Map of the 1918 German offensives on the Western Front from The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Ferdinand Foch. © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
German OffensivesOf Mar. 21 (Picardy)Of May 27 (Aisne-Marne)Of July 15 (Champagne-Marne)Of Apr. 9 (Flanders)Of June 9 (Compiegne)Front and situation of the German Armies March 20, 1918 (on the eve of the offensive)Front at the end of the offensiveScale of miles
"— A doctor tells me of the effects of mustard-gas: burns, blindness, pneumonia, inflammation of the testicles. 'We have a gas which is even more deadly,' he added.He also described the looting of villages by French soldiers when they abandoned them during the retreat. 'It was not for the sake of stealing. They could not take anything away with them. It was just a mania. To break into an empty house, to open drawers, to read letters, to play about with the linen and clothes, and then to leave it all where it was, after a few hours. The English, more methodical, carried off pianos in motor-lorries, on the pretext of organising the villages for defence."
Entry from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. Mustard gas, a poison gas introduced late in the war, caused large, painful blisters of the skin, eyes, and mucous membrane. The German offensives of 1918 forced first the British and then the French to retreat. After two offensives (Operations Michael and Georgette) against the British, the Aisne (Blücher) Offensive (May 27 to June 4) pushed the French back to the Marne River. The Noyon-Montdidier Offensive was anticipated by the French and came to an early conclusion.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 357, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1918-06-26, 1918, June, looting, poison gas, mustard gas, map of 1918 German offensives