that faith thou _innately_ hast in the _oneness_ of power in the Creative Forces as it makes for manifestations in the hearts and minds of men; and as ye do it in thy activities with thy fellow man, as ye do it in thy meditation, as ye do it in thy mind, so will it be meted to thee in thine inner self. For all must pass under the _rod;_ but He has tempered this with mercy and judgment. So must ye temper thine judgments, so must ye find thy patience, so must ye find those things within self that make for the answer of thyself before the Throne of grace. For if ye would have mercy ye must show mercy to thy fellow man; yea to thine very enemy, to those that despitefully use you. Laugh with those who laugh; mourn with those who mourn, in the Lord. Keep thy paths straight, and ye will find _glory_ \u2014 _glory_ \u2014unto thyself!\n\nIn the writing of books, in the ministry of tracts or tenets that may be helpful in song, in verse; in these are thy activities. But forsake not thy faith in the _oneness_ of Truth!\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Have I an inferiority complex, and what can I do to overcome it?_\n\n_A:_ As we have indicated, through the urge from the Uranian influence we find experiences that make for individuals speaking so as to make the entity conscious that it has acted quickly without thought; that it has acted quickly by an urge from within; but not an inferiority complex. Rather is there the necessity, as we have indicated, to meet such experiences with patience; and to have tolerance with those that misjudge. For say oft, \"They know not what they do!\"\n\n_Q: What am I best fitted for, to make my life more interesting in the way of accomplishment?_\n\nA: As indicated in the preparation of tracts, in the preparation of data, in the preparation of songs, of music, in the preparation of rhythmical movements for those who are seeking. For it may be said of this entity as of very few, that in such preparations it would never allow those using same to lose sight of the oneness of power. And so few there be who write or meditate, or who give formulas for others, that do not let the _formula_ become the power _rather_ than the influence being sought!\n\n_Q: How can my husband [1021] be influenced to develop his spiritual nature?_\n\nA: Not by might nor by power, but \"by my word, saith the Lord of hosts!\" Be patient, be kind, be gentle. A hint here, an understanding there; add little by little will it be seen that the little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. Not my might would thou cause him to do this or that, but let thy activities and thy word be of such a nature, such a character, that they _impel_ \u2014by the desire to be more and more in a oneness of accord with those in thine own surroundings.\n\n_Q: How can I improve memory and concentration?_\n\nA: Study well that which has been given through these sources on Meditation. Through meditation may the greater help be gained. As it has been indicated oft to the body, _do it_ and leave the results to the Creative Forces; for they are a part of thee. Let thy light so shine (for thou hast gone far on the highway) that others, seeing, may take hope and find that song, too, that springs oft within thy breast.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**2. Case #569**\n\n**Editor's Note: In this next life reading, Cayce gives much detail and guidance, then calmly ends the reading with this statement: \"Through thy own efforts in self there need not be the necessity in returning to earth's plane.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 569-6 F 45 (Housekeeper, Protestant)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 29th day of November, 1925, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Miss [569], via her step-cousin, Mrs. [538] [they were brought up in same household like sisters].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Mrs. Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Hugh Lynn Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn May 6, 1880, in Mascoutah, Illinois.\n\nTime of Reading 2:45 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. . . . , Ky.\n\nGC: You will have before you [569], who was born May 6, 1880, in Mascoutah, Illinois, and you will give the relation of this entity and the Universe, and the Universal Forces, giving the conditions that are as personalities, latent and exhibited, in the present life. Also the former appearances in the earth's plane, giving time, place, and the name, and that in that life which built or retarded the development for the entity, giving the abilities of the present entity and to that which it may attain, and how.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity here, and those relations with the Universal Forces as are manifested in the present sphere. Also those relations with the Universal Forces as are latent in the personality of the entity, with those conditions as do appear from the entrances into the earth's plane, and those influences in the present individuality of the entity.\n\nIn taking the position in the present earth's plane, we find under the influence of Jupiter and Venus, with Mercury and Uranus in the distance. In the adverse influence then of Vulcan and of the Pleiades. Hence the conditions as have to do with the relations in the present earth's sphere.\n\nAs to the personality as is exhibited in the present earth plane, we find one ever given to those ennobling influences in Jupiter and in Venus. Then with love, with prudence, with truth, with all of those classifications of those virtues as are found in the relation of Venus and Jupiter. See, there's a whole lot of money due the body that it has never gotten [2\/22\/26 letter thanking EC for 569\u20137: \"When you find that 'whole lot of money' that is due me I'm going to pay you well for your trouble and kindness to me.\"], and with the influences then in the life, there is brought these conditions as the latent forces in the urges of entity:\n\nOne that is considered peculiar by many, in its action, in its thought. One that is in the influence of love's forces ever. One that is lover of nature, of developing nature in every way, in the beauties in nature, in flowers [3\/19\/26 EC wrote saying he'd appreciate her sending him the flower seeds she promised for his flower boxes.], in music, in art, in every nature of the studies and the spirit as is manifest in same, and we shall see from the position many of these urges are taken.\n\nOne that may give much joy to many peoples, always giving, giving, more than ever receiving.\n\nAs to the appearances:\n\nIn the one before this we find in France, in the days when the Second Charles was in exile. The entity then in the name of Asada, and in the household of those [including [538]] who sheltered the escaped man or ruler afterwards, and assisted in the keeping of soldiery from capturing same, and was ever a favorite of that ruler, and the latter days were spent in the foreign port from birth, in England, see? and the urges as seen, the particular care in dress, and ability to keep secrets more than ordinary.\n\nIn the one before this we find in the Persian rule, when the forces were being over-run by the Grecians, and the entity then [was] carried as one of the captives to that country [period of Uhjltd], being then in the name Aurial, and in the household of the friend to the one who afterward gave much of the first philosophy of faith to this people, yet being persecuted for that belief and action. In this we find the entity as Aurial developed much, and gained much in the knowledge of the mental developments as were seen in the human forces. The urges as we see in the present from this, when once set in mind as to purpose or intent, hard to change, for that innate feeling of self's satisfaction in the gained knowledge, as acquired through that sojourn, ever projects itself in the inner consciousness.\n\nIn the one before this we find in the Egyptian forces, when the division in the kingdom came, on account of the rule in the Priesthood, [time of Ra Ta] The entity then in the household of that ruler, and was a favorite with the then ruler, and siding with the ruler, [341] and becoming the chief in that court after the banishment of Priest and those associated, or followers of same. Then first in the name of Isisush. Changed, when the coming of high estate in the rule, to Ahahs, and the entity both developed and retarded in that rule, gaining much of those innate desires toward that of close work with the needle, or with the hand, in any fancy work, for many of the alba garments were then first given shape by those hands, and many may yet be found in those tombs as exist to this day.\n\nAs to that which the entity may develop in the present sphere, keep in that same way as has been set in self, in purpose and in manner, for through thy own efforts in self there need not be the necessity in returning to earth's plane [GD's note: She wrote that she considers this earthly life to be a \"vale of tears.\"], for as is set, and if kept, these would develop into the higher spiritual realms, and then keep self in that way that leads to life ever-lasting, for in Him whom thou hast put thy trust is Life, for He is the Way, the Truth, the Light. In Him there is no guile.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**3. Case #1143**\n\n**In this next life reading, Cayce frees the soul of [1143] from future challenges in the earth with these words: \" _This entity_ may, with the keeping of those developments, make its peace in such a manner as for there to be few or none of the turmoils of the earth in its experience again.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 1143-2 F 48 (Secretary, Christian Background)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the David E. Kahn home, 44 W. 77th St., Apt. 14-W, New York City, this 18th day of April, 1936, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Miss [1143], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. [1143].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn July 12, 1887, in Leanninghen Spa, England.\n\nTime of Reading London, S.W.I., 11:25 to 12:15 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. England.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: (In going back over years to birth date\u2014\"\u2014'26, '25, '24\u2014Changes!\u2014'23, '22\u2014'16\u2014What a change!\u2014'15, '14-\" etc., on back to birth date)\n\nYes, we have the records here as made through the experiences and consciousness of the entity in those spheres of activity that have dealt and do deal with the application of the self and its soul-influences in the present.\n\nAs we find from the records here, those periods in the interim between the sojourns of the entity in the earth may be reckoned or paralleled with experiences of the entity in environs about the earth\u2014termed as an astrological influence.\n\nThese, however, are mere indications, and as to what an entity does about that the entity sets or maintains as its ideal makes for or produces or brings into the experience of the entity either developments or retardments.\n\nAs to the experiences then of this entity, [1143] called in the present (What a beautiful surrounding in its entrance into this earth in the present!), we find in the astrological aspects much has been gained and maintained by the entity that would be well for others to make a part of themselves in their own application.\n\nFor while throughout the experiences and sojourns in the earth turmoils of many natures have arisen, especially upon large scales of antagonistic influence, troublesome periods by animosities and waywardnesses upon the part of individuals and groups and masses about the entity, with these the entity has kept an equal balance, especially in what may be termed in words as tolerance.\n\nNot that there have not been anxieties even in its spiritual or astrological aspects, yet these as an innate and as a manifested experience become a portion of the entity itself.\n\nAnd\u2014as is the fruit of same\u2014patience, as engendered by mercy, has accompanied these experiences.\n\nThus the phases of the entity's sojourns then in the environs called astrological become apparent as with new meanings to some from those environments.\n\nJupiter\u2014we find the association as towards a _helpfulness_ in the engendering associations with those in power, those in positions of prominence as to their engendering for others conditions that make for the developments towards brotherly love in their activity.\n\nThese then make from the material aspect for that upon which the entity is active, finding in its associations great abilities, those that have been entrusted with means, manners and ways of dealing with their fellow man.\n\nAnd the entity has been, and will ever be so long as these are held, inviolate as a tempering experience for all such.\n\nAlso in those influences from Venus we find that beauty, peace, harmonious forces are ever in and _about_ the entity; yet for such to become active in the experience there has been required upon the part of the entity an _activity._ Not placidness, but peace rather gained, rather felt, rather experienced by _bringing_ same into the experience of others.\n\nWe find also in those astrological sojourns or influences in Uranus making for extremes; that the entity through its earthly as well as through the innate forces that have been impelled or chosen by self has found itself swinging, as it were, oft _suddenly_ from extreme to extreme.\n\nYet in its ability from a soul force, that finds expressions in those words we term as tolerance, patience, the entity has found the abilities to aid here and there.\n\nHold fast to these. For while those influences from the Martian experiences make for turmoils as about, we find that\u2014unless it allows itself to become, as it were, at times sorry for itself, or to become in a manner affected through such experiences that arise for self-aggrandizement\u2014the entity may continue then to bring harmonious influences in the experiences of those whom the entity may contact in the materiality.\n\nThese influences, of course, as indicated, arise innately; yet _so well,_ so oft have these been manifested in the physical and material application of the entity. To differentiate becomes rather hard in making for an interpretation of that which has been recorded here.\n\nThis _entity_ may, with the keeping of those developments, make its peace in such a manner as for there to be few or none of the turmoils of the earth in its experience again.\n\nAs to the influences from the sojourns in the earth; while these are not _all,_ they are those that in the present make for the urges that the entity finds indicated in its experiences and in its meeting with its fellow man in their problems, in their turmoils.\n\nFor, as the entity has in the most of its sojourns from the earth _given_ \u2014 _given_ \u2014 _given_ of self, so has there come in the deeper recesses of the present experience\u2014even upon the heels of turmoils, even upon the mount of consternation\u2014a deeper and an abiding peace that comes only with that as He hath given, _\"My peace_ I _leave with you.\"_ Not as the world knoweth or giveth peace, but that which makes for those answers as from within, when there is the turning to that Great Giver of love, mercy, justice\u2014\"Well done, thou good and faithful servant.\" For ye shall indeed know the joys of thy Lord. Hold fast, stand steadfast with the armor of thy Lord near thee.\n\nBefore this we find the entity lived in the earth during those periods when there was the overrunning, or when the changes were coming about in the land of nativity, when there were the Norsemen with the Huns and the Gauls that made for the turmoils in the north and in the eastern portion of the land.\n\nThe entity then was in the name (hence it is well name in the present) Marjoriee.\n\nIn the experience there were those turmoils and strifes, with neighbor against neighbor oft; for it was during those periods when they each of the landholders or of the different groups were as a law in their own land.\n\nThe entity kept a balance between many of those in and about that land, in Lancastershire, where there is to the entity\u2014in those surroundings in the present\u2014much that makes for deep meditation; for sorrow, yet punctured much and oft with a deeper gladness for the experiences that come there.\n\nAnd as the entity was in those fields and among those blossoms when they began to fade, it finds those sadnesses and yet bring a joy and a comfort in the inner self.\n\nHence in the introspection of self gladness is ever present, yet it is tinged with the desire for help to those that are weary of their mental and material burdens\u2014that finds an answering within the inmost being of the entity itself.