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To lead the offensive, before dawn German gunners set their 6608 artillery pieces and 3534 mortars – half of all German guns on the Western Front. Fog or not, the Kaiserschlacht was about to throw this corner of France into chaos. Yet, with an organised assault of this magnitude, there was no chance of getting the word out to the men poised on the frontlines that there would be a delay. On the designated morning of the offensive, the fog was so thick that soldiers couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. Across a 45-mile front, no fewer than two million German soldiers would hurl themselves at the Allied lines. The onslaught would be the biggest set-piece battle the world had ever seen. So begins the chapter entitled ‘The Kaiserschlacht – The Kaiser’s Battle – Begins’ in Peter FitzSimons’ final instalment of his World War One trilogy, Victory at Villers-Bretonneux. A sensitive and discriminating judgement is called for a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.’” 1 ‘It was the great Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz who, in 1832, put it best: “War is the realm of uncertainty three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser certainty.