The fall of Bagdad was an important event.  It cheered the Allies, and proved, especially to the Oriental world, the power of the British army.  Those who originally planned its capture had been right, but those who were to carry out the plan had not done their duty.  Under General Maude it was a comparatively simple operation, though full of admirable details, and it produced all the good effects expected.  The British, of course, did not stop at Bagdad.  The city itself is not of strategic importance.  The surrounding towns were occupied and an endeavor was made to conciliate the inhabitants.  The real object of the expedition was attained.

[Illustration:  Bagdad the magnificent Falls to the British

Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, Commander-in-Chief of the British Mesopotamian Army, making his triumphal entry into the ancient city at the head of his victorious army on March 11, 1917.]

CHAPTER VIII

IMMORTAL VERDUN

France was revealed to herself, to Germany and to the world as the heroic defender of civilization, as a defender defying death in the victory of Verdun.  There, with the gateway to Paris lying open at its back, the French army, in the longest pitched battle in all history, held like a cold blue rock against the uttermost man power and resources of the German army.

General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff and military dictator of the Teutonic allies, there met disaster and disgrace.  There the mettle of the Crown Prince was tested and he was found to be merely a thing of straw, a weak creature whose mind was under the domination of von Falkenhayn.

For the tremendous offensive which was planned to end the war by one terrific thrust, von Falkenhayn had robbed all the other fronts of effective men and munitions.  Field Marshal von Hindenburg and his crafty Chief of Staff, General Ludendorff, had planned a campaign against Russia designed to put that tottering military Colossus out of the war.  The plans were upon a scale that might well have proved successful.  The Kaiser, influenced by the Crown Prince and by von Falkenhayn, decreed that the Russian campaign must be postponed and that von Hindenburg must send his crack troops to join the army of the Crown Prince fronting Verdun.  Ludendorff promptly resigned as Chief of Staff to von Hindenburg and suggested that the Field Marshal also resign.  That grim old warrior declined to take this action, preferring to remain idle in East Prussia and watch what he predicted would be a useless effort on the western front.  His warning to the General Staff was explicit, but von Falkenhayn coolly ignored the message.

[Illustration:  Immortal Verdun, where the French held the Germans with the inspiring slogan, “They shall not pass”]