\n\nFor as the entity gained in those experiences, so may it in the present find that\u2014not by might nor by power, as saith the Lord of hosts, but by the still small voice, by the counsel as one tempered with mercy, grace and peace\u2014it may bring to those whom the entity contacts in such disturbing forces the experiences of _harmony_ within self.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in those periods when there was the return of a chosen people to their land for the reestablishing in the land of promise of a ritual service.\n\n_There_ the entity, with Zerubbabel's handmaids, became a helpful influence. And with the coming then of the priest\u2014or princess\u2014and the prince in Nehemiah, we find the entity lent that aid which made for the helping of those that resisted the peoples roundabout. Not by might, not by power, but by lending a helping hand to those that suffered bodily; aiding in bringing to those a better understanding of that edict which was given by the king for the reestablishing of those services of a peoples in their _own_ land.\n\nThen the name was Belenda, and the entity gained, lost, gained through the experience. For being misjudged for the associations with those then as of the heathens roundabout, as termed by those strangers in their own home land, the entity felt within self as being misunderstood\u2014and condemned, when innately within self there was known how the protection was brought even to many of those that labored upon the wall, as well as in those that were established.\n\nYet if the entity will read very closely the 6th and 8th chapters of Nehemiah, it will find much that harkens for an awareness of its presence there.\n\n_Hold_ to those things that make for this ability to be tolerant, even with those that despitefully use thee. For it engenders strife to hold animosities.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land now known as the Egyptian, during those periods when there were turmoils and strifes to those peoples that had settled in the land, and attempted to build for those peoples roundabout an understanding of the relationships of man to the Creative Forces, of man to his own fellow man.\n\nThe entity was among those peoples joined nigh to that one made the Priest, and who was debarred or set adrift from the activities begun.\n\nThose periods and experiences brought turmoils to the entity, yet with the return of the Priest, with the activities of those that came from Atlantis, with the paralleling of the teachings by the emissaries from Saneid, from On (?), from the activities in the Gobi, the entity began then to know that he that smiteth thee, if thou dost smite in return, will but engender an animosity that grows, that becomes as briers and tares in thine own experience, that will hinder thee in thine _own_ activity, bringing disturbing forces that make for the engendering of hate.\n\nThe name then was Absi-Shupht, and much might be said as to that development there.\n\nAs to the abilities in the present, and that to which the entity may attain, and how:\n\nWho would dare give the entity counsel when it may counsel so well! Hold fast to that which has been or may be gained by the reading of the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, the 14th of Joshua, the 24th Psalm, the 12th of Romans; the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th as recorded to John. For there ye will see that thou hast _innately_ made as thy bond. For He is in His holy temple and would speak with thee; for _thy_ body, _too,_ is His temple, and there He meets with thee!\n\nLove the Lord, eschew evil, keep the faith. For it _is_ but a reasonable service.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Where can I find this man whom you suggest I should gain further development and training from?_\n\nA: The _more_ will be found within self through the study, the application in the daily life of those tenets as recorded in those words that have been given.\n\nRather than in any man, in any person. For thy development is such, thy purposes are so high, that thou mayest meet Him, find Him, within-through the meditation with thy Lord.\n\n_Q: Do you consider that I have healing ability, and if I used it more would I develop?_\n\nA: The ways are shown as in those references given, that as has been given, \"What ye ask, that will be done _in_ and through you.\" Thus not only by the touch but by the meditation, by the handling of bodies, thou mayest\u2014as it were\u2014quicken them to their _own_ abilities; that the grudges, animosities must be put away.\n\nFor the mind is the builder, the spirit is willing; the body should be an expression of these.\n\n_Q: Do you consider that I should be a communicant or not?_\n\nA: Such answers, to be sure, should come from within. For the church, that of the faith\u2014He is thy bridegroom\u2014the _church_ is within thee, the temple is within _thee_! _There_ He meets thee!\n\nIf thy service to thy fellow man leads thee to commune, to break the bread, to break the body with others\u2014He will guide, _He_ will direct.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**4. Case #560**\n\n**Editor's Note: In this next case, Cayce identifies this entity's readiness to move beyond earth life: \"The earth need hold no cares for the entity in or after this experience.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 560-1 F 45 (Protestant)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 105th Street & Ocean, Virginia Beach, Va., this 30th day of September, 1931, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Miss [560].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Misses [560] and [993], Mildred Davis and L. B. Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn April 7, 1886, in Hull, England.\n\nTime of Reading 3:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time Virginia.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces, as are latent and manifested in the entity now known as, or called, [560].\n\nIn entering, we find in astrological aspects many _varying_ conditions; while Pisces, just past, in the rising of influences from this\u2014with the Mercurian, Venus, Jupiter and Uranus, these bring in an _astrological_ manner many _varying_ aspects or experiences of the influence, or the entity influenced in many varying manners as to that as is builded, or has been builded in the present experience of the entity, has depended upon the manner in which the entity itself has applied its will as respecting same. These, as we find, are builded in the entity _for_ experiences, _irrespective_ of how will's influence _has_ been applied. _These,_ as we find, have been builded as _how_ the entity _has_ applied will as respecting same:\n\nIn those influences in Mercury\u2014oft has the entity been considered not only high-minded, but tendency towards the dictatorial in mien and manner, though the application of will in _respect_ to such has altered this in a great degree as to the _influences_ impelled by the positiveness _of_ the entity in its application toward such influences. _Well_ (this aside, please) were the fact, as has been builded by the entity, that many would do likewise.\n\nIn the influences in Venus makes for that of one that is loved by all who come to know the entity _as_ a whole, yet the application of self respecting same has not _drawn_ all to express themselves in a manner as would signify that [in] their feelings toward the entity. Not that the entity had, or has, held self _aloof_ from peoples, but rather that, those that have _known_ the entity best have learned to love the entity the more. In this application, this has drawn _to_ the entity, _for_ the entity, friendships that once made _seldom_ have they been broken, save by those who have so acted, so acted in their _own_ feelings, as to separate themselves from that influence. This has the tendency at times (as the entity has changed much) for the grudges, or the holding of activities of others in a manner\u2014not as grudge, but a tendency to not easily forget slights or differences; yet in the _building_ much has been lost in the bigness of the influences gained in Jupiter _and_ Uranus in this respect, for the _spiritual_ life _of_ the entity is such as to have _builded_ for a development in this _present_ plane to such an extent\u2014that is, the _desire_ such, and kept in the present attunement\u2014the earth need hold no cares for the entity in or after this experience.\n\nIn Jupiter we find one that has broad vision of any subject, no matter how very centralized a portion of the subject or matter is taken by the entity, no matter how definite the aims of the entity towards conditions, peoples, places or _philosophies_ \u2014even\u2014the _vision_ is that that _enables_ the entity to reach far beyond that as is ordinarily understood. With the ascendancy of this influence, after the fifteenth of the coming month, for years there will _still_ be the tendency for an expansion of influences in these directions, of enabling others to so centralize their efforts and their visions as to gain a better concept of that portion of life's experience they, or individuals, are seeking. Hence, as one that would direct in the centralizing of individuals' desires for the seeking of spiritual guidance, mental understanding, material aid in a physical sphere, will _be_ the work, the greater developing period of, and _abilities_ of the entity in this present experience.\n\nIn those influences in Uranian, makes for those little appearances of indifference in the entity's mien, when it has as much curiosity as any! yet the appearance and acts may be as not the interest, but desiring not to show to be curious, or to delve into other peoples' affairs or business! yet the influences as are seen, that oft the entity\u2014in its _intuitive_ natures\u2014if asked, could often help when others _feel_ indifference has kept them from seeking when they would desire to. This, in the application, the entity has kept rather as a sacred portion of its own experience. At times it has brought those qualms of conscience that has made for wonderments as to whether it has appeared too indifferent or not, or as to whether there has been as much interest shown as self _should_ have manifested or expressed; yet with the opportunities as may be opened through those experiences with the rising influence in Jupiter\u2014which will bring, with the square of Venus in the love's influence, as is seen, many experiences that will make for a larger, fuller, greater understanding to the entity in these coming years, and months, and days.\n\nIn the appearances, then, and their _influence_ in the present experience:\n\nIn the one then just before this we find in the land chosen _now_ as the dwelling land [Virginia], and among those peoples as settled in the new land. The entity's experiences were of those that were _leading_ as frontiersmen, yet in a period when those of the earth had brought forth those of bounty to the people, yet during the period of oppression, and during those periods as brought on by the aggressiveness of those sires in the period of the entity in the Fairfax land. The entity lost through those oppressions, and losing the life early in the experience by being crushed in earth; and masses brings that _physical_ innate influence of crowds, or _smothering feelings_ close to the entity, as if it must _soon_ be free! In this experience the entity finds that while there are _many_ who boast of their lineage, or of their relations, rather does _self_ find that, that _builded_ as to aiding another speaks much more than that as of OTHERS' accomplishments for them. _proud_ indeed of the associations and relations, as all should be\u2014for to have _chosen_ a way that brings its reward in the _material_ way may one be proud, yet not haughty _with_ same. In this experience gaining and losing. Losing under the expressions of those that would oppress, yet _gaining_ in the love held even for those that oppressed.\n\nIn the one then before this we find in that land of nativity (that is, of the present) [England], during those periods when there were those rebellions _through_ the land, and the entity of those in the household of him, the ruler, that was beheaded [Charles I]. The entity then gained through the oppressions in that land, being able then to aid those that were of that house, even she [Queen Henrietta] that suffered by the acts of those that took the life of the ruler. The entity aided in making for the quietings of the fears, through those teachings of the faith that makes one strong, even under physical oppression. Being also among those that gave aid to the young king [Charles II] in his escape to the foreign land, aiding also with those that cared for this ruler in the foreign land, becoming an emissary\u2014or what would be called in the present a political spy, the entity was able to give much aid in _material_ ways, and with the spiritual guidance as held, much of a mental and _spiritual_ aid to those contacted. In the name Erial. In the present experience, while those experiences of the period bring many of those little hesitancies as come from speaking when there is the thought of things to be done or accomplished, yet gives to the entity the insight of a broad field of experience.\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land now known as the promised land, and during that period when there were the walkings in the land of the Promised One. The entity among those that were close _to_ the Master, being then the sister to one of those that the Master raised from the dead [Lazarus] living in Bethany in that experience. Hence those of that period are near and dear, and far _from_ those things that hinder from _knowing_ of those that would separate the entity from those experiences! Gaining, sure, through the experience, and giving much to many; though called by those that in the experience would bring censure for the parts chosen [as Martha], or those of the secular things of life, yet in the present\u2014with the experience\u2014brings that _practicability_ of the entity, that in groups, in associations, has ever been called\u2014while the dreamer, yet all _practical_ thought must be in accord _with_ the life lived, with the circumstances as surround, with the conditions in which people find themselves\u2014 _these_ are the better part, as was in that experience.\n\nIn the one then before this we find in that land when there were those comings together in the land now known as the Persian or Arabian land, when Uhjltd gathered many peoples about those cities being builded. The entity among those that came in, and were of those that\u2014in the _household_ of the leader\u2014came in contact with, associated _with,_ many of those of the household. In this association the entity changed much in its attitude towards people, things, conditions and surroundings. Hence in this experience may be termed the change in the entity's activities, as is seen what was brought in the one that followed. In this experience may be seen that as has been builded, or as has been overcome, of the little grudges, or the little feelings oft of slight or of oppressions, \"I will get even at sometime\u2014not _mine,_ but it will be done!\" This may be overcome, _has_ been overcome much, may it be taken away-even as has been given. In this experience in the name Raoue.\n\nIn the one then before this we find in that land now known as the Egyptian, and during that period when there were rebellions in the land, and when there had been the reestablishing of those that were deposed. The entity came into the _temple_ service there, being _then_ closely associated with the priest as was deposed [Ra Ta], and became close to those that were of the temple service, gaining in the experience, losing only when the secular things of the world\u2014when the entity sent abroad with others\u2014made forgetfulness come in the experience of the entity in that period. In the name Isusi. In the present, this experience has\u2014as of those in desert and in the Holy City\u2014brought much of that, with the Uranian influence, that makes for abilities to aid in an understanding of that as _is_ the _desire_ of those that would seek. Being practical, there makes for those abilities\u2014as to whether that sought is of the _material_ sources, the spiritual foundations, or of a mental aptitude towards the attempts to cover up or hide the real purpose. In this field, then, may the entity gain the most in the present, in aiding those who would seek to find-in the various forces as they manifest in the entity's experience\u2014 _that_ which _that_ individual seeks. That is, as the entity\u2014through its breadth of experience and understanding\u2014may aid another in knowing what phase of the forces _manifested_ an individual may find _their_ greater blessing.