However, the terms also included the Central Powers’ recognition of the union of Bessarabia with Romania. In April 1917, the United States Army had fewer than 300,000 men, including National Guard units, compared to British and French armies of 4.1 and 8.3 million respectively. On 6 April 1917, Congress declared war on Germany (pipihosa.com) as an “Associated Power” of the Allies. The United States was a major supplier of war material to the Allies but remained neutral in 1914, in large part due to domestic opposition. The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join the Grand Fleet, and provided convoy escorts. The most significant factor in creating the support Wilson needed was the German submarine offensive, which not only cost American lives but paralysed trade as ships were reluctant to put to sea.

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By September, the Germans had fallen back to the Hindenburg Line. The final assault on the Hindenburg Line began with the Meuse-Argonne offensive, launched by American and French troops on 26 September. Two days later the Allied armies (Belgian, French and British) attacked around Ypres, and the day after the British Fourth and French First Army at St Quentin in the centre of the line. The Allies had advanced to the Hindenburg Line in the north and centre. On 24 September, the Supreme Army Command informed the leaders in Berlin that armistice talks were inevitable. German forces launched numerous counterattacks, but positions and outposts of the Line continued falling, with the BEF alone taking 30,441 prisoners in the last week of September.

In the Battle of Dobro Pole, the Serbian and French armies had success after a three-day-long battle with relatively small casualties, and subsequently made a breakthrough in the front, something which was rarely seen in World War I. After the front was broken, Allied forces started to liberate Serbia and reached Skopje at 29 September, after which Bulgaria signed an armistice with the Allies on 30 September. German Emperor Wilhelm II in a telegram to Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand I described the situation thus: “Disgraceful! 62,000 Serbs decided the war!”. The collapse of the Central Powers came swiftly.

On 12 December 1916, after ten brutal months of the Battle of Verdun and a successful offensive against Romania, Germany attempted to negotiate a peace with the Allies. However, this attempt was rejected out of hand as a “duplicitous war ruse”. US president Woodrow Wilson attempted to intervene as a peacemaker, asking for both sides to state their demands and start negotiations. Lloyd George’s War Cabinet considered the German offer to be a ploy to create divisions among the Allies.

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Office of the Auditor-General New Zealand. Pennell, Catriona (2012). A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland. Brock, Peter, These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors to Military Service from the Great War to the Cold War, p. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehmann & van der Veer 1999, p. Tucker & Roberts 2005, p.