Ludendorff soon regained a semblance of calm, but it was the calm of the fatalist. On September 29 he told his staff that the army “faced not merely defeat, but imminent annihilation.” Officers were thunderstruck; a few colonels and generals openly sobbed. Thaer accosted Ludendorff after the meeting and implored, “Can it be true?” Ludendorff could only nod his head in reply.

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With total victory at all costs now impossible to achieve, making peace at any cost became inevitable. Nevertheless, Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued to vacillate between seeking an armistice and “going French,” the latter a reference to a proposal to issue calls for a revolutionary levée en masse of anyone left standing and able to pull a trigger that would end in a climactic Endkampf. As late as October 18, Crown Prince Rupprecht wrote that Ludendorff still refused to see the seriousness of the German army’s condition.

Saner heads soon recognized that the likely result of an Endkampf would be the invasion, devastation, and dismemberment of Germany. Eight days later, Ludendorff was out. The kaiser willingly accepted his resignation. Hindenburg stayed on to oversee a beaten army’s return to a defeated Reich.

That the German army had become too worn down, physically and spiritually, to continue as an effective fighting force was a fact that shook Ludendorff and Hindenburg to their cores. Instead of preserving victories achieved on the Eastern Front in 1917, the Ludendorff offensives of 1918 squandered them.

Even worse, the army did not lose in territorial terms. Rather, it lost in the realm of the spiritual, in the contest of wills, precisely where it was supposedly at its strongest vis-à-vis the enemy. The search for scapegoats was the predictable next step, since Germany’s warlords refused to face a bitter truth: that will and bravery alone could not guarantee victory, and that German soldiery had ultimately been overmatched and defeated in the field.

The irony was that the catastrophic results of 1918 vouchsafed Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s previous criticism of Falkenhayn’s costly offensives in the West. Seeking to win the war by tactical virtuosity brought to fever pitch by a lust for victory was a familiar and reassuring formula to these men. As initially impressive as the breakthroughs were that spring, they ultimately exhausted the troops and bred a new spirit of futility and defeatism, both at the battle front and on the home front. Instead of a site of victory, the Western Front became a tomb for German imperial ambitions—and a hecatomb for German soldiery.

In retrospect, the Western Front of World War I was for Germany much like its Eastern Front of World War II. This was the battleground where the German army committed the bulk of its soldiers but also the front where Germany never achieved decisive results, and it was the front where committed opponents broke the back of the German army by ultimately outgunning, outnumbering, and even outthinking and outfighting it.

Vanquished in the field, the German army was further betrayed by its warlords, who in 1919 absolved themselves of responsibility for its collapse—a collapse that was the price of their vainglorious and ultimately tragic pursuit of total victory. Indeed, their unbounded appeals to the sacrificial bravery of their soldiers left behind a dangerous legacy.

Despite near superhuman efforts, the army had failed. Citizens who had endured severe privation to feed and support that army were equally shocked. As they grappled for explanations, rightists encouraged them to focus yet again on zeal. This time, however, it was a supposed lack of zeal and tenacity that was the problem, not within the army itself or among solid burghers at home but rather among elements within German society that rightists reviled. In their eyes, these elements—socialists, war profiteers, Jews—were unworthy of being treated as true Germans.

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