\n\nIn the present, then, keep\u2014as was in old\u2014those experiences that make for the _understanding_ of those forces in love as were manifested in the home in Bethany. Keep that committed, for those that seek _through_ love will find. Those that seek through any _other_ source may be dumb-founded in the maze of that as is presented. Ready for questions.\n\n_Q:_ Would it _be advisable for the body to change her name to that of Mildred instead of Mary as it now is? [GD's note: It is interesting to observe that Miss [295], who was told that she was \"Mary of Bethany,\" subsequently changed her middle name from \"Gertrude\" to \"Mary.\"]_\n\nA: Those vibrations as come with the changes in the astrological experience, as well as the numerological experiences, would be well for such a change made in the coming or present experience _upon_ the entity.\n\n_Q: Did the body desire to be born in England, and why?_\n\nA: In those surroundings as were the experiences _of_ the entity, as has been seen, _were_ those surroundings of that particular sphere. Rather _was_ the seeking to return _through_ those channels to the land where oppressions had been, and an awakening had been in the entity's experience. Hence the _opportunity_ offered itself to be born in England, to reach that as it had desired in its karmic or karma influence in the experience\u2014see?\n\n_Q: What was the name of the entity just before the present one?_\n\nA: Fairfax.\n\n_Q: What was the name in Bethany?_\n\nA: The one, the sister to Mary\u2014Martha.\n\n_Q: In the name as Fairfax, was she related to the one who is her sister in the present [993], who was also a Fairfax?_\n\nA: A sister.\n\n_Q: How may we cooperate in our new work?_\n\nA: This rather indefinite, yet these may be seen. As one has _ever_ been a complement to the other, so in the _activities_ will there be _kept_ that same position in the activities of those as are approached.\n\n_Q: Why has the entity so much fear in the present?_\n\n_A:_ The experiences of the entity through the various appearances has brought those of fear in _many,_ as is seen. In the present then, there will be seen, as through that which brought fear in a _physical_ sense, will be eradicated through the awakening in the spiritual application _of_ material, as well as physical activities. See?\n\n_Q: What was the entity's first name as a Fairfax?_\n\n_A:_ Geraldine.\n\n_Q: Are there any records in the present available on this?_\n\n_A:_ There are some\u2014these may be found even in stone.\n\n_Q: What was the father's name, as Fairfax?_\n\n_A:_ This will be found among those of the records in that land about the Fredericksburg, where these were, you see.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**5. Case #2903**\n\nEditors Note: In this next case, Cayce identifies this soul as \"one **who** may, with the present will forces, make self unnecessary for return in earth's spheres.\"\n\n_Text of Reading 2903-1 M 58 (Life Insurance, Special Representative)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 322 Grafton Avenue, Dayton, Ohio, this 26th day of June, 1925, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Mr. [2903].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Mrs. Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\nMrs. [265], sister of [2903].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn January 2, 1867, near Hopkinsville, Ky.\n\nTime of Reading 4:00 P.M. Dayton Savings 'lime. . . . , Tenn.\n\nGC: You will give the relation of this entity and the Universe, and the Universal Forces, giving the conditions that are as personalities, latent and exhibited, in the present life. Also the former appearances in the earth's plane, giving time, place, and the name, and that in that life which built or retarded the development for the entity, giving the abilities of the present entity and to that which it may attain, and how.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity here, and those relations with the Universal Forces as are latent and exhibited in the present earth's plane. There come many of the conditions coming as urges from the existences in the earth's plane, and those surrounding influences, as are shown, have been manifested and may be manifested in the earth's plane.\n\nAs to the present position, we find taken from that of Jupiter, with Mercury and Mars in both adverse and in good influences in the present earth's plane. Then, we find one with those high ennobling influences as come from both Jupiter and Mercury's influence. Then one of high ennobling life and manner of manifesting same in the earth's plane. One with a high temper, yet able of controlling same and turning same into those channels wherein the better influence comes to self and others.\n\nOne, then, that gives much more to the development of others in every plane. One that has little of the influences towards detrimental conditions toward the development in the plane.\n\nOne who may, with the present will forces, make self unnecessary for return in earth's spheres.\n\nOne who, with the ennobling influences in Jupiter, brings much of this world's goods to the use of self and of others in whom there may come the influence as is seen in the mental forces.\n\nIn the development then in those of adverse forces, we find one in whom many of the influence of wrath and of that of the excess of the desire to hinder has at times brought consternation to the individual, yet each has been turned into that of development of self and beneficial to those whom the entity contacts.\n\nOne, then, of a loving, noble, influence in lives of all whom the entity contacts. One that causes others to have faith, confidence, in self and in others. One that invites, through the radiations of unselfishness in self, the desire of others and in others to give more of their self in the earth's plane towards development.\n\nOne that finds the greater possibilities in self to give aid in every manner to others. One who would have made a _wonderful_ minister in the present earth's plane. One who would have made success in ministration, or any of the developments of either economic or political forces. One that may yet in the branch of the influence towards those who labor in that of service to others, this entity may guide and direct many. This, and the usage of same, we will find in the urges from appearances.\n\nIn the appearances then:\n\nIn the one before this, we find in that of him who gave the freedom to the peoples in the English rule, when the peoples rose and sought freedom from the yoke of the King. Then in the name, Oliver Cromwell, and the entity then fought for that principle in which there was then instilled in the inmost forces, and in the present we find that urge for the ability of each individual to find their place and to fill same in their best capacity, and in this also we find that desire ever is shown in the entity to give of the best, and not reserving self in any manner.\n\nIn the one before this, we find in the days of the wars in the Grecian forces. The entity then in that of him who led the forces in the raids in the Western portion of the country. Also leading the peoples to the higher understanding of self, and seeking to educate them in that which would give the better influence in their homes. Then in the name Xenophon, and in this we find in the present the urge and ability to so direct the lives of others that the best may come to them. The detrimental forces coming from these being that of the warriors in the flesh, being fearful of same.\n\nIn the one before this, we find in the Egyptian forces; when the second rule that gave the peoples the laws as pertaining to the worship, the entity then in the Counselor to the then ruler, and in the name of Cenraden, and was that one who assisted, especially, in the memorials as were set and placed in the land during that day, being then in the manner the historian and gatherer of data for those of that period. The present urge we find, especially, in that in the desire to know, especially, of these periods, as the entity has and will show, passed through in the earth and in other planes. The entity developed again in this.\n\nIn the one before this, we find in the now Peruvian country, when the peoples were destroyed in the submerging of the land. The entity then in that of the next to the ruler in the Ohlm [Ohm?\u2014Ohum? Aymara?] rule, and in the name of Ormdi, and the entity then gave much to the peoples, especially to those who furnished the building of the lands for the sustenance of the peoples. In that, we find the present urge from same comes to the entity through the desire to understand the position from which any group of peoples desire their cause presented to others.\n\nAs to the abilities and how to develop same in the present, we find the entity may give much counsel to those whom would serve others, and in that capacity the entity will find the greatest development for self, and the ability to do same will and is presented to the entity from time to time.\n\nMany days will be seen in the present earth's plane. Then keep in that way wherein Him who gives the good and perfect gifts may be made manifest before men, knowing that unto Him all honor is due.\n\n**6. Case #2112**\n\n**Editor's Note: Cayce states this entity's freedom clearly: \"The entity has set self aright. As to what it may attain lies only with self, for kept\u2014and keeping the faith\u2014never would it be necessary for the entity to enter again into _this_ vale, but rather to bask or journey through that presence of the faithful!\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 2112-1 F 58 (Apt. House Manager, Theosophist)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 2nd day of June, 1931, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Mrs. [2112].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mrs. **[2112]** and Mrs. Walker.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn April 29, 1873, in Norfolk, Va.\n\nTime of Reading 3:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. . . . , Va.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces.\n\nIn entering we find the astrological influences of the entity, [2112], are quite different from that as has been _builded_ in the entity in the present; for while there has been three stages of development in the present experience, those in the last three to four _years_ has changed so that things that do appear in the present are but the shadow of that as would be seen from an astrological influence; for the entity has applied the will's influence in such a manner in the present\u2014especially the latter portion of the present experience\u2014in such a manner as to have made a _wonderful_ development.\n\nIn giving, then, astrological and that builded, these must be seen can _only be_ relative, and\u2014as there has been an alteration\u2014these must not be _confused_ with developments, or with the will's influence altering the _astrological_ aspect.\n\nComing under the influence of Mercury with Venus, naturally makes for a mental aptitude for the entity, but the quieting effect that the entity has upon individuals that the entity contacts is _builded_ by the will's influence upon that as has become a portion _of_ the entity's experience, even though the experience in Venus gives that love for peace, understanding, contentment, hope, faith, vision, longsuffering, endurance, loving-kindness, and those of _brotherly_ love; for these being _grounded_ in that as has been experienced by the entity, the _hope_ as is _manifest_ in the present comes from that communion with the higher sources themselves; for he that seeks shall find, and he that knocketh to him shall be opened. Few have gained the insight into what this means as the entity has! Be _not_ overcome with the long waiting, nor be not _weary_ in well-doing; for the _Master_ learned obedience, even through the things which _He_ suffered.\n\nIn contemplation, then, of those abilities within self, of those desires of those wanting to aid through the efforts of thine own hands\u2014do well that thou hast in hand from day to day, and there will be given that peace, that joy, that understanding, that only comes from the knowledge of God lives! And His Son is in the world! Through faith in His name may we know and see and understand all that the _physical,_ the _mental,_ has to bear in this mundane sphere.\n\nIn the abilities of the entity, these may only be measured by that ability of the entity to remain in that understanding, that knowledge, as has come _to_ the entity in the last few years; for, as each body meets its own problems from day to day with that understanding that the increase, the love, the desires are to be kept open in a manner that is in keeping with His Son, _God_ gives the increase. Be not in that position of one that frets about things, conditions, or peoples not _doing_ as _you_ would have them do! You may only be the channel through which the reflection of His love may be _made_ manifest, for _God_ works in His _own_ way, own manner, and fretting self only brings those of discouragement, disillusions, as to those things that _He_ would bring to pass.\n\nSpeak gently, speak kindly to those who falter. Ye know not _their_ own temptation, nor the littleness of their understanding. Judge not as to this or that activity of another; rather pray that the light may shine even in _their_ lives as it _has_ in thine. These are the manners in which the sons and daughters of men may _know_ His way. In this mundane sphere there comes to all that period when doubts and fears arise, even to doubting thine _own_ self. These may _easily_ be cast aside by knowing that He is in His holy temple and _all_ is well.\n\nIn the conditions that come from those things that are in the past, let the dead bury their _own_ dead; for _He_ is God of the living, _not_ of the dead! He is Life, and Light, and Immortality! _Glory_ in His weakness, _glory_ in His might, _glory_ in His watchful-loving-kindness, and _all will_ be right!\n\nIn the appearances and the effect these have, _have had,_ upon the present experience:\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land now known as the Eastern or New England land, where those persecutions came for those who had the visions of the familiar spirits, or for those who saw those that walked in the shadow land. The entity was then among those who were of the household of one who suffered in body for the _persecutions_ as were brought to the household. In the name Mary Alden. The entity gained and lost through this experience, for when persecutions came, hardships came upon the entity and there were grudges held against those who brought bodily suffering to the loved ones of the entity. In the present there has ever been innate an awe to the entity of those who were teachers, ministers, preachers, or those who professed _any_ association with unseen sources, and a dread to know the _end_ of such! Also this has brought about much of that that has changed the entity in understanding as to following what has been _ordinarily_ termed orthodox forces, or religious beliefs.\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land, that period, when there were contentions, wars and rumors of wars in those lands that were overrun by the peoples who\u2014zealous of their beliefs\u2014came into the land to conquer it. The entity was then among those in the household of that called the Moslems, and while the entity held to those tenets of the fathers in the experience, yet the entity offered much aid and succor to those who became\u2014as they were\u2014the _prisoners_ of that people. The entity then was in the name Telulila. In this experience the entity _gained_ throughout, holding to that as taught put into practice that as had been gained in the inner self through _another_ association. In the contact with individuals the entity gave that as was _inmost_ in self as truth. In the present has come those influences ever that has held the entity to those of a high ideal as to moral, material, and spiritual laws.\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land now called the Holy Land, and about that land where the Master walked\u2014the entity then a sister of she whom the entity met at the well in the land, and the entity came to know of that ministry, following afar; yet later becoming one of those that _spread_ those glad tidings to those in Mount Seir. In the name Selmaa. In this experience the entity lost and gained. Lost in the early portion when there was the aggrandizing of selfish interests; gaining in crucifying of _ideas_ for ideals, and gained much through the latter portion of that experience. In the present there is felt that awe that comes with the hearing of that particular portion of the Scripture, the Gospel, the Message read, of the journey _through_ that land; and the _abilities_ with the needle, with the making of things that have to do with adorning of body, also come from this experience.