and 19 years old. Another combing process added 300,000 more, and finally in November the 1916 class was called out -another 450,000. In 1917 another squeezing process found. 150,000 more men, draining the empire of every man who by any stretch of medical inspection could be regarded as fit for military service. There remained no other resource except the boys taken as soon as they became 18. Not before 1918 could the German Staff begin incorporating the 1921 class—and then only as fast as they became 18. At least 500,000 fit men were needed for indispensable industrial and civil service behind the lines. The utterly unfit totaled 2,800,000.19

At least 38,000,000 men were now bearing arms or in training for war-27,500,000 on the side of the Allies and 10,600,000 on the side of the Central Powers. These figures did not include the naval personnel of the belligerents, which would raise the total some millions. Against Germany's 7,000,000, Austria's 3,000,000, Turkey's 300,000, and Bulgaria's 300,000, were arrayed the following forces. Russia (if counted), 9,000,000; France, 6,000,000; Britain, 5,000,000; Italy, 3,000,000; Japan, 1,400,000; United States, more than 1,000,000; China, 541,000; Roumania, 320,000; Serbia, 300,000; Belgium, 300,000; Greece, 300,000; Portugal, 200,000; Montenegro, 40,000; Siam, 36,000; Cuba, 11,000, and Liberia, 400. Military experts believed these figures represented in round numbers the comparative strength of the contending armies. Germany and Austria made every effort to conceal the precise numbers of their armies. Careful estimates of Allied military intelligence departments placed the total at about 10,000,000, with Germany's forces more than double Austria's.

In the first half of 1916, when the German press was exulting in studies of the war map of Europe, Hindenburg with truth had described Germany's military position as "brilliant, but without a future." Increasingly effective methods of fighting the under-sea menace, and a great speeding-up of shipbuilding in our own country, seemed to mark the turning of the tide of U-boat frightfulness, and the collapse of Germany's main hope of victory. George

1 Henry Wood, United Press correspondent.

Gothien, a progressive member of the Reichstag, was quoted in a Berlin dispatch as saying that there was "no hope of crushing Germany's enemies on land," while as for the submarine campaign, some millions of tons of shipping had been sunk, but "no disposition toward peace on the part of England was discernible. In the United States men saw for the first time a thorough and effective use of the weapon that Germany was said to fear most, namely, a drastic embargo to keep food and other supplies from neutral countries contiguous to the Central Powers.

In Flanders, as has already been made clear, deep-dug trenches were impossible. Resort was of necessity had to sand-bags, that is, to building up a trench rather than to digging one down. Such construction stood out clearly against the sky in that flat, featureless country, and was therefore an admirable mark for artillery. To overcome both objections, the Germans constructed so-called "pill-boxes, small concrete block-houses, half buried in the ground, each of which was a machine-gun post, manned with a thoroughly experienced crew, trained for just the work it was called upon to perform. This now constituted the first-line German defenses. Behind it were the reserves, formed for the inevitable counter-attack, which was to be directed against the British infantry who advanced beyond the line of blockhouses. All this meant that the German front line was thinly held and depended for its defense upon machine-gun posts, which had been carefully placed with a view to enfilading the advancing infantry-line.

These posts caused the British trouble. They could not quite make out what the game was, nor how to meet it. But finally a solution was found in an increasing artillery-fire, and then Germany's real trouble began. The Germans could not man the positions heavily, because their losses were too great. They could not man them thinly, because then the British infantry would walk over them, while the artillery caught their massed reserves and wrecked them. And yet they obviously had to do one or the other. They stuck to the pill-box defense, and the British walked over them. The Germans had not found a way to match the British offensive. They had tried it both with men and machines, and both

British

had proved failures. The British march kept on. losses were severe, but the German losses were more so, and in a sense it became a war of subtraction from the opposing forces, more than it was a war in which progress could be measured on the map. The British finally gained the village of Passchendaele and the crest of the ridge which looked down upon the town of Roulers only six miles away. All the high ground which the Germans now held was a short

AN EAST INDIAN CEMETERY IN ENGLAND

Here were buried Moslem soldiers from India, who died in England of wounds received in the war. The cemetery is attached to a Moslem mosque at Woking, in Surrey, where services for Moslems visiting, or resident in, England have long been held

spur northward from Passchendaele, and this was taken on November 9. The Germans had clung to it desperately, because possession by the British would be the first step in throwing a noose around Houthulst Woods and so choking the Germans out of them. Marlborough had been credited. with saying that whoever held Houthulst controlled Flanders. This was in every sense true. When the Allies took this