\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land now called the Egyptian, and during that period when there were divisions in the land through the exiling of priest, through the gathering of those that made war through the divisions as were brought. The entity was then among those in the temple during the exile, remaining there, also aiding in the upbuilding when there was the return and the re-establishing. The entity was then the priestess to the Inner Shrine, making self of no estate that the _idea_ as held respecting the _ideal_ set by same might be kept intact. Losing in respect from many; gaining in self's own abilities to build that toward that which is set as _right;_ being hardheaded, as some would term; being set in ways, as others would call; being graceful, peaceful, lovable and law abiding, as others would term. In the name AI-Lai, and there _still_ may be seen in the holy mount\u2014or that tomb yet not uncovered\u2014much of that the entity made as respecting the hangings, the accoutrements for the altar in the temple of that day. In the present, that innate feeling of a certain rote, routine, and the entity is\u2014as may ever be seen with self, with household, with others\u2014keeping in a direct line.\n\nIn the abilities of the entity in the present, and that to which it may attain:\n\nAs has been given, the entity has set self aright. As to what it may attain lies only with self, for kept\u2014and keeping the faith\u2014never would it be necessary for the entity to enter again into this vale, but rather to bask or journey through that presence of the faithful!\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Would it be best for me to take over the house next to my present home, which_ I _have been contemplating?_\n\nA: Would be well.\n\n_Q: Will the financial part of my present home be worked out satisfactorily?_\n\nA: As we find, it will be worked out satisfactorily. Some disappointing factors arising in same, yet will be made satisfactory.\n\n_Q: Have I any healing power?_\n\n_A:_ What power _hasn't_ the body, with that faith, with that _understanding!_ These may be used in _many_ directions by the laying on of hands, and with prayer\u2014anointing as of oil\u2014as has been given, anointing with oil\u2014pouring in of those of the spirit, that knowledge, of understanding\u2014will bring _blessings_ to many. Do not _neglect_ that that has been committed into thy keeping\u2014thine own!\n\n_Q: Is the application I use sufficient, or could the phenomena give a better one?_\n\nA: That as may be gained by self the better, than that that may be told; for why take it from another source when self may attain to the Throne itself! _We_ are through.\n\n**7. Case #444**\n\n**Editor's Note: This next entity has reached a level of freedom that the decision to reincarnate is hers to make: \"Only through the desire may it be necessary for the entity to enter earth's environs again.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 444-1 F 43 (Artist, M.D., Psychiatrist, Educator)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at Lillian Edgerton, Inc., 267 Fifth Avenue, New York City, this 16th day of November, 1933, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Miss [444], new Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc., recommended by Dr. [961].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Hugh Lynn Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. [444] and [445].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn May 14, 1890, in New York City.\n\nTime of Reading 11:05 to 11:40 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. New York City.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces, that are latent and manifested in the personality of the entity now known as [444].\n\nIn giving that which may be helpful to the entity in the present, the approach to the astrological influences would be from the sojourns rather than the position of the planets or the elements in same. For, the sojourns make for innate influences; while the earth's appearances make for the greater urge within the present mental forces of the entity.\n\nIn this entity, [444], we find rather unusual developments in the astrological influences; for these are rather as _two_ urges in the inner being of the entity, or are rather in pairs. So, there will be seen in the present experience that there are periods when there have often been halting opinions or urges leading in separate directions at or during the same period of activity in the physical experience of the entity.\n\nWe find that Venus with Uranus make for rather at times the complications as to the character of associations, the activities in the relationships to those influences which are accredited to the activities of an indwelling in such environ. Hence the mystic, the occult, with love's influence, are of particular interest. Hence the entity's abilities in building or making or writing stories pertaining to activities in these directions might be developed in those periods particularly when there is the conjunction of, or the influence direct in the earth from Venus and Uranus experience.\n\nIn the activity also in Jupiter do we find the entity's indwelling, making for innate urges in the activity of the entity through those influences that make for travel, for meeting of individuals in the varied walks of life, in those that find expressions in the activity with the mental proclivities of the individual. Rather does the entity innately deal with mental and mind than with things, yet conditions as produced by the mental association and activity of individuals are of particular interest to the entity.\n\nAs to the sojourns in the earth and their influence upon the activities of the entity in the present:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was during those periods in the present land of nativity when there was an expression of those influences in the spiritualistic realm, in and about those places in Salem, when there were the students and the persecution of those that made for activities in that particular experience.\n\nDuring the sojourn the entity gained much by the physical activities in following much that was presented in the appearance of those particular phenomena manifested by those felt by many during the period as being possessed.\n\nThe entity was rather the observer than associating self with the activities during the period, and was in the name Beldon.\n\nFrom that experience in the present sojourn there are seen in the activities of the entity those things pertaining to following the lines of suggestions in those activities in that particular experience. And the _mental_ forces of those that are active in such fields make for the greater expression of manifestation to the entity.\n\nThe fields of reading, the fields of activity in the social relationships, arise from experiences in that sojourn.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was during that period when there were the activities of those that came into the land of promise as Crusaders for a cause, in the ideas of many.\n\nThe entity then was of the people in the Fatherland, as may be called, that were among those left by the other members of the household; and much of the duties and activities in material things fell upon the shoulders or activities of the entity in the experience, bringing to the entity many questions as to duty and obligation to those influences in the actual experience and duties and obligations that arise from impelling influences or urges to become active in or for an ideal.\n\nThrough the experience the entity may be said to have lost and gained, for there was much turmoil in the mental forces of the entity during the period, much of those experiences that made for the realizing of the necessities of material activities in a material world. Yet, in the later portion, as in those experiences when self lost self\u2014as it were\u2014in that it gave to others, in the character of conditions that made for the losing of self in service to others, developments came to the entity. The name then was Herzenderf.\n\nThe entity in the experience made for those activities that in the present at times have caused the _wondering_ as to the abilities of differentiation\u2014in the experience of self\u2014between that of practical value in the experiences of man or of self and that having more to do with the urge to the emotional influences that make for the forming of ideas, rather than ideals; or as to whether the ideals are of such standards that both the emotional and the practical influence on material things weigh well in the balance of the activities of the individuals through which the relationships bring those influences in their lives and their experience.\n\nHence the entity naturally in the present is of an analytical mind, with the abilities to use or apply self in analyzing others' influences or experiences in such a way as to be beneficial to such individuals who make overtures to the entity in any manner for aid in this direction. And _well_ may the entity apply this experience, for not only self-development but in giving out to others those things that maybe most helpful in their experience. For, the entity learned in that experience, in that land, it is not what a mind _knows_ but what the mind applies or does about that it knows, that makes for soul, mental or material advancements.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in that land now known as the Egyptian, during those experiences when there were turmoils and strifes through the rebellions that arose in those activities in that land, when there had been the banishment of the priest in the spiritual life\u2014and the uprisings of the natives and those people that had sojourned in the land, and the differentiations that arose from those tenets that were being proclaimed by those incoming from the Atlantean land.\n\nThe entity then was among those that aided in re-establishing the priest among the peoples, and was of those that aided specifically in the Temples of Sacrifice of that period. Not where offerings were made of animals or of the influence or increasing of the field, but where rather those things were shifted from individuals' experience, mentally and materially, that prevented their becoming more in accord with the laws that were proclaimed by the priest\u2014aided and abetted by the activities of those that came in from the Atlantean land to establish what was in the period the greater understanding of the law of the relationships of souls to the Creative Forces, and of the individual's obligations and relations to the fellow man.\n\nThroughout the experience the entity developed in soul, and met many of those that were antagonistic to the influencing for the betterment and many of those through whom the tenets came for the activities in giving and spreading to the peoples that which was helpful in their relationships, their experiences. The entity was particularly active in the later portion, given to disseminating those that were of the fields of activity in what became or is the basis of much in modern medicine.\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in those experiences in the Atlantean land, before those periods of the second upheavals or before the lands were divided into the isles.\n\nThe entity was among those of the household of the leaders of the One, and made for and aided in the attempts to establish for those that were developing or incoming from the thought forces into physical manifestations to gain the concept of what their activities should be to develop towards a perfection in physical body, losing many of those appurtenances that made for hindrances for the better activities in the experience. The entity then was in the name Asme, as would be put in the language of the day. And the entity gained and lost in the experience. For, while in the office of the priestess in the temple of the One, the entity lost in the associations of the carnal influences in relationships to those in the same activity. Yet, the entity gained in the greater portion of the abilities to make for disseminating truths to others.\n\nIn the present also may come, by turning within, from that experience, that which may make for the background of many of those experiences in the writings or in the stories or in the impressions that may be had as illustrative to those whom the entity would teach.\n\nAs to the abilities of the entity and that to which it may attain in the present, and how:\n\nIn those fields of activity as indicated, the mental influences are above the normal, or above the rabble. And, if the entity will apply self in those forces that make for the creating within self and those whom the entity may contact day by day, ideals that are of the standards making for Creative influences in the mind, the soul and the physical influences, through same may the entity gain and develop in this experience to those influences where only through the desire may it be necessary for the entity to enter earth's environs again.\n\nThen, present self to those influences that make for Creative activities in such a manner that self may never fear to meet that it has spoken in word, or thought; for each soul meets that it has meted, with those measures with which it has meted out.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: Does this coverall the incarnations that have been passed through this entity?_\n\nA: By no means. These are the ones that influence the most in the present.\n\n_Q: What was the name in the Egyptian incarnation?_\n\n_A:_ El-Pthut.\n\n_Q: Give the dates of the Egyptian incarnation._\n\nA: During that period of the rebellions that were, as would be counted in earth years in the present, 10,490 to 10,300 before the Prince of Peace came into the earth. In the period the entity's activities were such as to make for material development with the associations of the priest Ra Ta, with those of Ra\u2014in the names that came later\u2014and those of that particular period.\n\n_Q: Were there any other periods of incarnation of an Egyptian nature?_\n\nA: During those periods when there were the activities of those just before the return of those peoples from the land to the Promised Land, during the reign of Hathersput [Hatshepsut] [The former was my spelling from the sound. GD]. The entity then was among those peoples. Yet this does not influence the greater portion in the present, as to the mental activities or soul development. Urges may be raised from these, specifically as to things that pertain to the manner in which stones of certain characters are set; for these appear at times\u2014but do not influence the soul development.\n\n_Q: Would you give more details regarding the period of incarnation mentioned in relation with the promised land?_\n\nA: It was during that period when there were the correlations between those of the Princess of the Egyptian and those of the household of one of the tribes of the people there. Then entity was a sister then of Hathersput, the Princess that became the Queen that made for much of the expansions and developments in the land as related to extending the activities of the peoples to other lands. Yet these activities and associations with the people of the period do not influence the soul development as do those that we have given.\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**8. Case #1472**\n\n**Editor's Note: This case has little need for a return to earth, unless she wishes to help others\u2014the _Bodhisattva_ role in Buddhism. Here are Cayce's words on this: \"If there is kept that purpose in self, there is little need for a return; save as one that may lead the way to those that are still in darkness.\"**\n\nText of Reading 1472-1 F 57 (Writer, Radio Broadcaster, Protestant)\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the David E. Kahn home, 20 Woods Lane, Scarsdale, N.Y., this 6th day of November, 1937, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [1472], new Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc., recommended by Mr. [1151] and Mrs. [1158].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. Mrs. [1472].\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn May 5, 1880, in Bowling Green, Virginia.\n\nTime of Reading 3:50 to 4:50 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. New York City.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\n(In going back over years from present\u2014\"\u2014'85\u2014rather as a cross\u2014'84, '83\u2014\" etc., on back to birth date.)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the records here of that entity now known as or called [1472].\n\nIn giving the interpretations of these, we find these are those that may be helpful in the experience of the entity through the present sojourn.\n\nThese are beautiful in many of the experiences, yet the more turmoil may appear to be present in this present sojourn.\n\nFor the entity has come a long way, and oft grows weary with the burdens not only that become a part of self's experience but that apparently are unburdened and yet burdened upon the entity, in its dealings with those about self.\n\nRemember, though, that these _are_ but that which is a part of the experience; for those whom He loveth, those He holdeth dear in their dealings with the fellow man.\n\nFor He hath indeed given His angels charge concerning thee, and He will bear thee up\u2014if ye will faint not but hold to that purpose where-unto thou hast purposed in thy tabernacle in the present.\n\nFor know that His temple in thee is _holy;_ and thy body-mind is indeed the temple of the living God.\n\nThus may ye find oft that upon the horns of the altar many of the burdens may be laid aside, and that the sweet incense of faith and hope and prudence and _patience_ will arise to bring the consciousness and the awakening of the glories that may be thine.\n\nIn giving, for this entity, the interpretations of the records made\u2014upon time and space from God's book of remembrance\u2014we find life, as a whole, is a continuous thing; emanating from power, energy, God-Consciousness, ever.\n\nAnd as it must ever be, so has it ever been; so that only a small vista or vision may be taken here and there, from the experiences of the entity in those environs of an astrological nature (as ye term).\n\nOr the experiences of the visitation of the soul-entity, as it were, during those periods when absent from the material, three-dimensional matter, become as in the accord with that which has been accredited by the students\u2014yea, by the seers of old to those astrological aspects.\n\nThat is, the influences or environs to the entity in those consciousnesses that are given as a portion of the experience, from such sojourns, are as signs or symbols or emblems in the experience of the entity in the present.\n\nFor as the entity experiences, it is ever the _now_ and what the entity or soul may do _about_ the consciousness or awareness that makes for those influences which are to be.\n\nHence such influences that are accredited much to the astrological aspects become a portion of the entity, not because of the position at the time of birth but because of the entity's sojourn there. Or, rather, because the All-Wise, All-Creative Force has given into the keeping of the souls that they journey as it were from experience or awareness or consciousness to consciousness, that they\u2014as a portion of the whole\u2014may become aware of same.\n\nAnd as the injunction has been from the beginning, subdue ye the influences from without, that ye may be a fit companion, that you may be one with that Creative Force or Energy ye worship as thy Maker, thy God, thy Brother\u2014yea, that within which ye live, ye move, ye have your being!\n\nThen as we find, as the consciousness is aware of the individual now, and knows itself to be itself\u2014these are the purposes.\n\nThen only as an individual gives itself in service does it become aware. For as the divine love has manifested, does become manifested, that alone ye have given away do ye possess. That _alone_ is the manner in which the growth, the awareness, the consciousness grows to be.\n\nFor until the experiences are thine, thy awareness cannot be complete.\n\nAs to the astrological aspects, we find these become as innate or mental\u2014or dream, or visions, or cries, or voices as it were from within.\n\nBut the influences that arise from the few appearances in the material sojourns or consciousness (that have an effect in the present) are to create or bring about or affect the emotions.\n\nHence as there are those contacts with individual entities\u2014for this entity is struggling even as they\u2014there comes with the awareness of their thought-expression in material consciousness the emotions, the awareness of their struggles having been as parallel, or at cross purposes here or there.\n\nYet having left as it were upon the skein of time and space that consciousness that only in the patience of the divine love may that hope, that helpfulness be made complete\u2014as ye lean upon the arm of thy Brother, thy Friend, ye may be borne to the very presence of divinity itself.\n\nIn the astrological aspects then we find these as a part of this entity's experience; that Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Neptune all become a portion of the entity's innate activity.\n\nHence these come into material manifestation by the application of, or doing something about, the urge produced by that activity that is latent yet is so subtle, yet so definite as to produce that which brings movement to the experience of self.\n\nThus it becomes a portion of its activity in the material sojourn.\n\nVenus and Jupiter bring sympathy, love, beauty; and those abilities to depict same into material activity such that it becomes a portion of the longings and the hopes of the many.\n\nFor as thoughts are things, and as their currents run into the experience of individuals, they shape lives and activities so that they become miracles or crimes in the experiences of others as they mete them in their associations with their fellow men.\n\nFor as ye do it unto the least of these, thy brethren, ye do it unto thy Maker.\n\nHence these make for those activities in the experience of this entity's soul in which the masses, as well as classes and groups, are to be, will be, influenced.\n\nHence is there little wonder that oft there is the second thought\u2014yea, the counsel with the inner self\u2014as to whether that written, that spoken, that printed, that said in thy dealings with others becomes as a wonderment or is constructive or destructive?\n\nBut more and more may the thoughts expressed and given out by the entity bring constructive activity in the lives of others, as the self gains that open consciousness that He has given His angels charge lest ye dash thy foot against a stone.\n\nHence know that He is in His holy temple, and that all the earth must hear, must know. For every knee must bow to that love divine, as ye are capable of meting and measuring through such activities in thy experience and thy relationships with thy fellow men.\n\nIn Mars we find those fits of anger, resentment, selfishness here and there; those impure motives creating those struggles, those entanglements, those angers. Yet these as they arise upon thy horizon of activity in thy relationships may oft keep from view the visions of that glory prepared for those who love the Lord.\n\nYet know that truth and light, as may be aroused or made alive from the assurances of His walks with thee, will dissipate those fogs, those mists, as ye apply love in thy dealings with every character of circumstance in thy experience with others.\n\nThen these will matter little; for the Lord's ways are not past finding out, yet ye must oft learn to wait upon the Lord, and not become overanxious\u2014in thy anxiety that \"they, too\" taste of the goodness that may be found in the divine love.\n\nIn Uranus, as well as in Neptune, we find the water\u2014yea, the elementals; the fire and water\u2014oft interfering? no, cleansing rather. For as hath been given, all must be tried so as by fire. All must be purified.\n\nYet in the beauty of life springing anew in the water of life itself, ye find in the mysteries\u2014yea, the occult and the spiritual forces\u2014influences that make for _extremes_ in the lives of many.\n\nYet as He walked the path to Gethsemane, [Jesus] as He struggled alone with His own Cross; so ye\u2014as ye struggle _have_ the assurance that His presence abideth; and they that become overzealous or overanxious may find that the stepping-stones that may be in thy experience become stumbling-stones.\n\nBut keep ye the faith in not the Cross as sacrifice but the Cross as the _way,_ the _light,_ the _life!_\n\nFor without the Cross there is not the Crown!\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth, all may not be visioned from this particular experience or sojourn. For as ye apply thyself in thy daily experiences in bringing those bonds here, those activities in the sojourns of others, ye bring the _new_ visions and vistas of thy sojourns materially as well as in the astrological spheres about this thine own concept of the universe. But:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, during those periods of the settlings in the early portions of the land.\n\nIt was when there were those being brought into the land for companions, helpmeets to those of the land.\n\nThe entity was among those brought hither from the English land, and become in the household of that family which later grew to be in authority, in power, in that Virginian land; or in the household of that family whose name has been changed to what is now called Byrd\u2014then Bayonne [?].\n\nIn the experience, as Clementine, the entity's activities were in the assurance of the freedom of actions for the bringing not only of conveniences into the home but into the activities of the neighboring groups roundabout.\n\nAnd these have left upon the consciousness of the entity such emotions that oft it finds itself bound by convention, bound by that which prevents the full expression.\n\nYet know in the awareness that ye will find more and more that the _truth_ indeed sets one _free. Not_ to convention, of the material policies or activities, but in _spirit and in truth!_\n\nFor God looks upon the purposes, the ideals of the heart, and not upon that which men call convention.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Palestine land, during those days when the Master walked in the earth; and when there were the peoples about those activities of not only the birth but His sojourns before and after the return from Egypt\u2014those whom Judy blessed, that labored in the preserving of the records of _his_ activities as the Child; the activities of the Wise Men, the Essenes and the groups to which Judy had been the prophetess, the healer, the writer, the recorder\u2014for all of these groups.\n\nAnd though questioned or scoffed by the Roman rulers and the tax gatherers, and especially those that made for the levying or the providing for those activities for the taxation, the entity gained throughout.\n\nThough the heart and body was often weary from the toils of the day, and the very imprudence\u2014yea, the very selfishness of others for the aggrandizing of their bodies rather than their souls or minds seeking development, the entity grew in grace, in knowledge, in understanding.\n\nAnd in the present those abilities arise from its desire, from its hopes to put into the word of the _day,_ the experience of the day, in all phases of human experience, _lessons_ \u2014yea, symbols, yea tenets\u2014that will drive as it were _home,_ in those periods when the soul takes thought and counsel with itself, as to whence the experiences of the day are leading\u2014as to whether they are leading to those activities that are the fruits of the spirit of truth and life, or to those that make for selfishness, and the aggrandizement of material appetites without thought of those things that are creative and only make the pure growths within the experience of others.\n\nHence whether it be in jest, in stories, in song or poem, or whether in skits that may show the home life, the lover\u2014yea, the weary traveler yea the high-minded, and they that think better of themselves then they ought to think\u2014 _these_ abilities are there. Use them. For He, even as then, will bless thee with His presence in same. And what greater assurance can there be in the experience of any soul than to know that He\u2014yea, the Son of Mary\u2014yea, the Son of the Father, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Giver of all good gifts\u2014will be thy right hand, yea thy heart, thy mind, thy eye, thy heart itself\u2014if ye will hold fast to Him!\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Egyptian land, during those periods when there were the gatherings of those from the turmoils, from the banishments, and those from the Atlantean land.\n\nThe entity then was among those from the lands that were later called the Parthenian lands, or what ye know as the Persian land from which the conquerors then of Egypt had come.\n\nAs a Princess from that land the entity came to study the mysteries for the service it might give to those of her own land, the Carpathians or as has been given, the entity was among the _first_ of the pure white from that land to seek from the Priest and those activities in the Temple Beautiful for the purifying of self that she, too, might give to her own not only the tenets but the practical application of that which would bring home in the material experience an _assurance_ in the separations from the body.\n\nThus in the abilities of the entity from that experience, as well as those gained throughout those activities, we find in the present: Just meting out day by day those visions, that ye have gained here, that ye have seen in thy experiences, thy sojourns, ye will find that _He_ the keeper, _He_ the Creator, will give the increase necessary for the activities in every sphere of thy experience.\n\nFor keeping inviolate that thou knowest gives assurance not only in self but in the promises that He will bear thee up!\n\nIf there is kept that purpose in self, there is little need for a return; save as one that may lead the way to those that are still in darkness.\n\nAs to the practical application, then:\n\nIn the writing, in the song; in the meting it out in the conversation day by day. For _ye_ can only be the sower. _God_ giveth the increase!\n\nFaint not at well-doing.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: How can I extend the horders of my consciousness to include fourth dimensionalknowledge and achieve greater spiritual illumination?_\n\nA: These illuminations, the greater visions, only come by the communion with the true life and light from within.\n\nFor as thy body is the temple of thy _own_ self, so is the kingdom of heaven within, even as He gave. And if ye will but open the door of thy consciousness and let Him come in, He will sup with thee and give thee that thou may _use_ day by day.\n\n_Q: Where, when and what was my relationship to the entity now known as [1470], in any past incarnation, and what does he mean to my present life pattern?_\n\n_A:_ In the Palestine period the self was as Judy, the entity [1470] was as the Roman that made light much, and later came to seek.\n\nAnd thus in authority in self doth he find that those activities in the present will become much in the same way and manner. For not as one dependent upon the other, but one as bolstering as it were the purposes that may be held aright.\n\n_Q: Where, when and what was my past relationship to the entity now known as [1151], and what is the purpose of my present association with him?_\n\nA: In the same land.\n\nHere we find quite a variation in the activity. For as the entity that walked in the way to Emmaus _found_ that those records of those activities became part and parcel of the experience, so is that bond of sympathy found in the associations that awakens the urge for a _helpfulness without question_ as one to another.\n\n_Q: Is radio the field in which I can best use my spiritual enlightenment and writing ability for the greatest service to the world?_\n\nA: Radio is a means of expression; writing is a means of confirmation and is longer _lasting._\n\n_Q: Why do I get so little love, consideration and appreciation from those to whom I pour out the most service and devotion?_\n\nA: Study that which has been given thee relative to such, and ye will see that it is patience ye must learn, that ye must add to those virtues that have made thee ever the burden bearer for the many throughout those periods when the awakenings were coming.\n\nFaint not because of thy loneliness, for who can be alone with His love, His promises abiding with thee!\n\nThese may make for a blooming into activity in thy experience, and _will,_ if ye will give expression more and more to those promises that are thy very own.\n\nFor He, as He hath promised, may bring to thy remembrance _all_ things\u2014from the foundations of the earth. Know the Lord is nigh; and that those who keep watch, who keep faith _with_ thee, are even as those of old\u2014when there are the hundreds, yea the thousands that have never bended the knee to Baal, but as thee\u2014only need that light, that assurance that He _is_ the guiding light!\n\n_Q: How can I help my daughter, the entity now known as [. . .]?_\n\nA: Be not overanxious. Ever be ready rather to give an answer for the faith that lieth within. Not as argumentive, but as that which has been, which is, which ever will be the assurance to thee of the faith, the love that conquers all.\n\n_Q: Who and where is my real mate?_\n\nA: This may best be found by considering that as was the experience in those activities during the Palestine period, yea those full activities of the entity _as_ Judy in that period with the Essenes. Study even that little which has been preserved of same. Ye will find him studying same also!\n\n_Q: Can you tell me anything of the activity and development of my son, the entity known in this life as [. . .] who died at the age of 13?_\n\nA: As has been given thee, let Him, the Way, the Life, reveal this to thee in thine _own_ meditation. He is near at hand.\n\nIf thine eyes will be opened, if thy purposes will be set in the service, in the patience of love, He may reveal\u2014as given\u2014all things to thee.\n\nLet thy deeper meditation be, in thine own way, but as these thoughts:\n\n_Lord, my Lord, my God! Thy handmaid seeks light and understanding! Open to my mind, my heart, my purpose, that which I may use in my daily service, my daily contacts, that will be more and more expressive of Thy love to the children of men._\n\nWe are through for the present.\n\n**9. Case #5366**\n\n**Editor's Note: In this next case, Cayce states that the entity whose name has been replaced with the number 5366, comes under no astrological influences and as for future earth incarnations he says \"no such [incarnations] may be necessary in the experience again in the earth-materiality.\"**\n\n_Text of Reading 5366-1 F 53 (Housewife, Protestant)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at the office of the Association, Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach, Va., this 19th day of July, 1944, in accordance with request made by the self\u2014Mrs. [5366], Associate Member of the Ass'n for Research & Enlightenment, Inc.\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Jeanette Fitch, Stenos.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn October 31, 1890, on a farm near Bellefontaine, Ohio\n\nTime of Reading Set bet. 3:30 to 4:30 P.M. Eastern War Time . . . . , Mass.\n\nGC: You will give the relations of this entity and the universe, and the universal forces; giving the conditions which are as personalities, latent and exhibited in the present life; also the former appearances in the earth plane, or giving time, place and the name, and that in each life which built or retarded the development for the entity; giving the abilities of the present entity, that to which it may attain, and how. You will answer the questions, as I ask them:\n\nEC: My! Some very interesting characters have been born near Bellefontaine! This entity was among those with that one who persecuted the church so thoroughly and fiddled while Rome burned. That's the reason this entity in body has been disfigured by structural conditions. Yet may this entity be set apart. For through its experiences in the earth, it has advanced from a low degree to that which may not even necessitate a reincarnation in the earth. Not that it has reached perfection but there are realms for instruction if the entity will hold to that ideal of those whom it once scoffed at because of the pleasure materially brought in associations with those who did the persecuting.\n\nIn giving the interpretation, then, of the records of this entity, there is much that may be said but, as has been indicated, we would minimize the faults, and we would magnify the virtues. Thus may little or nothing be given that would deter the entity in any manner from holding fast to that purpose which has become that to which it may hold. For, as Joshua of old, the entity has determined (and sometimes the entity becomes very disturbed) \"Others may do as they may, but as for me, I will serve the living God.\"\n\nAstrological aspects would be nil in the experiences of the entity. (Let's pray with the entity.) No such may be necessary in the experience again in the earth-materiality. Remember, there are material urges and there are materials in other consciousnesses not three-dimensions alone.\n\nAs to the appearances in the earth, these would only be touched upon, as indicated, to be a helpful experience for the entity, as:\n\nBefore this we find the entity was in the land of the present nativity, through the experiences in seeking for new undertakings with the associates or companions. The entity became a helper to those who sought to know more of that which had been the prompting of individuals to seek freedom and to know that which is the spirit of creation or creative energies. Thus did the entity grow in attempting to interpret man's relationship to the Creative Forces or God. The name then was Jane Eyericson.\n\nBefore that we find the entity, as mentioned, was a companion or associate of that one [Nero] who persecuted those who believed in, those who accepted faith in righteousness, in goodness, in crucifying of body desires, in crucifying the emotions which would gratify only appetites of a body, either through the physical self or through physical appetites of gormandizing, and of material desire for the arousing more of the beast in individual souls.\n\nIn the experience, then, the entity is meeting self in that which was a part of the experience as Emersen.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the land when the children of promise entered into the promised land, when there were those whose companion or who father [Achan] sought for the gratifying of selfish desires in gold and garments and in things which would gratify only the eye. The entity was young in years and yet felt, as from those things which were told the entity, that a lack of material consideration was given the parent. The name then was Suthers.\n\nBefore that we find the entity was in the Egyptian land. The entity was among those who were trained in the Temple Beautiful for a service among its fellow men, contributing much to the household and the establishing of homes. Thus is the home near and dear to the entity, as are members of same, whether of the body-family or of the help or kinsmen.\n\nThus again may the entity find, in its application of those tenets and truths in the present, that answering in experiences of the entity in that land.\n\nThen the entity was called Is-it-el.\n\nAs to the abilities:\n\nWho would tell the rose how to be beautiful; who would give to the morning sun, glory; who would tell the stars how to be beautiful? Keep that faith! which has prompted thee. Many will gain much from thy patience, thy consistence, thy brotherly love.\n\nReady for questions.\n\n_Q: What_ locality _is best for me?_\n\nA: In the middle west.\n\n_Q: What has been the incentive to heal and help others?_\n\nA: Read just what has been given.\n\n_Q: Should we invest a small sum of money in Tung Oil or Ramie land in the south, or a log cabin on a mountain side on . . . 's farm at..., Conn., for future vacations?_\n\nA: No. Those in the west we would prepare, or Ohio, Indiana, or Iowa. These would be the better and there invest; whether in Illinois, in oil, yes; Iowa, a rest home, yes; in Ohio, farmland.\n\n_Q: How have I been associated in the past with my husband, [4921]?_\n\nA: In the experience before this there were associations in which each was an incentive or a helper, and yet never closely associated. That's why ye disagree at times in the present. In the experience in Egypt in the same association as in the present, as were the children, though there were many more of them there.\n\n_Q: My son, [5249]?_\n\nA: As indicated.\n\n_Q: My son, [5242]?_\n\nA: As indicated.\n\n_Q: How can I best help them in the present?_\n\nA: In helping them to study to show themselves approved unto God, workmen not ashamed, rightly stressing the words of truth and keeping self unspotted from the world.\n\nWe are through with this reading.\n\n**10. Case #1741**\n\n**Editor's Note: \"The entity may so apply those tenets as have been set before self, in its ministration to those that are about the entity, that no return would be necessary in _this_ experience or plane.\" Cayce emphasis on \"this\" gives one the impression that 1741 may have some necessary experiences in other planes of life \u2013 a concept that Cayce's readings often presented to us, despite our earth focus.**\n\n_Text of Reading 1741-1 F 42 (Governess in Jewish Family)_\n\nThis Psychic Reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 15th day of October, 1930, in accordance with request made the by the self\u2014Miss [1741], via her employers, Mr. [1734] and Mrs. [1732].\n\n**PRESENT**\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno. L. B. and Hugh Lynn Cayce.\n\n**READING**\n\nBorn February 3, 1888, Sargans, Switzerland.\n\nTime of Reading 11:40 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. New York City.\n\n(Life Reading Suggestion)\n\nEC: Yes, we have the entity and those relations with the universe and universal forces, as are latent and exhibited in the present entity, [1741].\n\nIn entering the present experience, we have the entity coming under the influence of Uranus and Venus, Jupiter and Mercury. Hence those conditions as personalities, manifestedly builded in the present entity:\n\nOne high minded, yet the tempered thought and experience influenced by those of an occult or mystic nature; love ruling in the influences of the entity, and in the scope of mental abilities these take-especially interest\u2014are influenced by those of the love's influence, rather than of _material_ conditions, yet material forces are apparent in the influences that bring such changes in the experience of the entity, as has made for that as builds for patience, long suffering, kindness, endurance, tolerance and brotherly love, faith, hope, charity to all. These are as the children of the entity's development, making for those influences as build in the present experience, as develops\u2014which, when grown and manifested in the material actions of the body, bring that pleasing, patient personality as is manifested\u2014especially with those whom the entity _would_ influence; using then those armors that are rather of the nature of disarming to those that would be in a hurry, in a bluster. Not that wrath does not present itself, but rather that the influences through the _experiences_ has brought that as develops the control, rather than being controlled by such for the entity.\n\nOne appreciative of literature, especially those of the descriptive nature of the outdoors and the influence that same has upon those that experience\u2014either in reading or in actuality\u2014such visions, such surroundings, such scenes. Patient in that of study, especially as bear an influence towards those things that bespeak of the spiritual life. While in the entity's development there are set rules for self, tolerance in others brings a _beauty_ to the entity's speech and activity that draws\u2014rather than repels\u2014the influence of the entity. In the appreciativeness of kindnesses, soft words, gentleness, the entity may be called one as excels; making friends easily, enemies seldom; holding little grudges, yet _positive_ in its ideals, in its ideas as to the approach to ideals.\n\nOne that is handy, or a handmaid in the arts of sewing, mending, or gathering together of the studies of such, and especially as brocades or laces, figures in cloth, interest the entity.\n\nIn the development, or that to which it may attain in the present, rather the application of that as has been set before self\u2014for _well_ has the way been chosen. Many depend _physically_ upon, depend _mentally_ upon, the activities of the entity. Be true to the duties set by self. Know that the way made is in keeping with the ideal set before self.\n\nIn appearances and the influences in the present experience:\n\nIn the one before this we find the entity among those who sat by the river, as the gatherings on the feast days, and listened to the speech and the exhortation by those who gave a new message from the foreign land to the women of Thyatira and Sidon, for the entity was then a seller of lace, purple brocade and linens, and in the _city_ as of Lystra did the entity dwell\u2014a maiden throughout the experience, and the entity gained through this experience, for much as was gained in the service set\u2014and in the applications of the new rule or ideal as was given in this experience\u2014did the entity apply and use in that experience. In the name Lystia. In the present, that of the aide, the teacher, the succor, the minister to the needs, the wants, of those dependent upon the activities of another, does the entity seek to find expression in that held within self's own heart.\n\nIn the one before this we find in that land known as the Egyptian land, and in the days when there were the incoming of the peoples from the hill country did the entity attempt to cause those in authority to rebel; yet in the changes as were wrought\u2014for the entity was then among those of the royalty of that period or land, in the household of the ruler in the southern portion of the land\u2014the entity lost and gained through the experience; being then in that place that gave _to_ the land a teacher, through the body that afterward became a mighty one in word, in deed, and in activity. In the name Io-Li. In the present experience this gives the entity that ability to control self, even when those conditions that are held as imperative are overridden by others in position, power or place.\n\nIn the one before this we find in the land known as the Poseidan, or a portion of the old Atlantean. In this period the entity found much of those that pertained to the mysteries of nature, in the application of unseen forces, in the usages of same for man's indwelling, and man's physical dwelling. Hence much that is of the mystic, symbol, symbolistic, or of that as brings to the varied consciousnesses of an entity, does the entity often dwell upon; being mindful that those that are of the chemical, or chemical combines in the present, does not gain a hold that may not easily be set aside. In the name Ameer.\n\nIn the abilities of the entity in the present, as given, these may be made to excel\u2014and the entity may so apply those tenets as have been set before self, in its ministration to those that are about the entity, that no return would be necessary in _this_ experience or plane; for in _Him_ is the light, and the light came among men, showing men the way to find that consciousness in _self_ \u2014for the _kingdom_ is of _within,_ and when self is made one _with_ those forces there may be the accord as is necessary for \"Come up higher. Being faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many\".\n\nWe are through.\n\n## **Part 2**\n\n## **Karma**\n\n### **5**\n\n### **Edgar Cayce's Discourses on Karma**\n\n#### **Reading 440\u20135**\n\nWell that karma be understood, and how it is to be met. For, in various thought\u2014whether considered philosophy or religion, or whether from the more scientific manner of cause and effect\u2014karma is all of these and more.\n\nRather it may be likened unto a piece of food, whether fish or bread, taken into the system; it is assimilated by the organs of digestion, and then those elements that are gathered from same are, made into the forces that flow through the body, giving the strength and vitality to an animate object, or being, or body.\n\nSo, in experiences of a soul, in a body, in an experience in the earth. Its thoughts make for that upon which the soul feeds, as do the activities that are carried on from the thought of the period make for the ability, of retaining or maintaining the active force or active principle of the thought _through_ the experience.\n\nThen, the soul re-entering into a body under a different environ either makes for the expending of that it has made through the experience in the sojourn in a form that is called in some religions as destiny of the soul, in another philosophy that which has been builded must be met in some way or manner, or in the more scientific manner that a certain cause produces a certain effect.\n\nHence we see that karma is all of these and more. What more? Ever since the entering of spirit and soul into matter there has been a way of redemption for the soul, to make an association and a connection with the Creator, _through_ the love _for_ the Creator that is in its experience. Hence _this,_ too, must be taken into consideration; that karma may mean the development _for self_ \u2014and must be met in that way and manner, or it may mean that which has been acted upon by the cleansing influences of the way and manner through which the soul, the mind-soul, or the soul-mind is purified, or to be purified, or purifies itself, and hence those changes come about\u2014and some people term it \"Lady Luck\" or \"The body is born under a lucky star.\" It's what the soul-mind has done _about_ the source of redemption of the soul! Or it may be yet that of cause and effect, as related to the soul, the mind, the spirit, the body.\n\n#### **Reading 276\u20137**\n\nWhat has karma to do with this body, then? What is the fate, or the destiny, of such a soul? Has it already been determined as to what it may do, or be, for the very best? or has it been so set that the activities and the influences, the environs and the hereditary forces, are to alter?\n\nThese indeed are worthy questions, in the light of that which has been given.\n\nIf there be any virtue or truth in those things given in the spiritual or Christian or Jehovah-God faith, His laws are immutable. What laws are immutable, if truth and God Himself is a growing thing\u2014yet an ever changeable, and yet \"ever the same, yesterday and today and forever\"?\n\nThese things, these words, to many minds become contradictory, but they are in their inception _not_ contradictory; for Truth, Life, Light, Immortality, are only words that give expression to or convey a concept of one and the same thing.\n\nHence, Destiny is: \"As ye sow, so shall ye reap.\" And like begets like! And the first law of nature, which is the material manifestation of spiritual law in a physical world, is self-propagation\u2014which means that it seeks self- preservation and the activity of the same law that brought the thought of man (or the spirit of man) into existence\u2014companionship!\n\nWhat, then, is karma? And what is destiny? What has the soul done, in the spiritual, the material, the cosmic world or consciousness, respecting the knowledge or awareness of the laws being effective in his experience\u2014whether in the earth, in the air, in heaven or in hell? These are ever one; for well has it been said, \"Though I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the utmost parts of the heavens, Thou art there! Though I make my bed in hell, Thou art there! Though I go to the utmost parts of the earth, Thou art there! Truth, Life, God! Then, that which is cosmic\u2014or destiny, or karma\u2014depends upon what the soul has done about that it has become aware of.\n\nWhat, you say, has this to do with this soul, this entity, that\u2014as we have given\u2014is well balanced and attuned as to that it will do; by its own activating forces of its will, its desire\u2014that arise from its experiences in the mental, the spiritual and the material world? Because it is thus making its destiny, its karma! For, He will stand in the stead. For, by sin came death; by the shedding of blood came freedom\u2014freedom from a consciousness, into a greater consciousness.\n\nSo, in His promises do we live and move and have our being. Be patient. But know much may be done.\n\n#### **Reading 311\u20137**\n\n_Q: Have I much bad karma to work out in this life?_\n\nA: _Karma_ is rarely understood, in \"being _worked out.\"_ There is, has been prepared, a way in which karma\u2014as ordinarily known\u2014may be forgiven thee. There are constantly those necessary temptations being presented before each soul, each individual, each developing force in God's own nature; that, are these left upon those Forces, or to those Forces rather than to self, there is little to be feared in that that would beset.\n\n**Editor's Note: This next reading was given for a Quaker teacher, which may explain that intensely Christ-centered directive to Mrs. [2067].**\n\n#### **Reading 2067\u20132**\n\n_Q: Considering my ideals, purposes and karmic pattern, as well as the conditions which I face at present, in what specific direction should_ I _seek expression for my talents and abilities in order to render the greatest possible service?_\n\nA: This is rather a compound question, for it presumes or presupposes as to ideals, as to purposes, and as to self's concept of karma.\n\nWhat _is_ karma? and what is the pattern?\n\nHe alone is each soul pattern. He _alone_ is each soul pattern! _He_ is thy _karma,_ if ye put thy trust _wholly_ in Him! See?\n\nNot that every soul shall not give account for the deeds done in the body, and in the body meet them! but in each meeting, in _each_ activity, let the pattern\u2014(not in self, not in mind alone, but in Him)\u2014be the guide.\n\nAs to the outlet, as to the manner of expression\u2014to give as to this or that is merely giving opinions. For, all must be quickened\u2014there must be the quickening of the spirit.\n\nAs we find indicated in the expression of thought, by or through writing is _one_ manner, or one channel. Another is by the speaking, the becoming as a lecturer, an interpreter for groups of various sects or forms of activity\u2014whether psychological groups, Theosophist groups, Sunday School groups of various denominations, or of whatever cult. For, the ideal is to set those aright! not by dogmatic activity but by reasoning\u2014as He\u2014with others.\n\nWhen questioned as to political, economic or social order, what were His answers? Did He condemn the man who was born blind? Did He condemn the woman taken in adultery? Did He condemn the man that was healed of palsy or of leprosy? Did He condemn any? Rather did He point out that in _Him_ each meets that karmic condition found in self, and that the pattern is in Him; doing good, being kind, being patient, being loving in _every_ experience of man's activity.\n\nDo thou likewise.\n\n**Editor's Note: In this next reading we see Cayce's biblical foundation (both Old and New Testament) coming through in a mystical vision of the early Christian concept of the blood sacrifice. Cayce equates it with the removal of karma.**\n\n#### **Reading 2828\u20135**\n\nWhen it was given \"Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.\" That is, in this case, the blood of his will, of this purpose, of this physical desire to carry on in his own ways of activity and by those conditions in the body itself being thwarted. The entity thwarted others and is meeting it in self. That is karma. In the blood of the Christ as was shed karma is met and then it becomes the law, not of cause and effect, but of being justified by faith in Him. Then, may we use, may we apply those things of the material earth _and_ the spiritual combination to become again sons of God. Not sons of Belial or of the devil.\n\n### **6**\n\n### **Examples of Karma in Edgar Cayce's Discourses**\n\n_Text of Reading 275-19 F 18 (Student, Protestant)_\n\nThis psychic reading given by Edgar Cayce at his office, 115 West 35th Street, Virginia Beach, Va., this 16th day of May, 1931, in accordance with request made by self\u2014Miss [275].\n\nEdgar Cayce; Gertrude Cayce, Conductor; Gladys Davis, Steno.\n\n**READING**\n\nTime of Reading . . . Ave., 11:25 A.M. Eastern Standard Time . . . . , N. Y.\n\nGC: You will have before you the information in the life reading through these sources for [275] on October 13, 1930. You will now give the place, time, description of life, with its resultant karma in entity's incarnation as Partheniasi. You will answer the questions which will be asked concerning these.\n\nEC: Yes, we have the information as given relative to the entity's sojourn in the earth's plane as Partheniasi.\n\nAs we find, the record as is _builded_ by an entity in the akashian record is to the mental world as the cinema is to the material or physical world, as pictured in its activity. So, in the direction to an entity and its entrance into the material plane in a given period, time, place\u2014which indicate the relative position of the entity as related to the universe or to the universal sources\u2014then one only turns, as it were, to those _records_ in the akashian forms to read that period of that builded or that lost during _that_ experience.\n\nIn this entity's experience and the karma builded, or that to be met in the various experiences of the entity:\n\nDuring the period in Nero's reign in Rome, in the latter portion of same, the entity was then in the household of Parthesias\u2014and one in whose company many became followers of, adherents to, those called Christians in the period, and during those persecutions in the arena when there were physical combats. The entity was as a spectator of such combats, and under the influence of those who made light of them; though the entity felt in self that there was more to that held by such individuals, as exhibited in the arena, but the entity\u2014to carry that that was held as necessary with the companionship of those about same-laughed at the injury received by one of the girls [301] [GD's note: [301] is now her brother [282]'s wife, living in the same household and helping to nurse [275] in the arena, and _suffered_ in _mental anguish_ when she saw later\u2014or became cognizant of\u2014the physical suffering brought to the body _of_ that individual during the rest of the sojourn. The suffering that was brought was of a _mental_ nature, and when music\u2014especially of the lyre, harp, or of the zither\u2014was played, the entity _suffered_ most; for the song and the music that was played during that experience brought\u2014as it were\u2014the experience to the entity. Hence in meeting same in the present, there has been builded that which the entity passes through, or \"under the rod\"\u2014as it were\u2014of that as of being pitied, laughed at, scorned, for the inability of the personal body to partake of those in the material activities as require the need of all of the physical body; yet in the music, in the acceptance, in the building of those forces through that which laughed at, which scorned\u2014though knowing; now _knowing,_ laugh to scorn those who would _doubt_ the activities of the forces that build in a material body that activity in every cell, every force, to make a perfect body. Ready for questions.\n\n_Q: Give exact guidance how entity can best make good her karma during this life._\n\nA: As has been outlined, that\u2014now knowing that as is to be met, no scorn, no sneer, but with patience, with fortitude, with praise, with the giving of pleasure in music, in kindnesses, in gentle words, in bespeaking of that as may build for a perfect mind, a perfect soul, a perfect body, may the entity overcome those things that have beset\u2014that not often understood, those things that so easily beset us; making the will one with the Creator and the Creative Forces. Be used by _them,_ and the channel\u2014the cup will run over with blessings. Those things that easily beset bespeak not of those only that are weaknesses in the flesh; but the weaknesses in the _flesh_ are the scars of the soul! and these, only in that of making the will one with His, being washed\u2014as it were in the blood of the lamb. We are through.\n\n#### **Reading 538\u201330**\n\nGC: You will have before you the body and the enquiring mind of [538]. You will give a detailed life-history of this entity's appearance in Egypt as Isris, and of her association with those of that period with whom she is closely associated in the present. You will answer the questions which will be asked regarding this, and also regarding information which has been given her through these sources and her present development.\n\nEC: Yes, we have that record as made in _that_ experience. In the entering as a record, in the household of him raised to the position of priest enduring the banishment of the entity with others, becoming a favorite of the king, in the household of the king, and a dancer in the temple service; becoming one favored by the priest, and with the associations became a mother in the king's household, banished with priest to the Nubian land; in exile for nine years, returned with those of the exile and those gathered about the priest and his associates. Many were the associations directly, indirectly, of the entity during this period. Beautiful of body and figure, many are the casts that were made during the period as an aide or dancer in temple service. In the latter days more active in the issuing forth of those tenets as were carried to the various groups or peoples, as the _kingdom_ extended its appeal to other lands. Ready for questions.\n\n_Q: What karma does the entity bring to the present from this period, and how may I work this out?_\n\nA: Easily holding grudges where there are misunderstandings, or those who apparently injure the body in thought or deed. In working same out, this becomes necessary\u2014as we find in answering such questions\u2014that we turn entirely away from that as is a record and use either that as the _ideal_ as has been builded, or was builded in that period and later became manifest through those forces as were known in the Son.* In overcoming karma, or that innate influence that arises from experience of the soul in its passage through material planes, the meeting of individuals, entities, drawn to or from by innate urges that become impelling in many ways, these are acted upon by that as is builded by an entity as its ideal. Well to learn that lesson! for as is builded, then does the comparison come when the soul passes from experience to experience by that it has held as its standard. This becomes confusing to the body, as we view from this plane. This, then: As one builds in self that ideal as takes away the errors of material things, as this grows, so does the soul become more like Him\u2014see?\n\n_Q: How may I better fit myself to aid in this work, which is so influenced by this Egyptian period?_\n\nA: In drawing nearer and nearer to that _mind_ as was in Him who _crystallized_ the _experiences_ of the period in the earth ten thousand five hundred years later. As this becomes understood, may each soul, each entity, apply those truths as given, then as crystallized, as exemplified, as made one in Him; so may a soul, meditating in those tenets, come to know how, what manner, self may apply self's abilities in daily contacts with individuals, bring forth that as makes for the better, the clarifying, the exemplifying, of those laws, loves, truths.\n\n#### **Reading 2842\u20132**\n\n_Q: Please tell me what my karma is, in order that I may strive to overcome it._\n\nA: Overcome that fear and dread in self. That is the karma. That is that to be conquered in self, for this applies to the entity in its secular, physical, mental, and spiritual body\u2014for, as is seen, when the body physical, mental or spiritual has set self to disregard fear of consequences, so long as that activity was in keeping with the first law of the directed or creative energy, all well! but when applied in the manner of I! the vibration has brought that as of against the stone wall.\n\n_Q: Why have I always had more or less of an aversion to the opposite sex?_\n\nA: Rather that of the complex, brought on by fear\u2014as has been given\u2014in the various experiences of the entity in and through the earth's plane. This at times as the entity has felt mentally, and at other times felt inwardly has been detrimental, yet\u2014would that law become the fullness of the truth in the entity\u2014let that prayer be: I will be all things unto all peoples, that I may _gain_ the more. _Not_ in the sense of building in self as one that would live upon the efforts of another, but that\u2014being all things\u2014I may be understood, and may _understand_ the viewpoint, the concept, the impelling force, the reflective angle to which another sees its God.\n\n_Q: Have I a right to demand abundance, or should I be content with my small income?_\n\nA: Be _content_ with what thou hast, but never be _satisfied_ with what thou hast. Abundance is the lot of him who is in accord with those truths of the Creative Energy, just as the world\u2014the hills, the cattle, the gold\u2014is mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay, sayeth the Lord. Put thine self in that attitude, that position, of reflecting that as is of the Creative Energy, and that necessary\u2014and over an abundance will be in thine hand.\n\n#### **Reading 262\u201357 (early deaths)**\n\n_Q: Does the truth, \"By becoming aware in a material world was the only manner through which spiritual forces might become aware of their separation from spiritual surroundings\" show that the reincarnation of those who die in childhood is necessary?_\n\nA: As the awareness comes by separation (which is being manifested in materiality as we know it in the present), there is the necessity of the sojourning in _each_ experience for the developments of the influences necessary in each soul's environ, each soul's attributes, to become again aware of being in the _presence_ of the Father. Hence the reincarnation into this or that influence, and those that are only aware of material or carnal influences for a moment may be as _greatly_ impressed as were a finite mind for a moment in the presence of Infinity. How long was the experience of Saul in the way to Damascus? How long was the experience of Stephen as he saw the Master standing\u2014not sitting, _standing?_ How long was the experience of those that saw the vision that beckoned to them, or any such experience?\n\nWhen one considers the birth of a soul into the earth, the more often is the body and the body-mind considered than the soul\u2014that is full-grown in a breath. For, did the Father (or Infinity) bring the earth, the worlds into existence, how much greater is a day in the house of the Lord\u2014or a moment in His presence\u2014than a thousand years in carnal forces?\n\nHence a soul even for a flash, or for a breath, has perhaps experienced even as much as Saul [later, Paul] in the way [to Damascus].\n\n### **7**\n\n### **Edgar Cayce's Tips for Meeting Karma**\n\n#### **Reading 2271\u20131**\n\n_Q: What karma do I have to overcome in order to free myself mentally and spiritually?_\n\nA: _Karma_ is rather the lack of living to that _known_ to do! As ye would be forgiven, so forgive in others. _That_ is the manner to meet karma.\n\n#### **Reading 2990\u20132**\n\n_Q: Please explain karma to me in relation to my eye condition, and how it may best be met in the present?_\n\nA: Read that just given, and as to how you may apply it. Karma is met either in self or in Him. For, as has been given, \"in the day ye eat thereof\u2014or in the day ye entertain fear, the day ye entertain sin\u2014the soul must die.\" Not in that moment, possibly not in that era, but if the soul continues in sin, that is karma, that is cause and effect. But God has not willed that any soul should perish; He has with every temptation prepared a way of escape.\n\nHence, He, the Word, the Light, the Truth, came into the earth, paid the price of death, that we through Him might have life more abundantly; eternal life, the consciousness of eternal life; the consciousness of eternity; and that we are one with Him.\n\n**Editor's Note: This next reading reveals how karma does not have to become an actual physical experience, but be met in the mental and spiritual consciousness.**\n\n#### **Reading 1635\u20133**\n\nBefore this the entity was in the household of the Audubons. There the entity was the daughter of its present mother, and not too long-lived in that experience. For, the entity then was destroyed\u2014or met sudden death\u2014in an accident, in a car, or a horse and car.\n\nThese are latent conditions in the present experience for the entity, then; and warnings must be entertained and kept, not as to keeping the entity from such, but know with whom any traveling is done\u2014else there may be accidents in car or in travel that may make of the body a partial invalid. These are a part of the karma, unless there is kept that law of grace through which karma is _not_ an actual experience.\n\nHence there shall be great stress in the unfoldment or development of the entity, upon its trust in _divine_ sources, of its care, of its intent, of its _trust_ in those with whom it becomes active\u2014not as to _daring,_ but as for purpose, as for hope, as for those forces of the divine nature; that the entity in its intent and purpose may be kept in a sound, perfect body to better fulfill its purpose in the earth in its present sojourn.\n\n**Editor's Note: In some cases, Cayce chose not to address the karma but to simply get beyond it, as in this next reading for a young woman.**\n\n#### **Reading 2072\u201314**\n\n_Q: What is the karmic cause of the physical condition of this body?_\n\nA: This would have to do with other influences. Let's leave karma out. For there is a way, and the trust is in the divine within that may be in attune with the infinite. The karma\u2014well, these would be sad. Leave this out. Just change it.\n\n_Q: How can one be sure that a decision is in accordance with God's will?_\n\n_A:_ As indicated here before. Ask self in the own conscious self, \"Shall I do this or not?\" The voice will answer within. Then meditate, ask the same, Yes or No. You may be very sure if thine own conscious self and the divine self is in accord, you are truly in that activity indicated, \"My spirit beareth witness with thy spirit.\" You can't get far wrong in following the word, as ye call the word of God.\n\n### **8**\n\n### **From Karma to Grace**\n\n#### **Reading 2800\u20132**\n\nYet, it is a fact that a life experience is a manifestation of divinity. And the mind of an entity is the builder. Then as the entity sets itself to do or to accomplish that which is of a creative influence or force, it comes under the interpretation of the law between karma and grace. No longer is the entity then under the law of cause and effect\u2014or karma, but rather in grace it may go on to the higher calling as set in Him.\n\nKeep the faith in the Lord, not in things. Some of those activities in the present may tend to lead the mind astray, for it to become a disciple of an idea rather than of ideals. But let thy purpose be in the Lord, and thy ways may be pleasing to Him.\n\n#### **Reading 3177\u20131**\n\n_Q: What is the karma which follows me?_\n\nA: This\u2014find it in self. Know, so long as we feel there is karma, it is cause and effect. But in righteousness we may be justified before the Throne; thus we may pass from cause and effect, or karma, to that of grace.\n\nThis is the attitude; not of self-righteousness no, but of blessed assurance that He is able to take all that we may commit unto Him against any experience in our lives.\n\n#### **Reading 2981\u20131**\n\nIn giving an interpretation of the records as we find them, there is much from which to choose. These we would choose with the desire and purpose that this may be a helpful experience for the entity; enabling the entity to better fulfill those purposes for which it entered this present sojourn.\n\nMuch that would be of interest might be gained by some, as to why the entity entered this present sojourn; partly by choice of self. For, viewed from the spirit, much of time and space in a material concept loses its relationship\u2014and becomes _now._\n\nHence those experiences which have brought distortions in the material plane are not merely because of karmic law, but the application of karmic law in the life of the individual entity.\n\nThus we find those greater opportunities for the entity meeting same, not only in the law of cause and effect\u2014or karma\u2014but also in the application of the law of grace.\n\nThe activities of the entity, thusly, are tied in the material, in the mental, in the spiritual, with what the entity does about the choices made.\n\nThe body of each entity is the temple of the living God. There He has promised to meet the entity. To live, to be\u2014and that activity\u2014unto the glory of the Creative Forces is the purpose of the entrance of each entity into material consciousness.\n\nThat met, that accomplished in any experience, is unto that unfoldment of the awareness of the oneness of self with that Creative Force which it, the entity, would magnify.\n\nMany influences enter in the experience of this entity; more from activities in the material plane than from what might be ordinarily termed the astrological sojourns. While the sojourns of the entity in those consciousnesses we term the astrological aspects do have their influence, these are manifested more in the manner or way of thinking; as indicated in Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.\n\nThese, then, bring the high mental abilities; the interest in music, art, and the universal consciousness\u2014also the affliction in Saturn. Thus the desire of change in the activities. Thus the necessity, as in most entities, that patience be practiced, not only as a theory but as a reality in the experience; not only patience with things, conditions (that are a part of the experience), but with people, with others, with time, with influences that may alter the activities of the entity.\n\n#### **Reading 2727\u20131**\n\nWhile the astrological influences are apparent, we find that these do not in this particular case run true to the ordinarily termed astrological effects; varying because of the application the entity has made in those relationships. Just as that influence termed by some students as karma. This is the natural law, yes. But there _is_ the law of grace, of mercy. And this is _just_ as applicable as the law of karma, dependent upon the stress or the emphasis put upon varied things.\n\n#### **Reading 3249\u20131**\n\n_Q: Are these ailments karma, if so what did I do and how can I wash them out?_\n\n_A:_ These are part karma and part just self. Karmic conditions, of course, are cause and effect. There is grace through the power of the belief of the entity in the divine, in His materialization, His manifestation and His glorification. Then the purpose of the entity should be ever to use whatever may be the abilities to glorify and magnify Him in the earth.\n\n_Q: Is my soul going ahead or have I missed the call of this incarnation?_\n\nA: Ever going ahead. Though it may appear at times to fail, there is nothing that can separate thee from the love and the knowledge of the Father save self.\n\n_Q: What do I do that is wrong?_\n\nA: Who made us a judge over thee or anyone else? What are thy ideals? Parallel thy activities with thine ideals, not merely in mind but put it on paper so that you may study and take a lesson from same.\n\n_Q: What should I do to further my advancement on the path?_\n\nA: Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman not ashamed; rightly dividing the words of truth, keeping self unspotted from condemnation of others or of things.\n\n#### **Reading 2746\u20132**\n\nThe entity was an Atlantean, as indicated. This experience was indicated because there had been the opportunity in self, in which there was the use of spiritual ideals for self-indulgence. Hence such entities, in each period of activity in the material plane, will either make reparations or\u2014rather should it be said\u2014turn to the law of grace instead of the law of karma, and will come out of the experience as a wonderful success or a miserable failure. They are extremes, just as the entity itself has found in the present. There are periods when there is the decision that something is desirable and you don't stop until you have it! These are extremes. Time and space and patience are most needed oft, that few souls or individuals are willing to pay the price for\u2014until they grow to be such, you see.\n\nJust as has so oft been indicated, one doesn't fall out of a tree into heaven, or an airplane, or fly into heaven, but one grows in grace, in knowledge, in understanding, in perfecting within self those applications of tenets and truths that bring to the activities the spiritual, the mental growth.\n\n#### **Reading 2987\u20131**\n\nThe name then was Eloise White. Yet the entity in the latter portion of its experience gained, for it came in contact with some of those who had suffered through the destruction of those lands now called Chicago or Dearborn. These brought a stabilizing of self, in the understanding that with what measure ye mete it is measured to thee again. It is the law of cause and effect, and is thus called karma. It is also the law of grace, of mercy, for if ye would have mercy ye must show mercy. If ye would have peace it must be first within self, and ye must be peaceful and create peace wherever you go, with whomever ye contact, and not dissension.\n\nIn the latter portion of that sojourn the entity helped others, by teachings; as ye may in the present, in the application of lessons of truth, gems of knowledge as may be in the soul experiences of the entity; and the application of same may bring harmony in the experience.\n\n#### **Reading 3243\u20131**\n\nAs we find, conditions here are karmic. And unless the body would accept the responsibility of the general condition for self, then go about to correct same through the law, not of karma but of grace\u2014not a great deal may be done.\n\n#### **Reading 5209\u20131**\n\nThe karmic conditions are needed for the entity, or soul development of the entity, and those who have the responsibility of same; in that source from which all healing comes. For whether it be medicinal, mechanical or what sources, healing can only come from the divine. For as has been indicated, \"Who healeth all thy diseases?\" Him in whom we live and move and have our being.\n\nThus we may through those administrations of that which is the spirit of truth made manifest, turn this karma, or law, to grace and mercy. For the pattern hath been given those who seek to know His face.\n\n#### **Reading 1648\u20132**\n\nAs has been indicated through these channels, there is never a chance meeting, or any association, that hasn't its meaning or purpose in the development of an individual entity or soul.\n\nThen, as we have indicated, if any entity, any individual, takes a meeting, any association, with the purpose or the desire to use same for self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and no thought of the purposes of any activity through the development of the soul for its purpose as it enters, then it becomes that as may be or is called _karma_ \u2014or the individual becomes subject to law!\n\nAnd, as has been pronounced, the letter of the law killeth, but the spirit of the law maketh alive.\n\nThen the spirit of the law is exemplified in He that is the Law of Love, and Grace, and Mercy, and Truth.\n\nAnd they that use such associations, such meetings as such, become helpmeets one to another\u2014or stepping-stones for a greater development.\n\n## A.R.E. PRESS\n\nThe A.R.E. Press publishes books, videos, audiotapes, CDs, and DVDs meant to improve the quality of our readers' lives\u2014personally, professionally, and spiritually. We hope our products support your endeavors to realize your career potential, to enhance your relationships, to improve your health, and to encourage you to make the changes necessary to live a loving, joyful, and fulfilling life.\n\nFor more information or to receive a free catalog, call:\n\n**800\u2013333\u20134499**\n\nOr write:\n\nA.R.E. Press\n\n215 67th Street\n\nVirginia Beach, VA 23451\u20132061\n\n**AREPRESS.COM**\n\n## _E DGAR CAYCE'S A.R.E._\n\n**_What Is A.R.E.?_**\n\nThe Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., (A.R.E.\u00ae) was founded in 1931 to research and make available information on psychic development, dreams, holistic health, meditation, and life after death. As an open-membership research organization, the A.R.E. continues to study and publish such information, to initiate research, and to promote conferences, distance learning, and regional events. Edgar Cayce, the most documented psychic of our time, was the moving force in the establishment of A.R.E.\n\n**_Who Was Edgar Cayce?_**\n\nEdgar Cayce (1877\u20131945) was born on a farm near Hopkinsville, Ky. He was an average individual in most respects. Yet, throughout his life, he manifested one of the most remarkable psychic talents of all time. As a young man, he found that he was able to enter into a self-induced trance state, which enabled him to place his mind in contact with an unlimited source of information. While asleep, he could answer questions or give accurate discourses on any topic. These discourses, more than 14,000 in number, were transcribed as he spoke and are called \"readings.\"\n\nGiven the name and location of an individual anywhere in the world, he could correctly describe a person's condition and outline a regimen of treatment. The consistent accuracy of his diagnoses and the effectiveness of the treatments he prescribed made him a medical phenomenon, and he came to be called the \"father of holistic medicine.\"\n\nEventually, the scope of Cayce's readings expanded to include such subjects as world religions, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, dreams, history, the missing years of Jesus, ancient civilizations, soul growth, psychic development, prophecy, and reincarnation.\n\n**_A.R.E. Membership_**\n\nPeople from all walks of life have discovered meaningful and life-transforming insights through membership in A.R.E. To learn more about Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. and how membership in the A.R.E. can enhance your life, visit our Web site at EdgarCayce.org, or call us toll-free at 800\u2013333\u20134499.\n\n**Edgar Cayce's A.R.E.**\n\n**215 67th Street**\n\n**Virginia Beach, VA 23451\u20132061**\n\n**E DGARCAYCE.ORG**\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}