"Get a lot of Huns and plant them In a ditch across the way;

Now you have war in the making,

As waged here from day to day."

But Tommy is not all fun, and he closes with,

"Oft we're told 'Remember Belgium,'

In the years that are to be;
Crosses set by all her ditches

Are our pledge of memory."

This was the condition of things on what came to be called the Western Front. There was also an Eastern Front, which gradually extended itself from Riga on the Gulf of Riga to the Black Sea. The Russians could not make their way into France, but they kept so much going on in the east that German troops had to be withdrawn from the Western Front and sent against them. Poland, in the western part of Russia, thrusts a square wedge between Germany and Austria. It looks on the map like an easy route for the Russians into the heart of the enemy's country; but the Grand Duke Nicholas knew very well that if he took it, the Germans could come from the north and the Austrians from the south and crush his forces between them; therefore he marched straight into the part of Germany which extends farthest into Russia. Now, there was in Germany a retired general, Von Hindenburg, who had long amused the military folk of the country by insisting that in case of war this region would be of the utmost importance. He made it such, for there he won a great victory over the Russian troops. No one smiled at Von Hindenburg's notions again.

Another army of Russians made a successful drive into Galicia, in northeastern Hungary. Unluckily for them, they were not so cautious as they were brave, and they were nearly destroyed by the German von Mackensen. They tried it again with fresh troops, and now they took Lemberg and began the siege of the unpronounceable Przemysl. This held out until well into 1915. Meanwhile, the Germans had made a drive into Poland and were aiming at Warsaw; but like Przemysl this did not change masters until 1915.

The Western and the Eastern were the two principal fronts, but as the war continued, other fronts developed. Just before the Germans occupied Louvain, the Austrians made a dash into Serbia, but were driven back. A second time they attacked Serbia, and from across the Danube they bombarded Belgrade into ruins and pushed on victoriously. Suddenly, as in Hawthorne's story of "The Gray Champion," there came galloping straight into the midst of the battle-field the white-haired Serbian King. More than forty years earlier King Peter had fought for the French in the Franco-Prussian War. Three times he had been captured by the Germans, and three times he had escaped. No fear had he of Prussian or Austrian, and he led his troops in so furious and unexpected an attack that the whole Austrian army retreated to their own country. Serbia's fall was yet to come, but for a year she was safe.

Germany had planned to become mistress of the

seas. She had built the famous Kiel Canal, so that her war vessels could pass easily from the Baltic into the North Sea without having to go around Denmark; and here much of her fleet was gathered. In July, 1914, England had held in the English Channel a review of her warships, 215 in all. They had not dispersed, and so, the moment that war broke out, they were ready to do their part, and they bottled up the German fleet in Wilhelmshaven, west of the Kiel Canal. A few cruisers and torpedo boats escaped the patrol. Any one who knows the career of the German commerce raider Emden, how she destroyed shipping to the value of $10,000,000 before she was sunk by an Australian war vessel, can guess what damage the whole German navy might have done had it not been for the prompt action of the British fleet.

At the end of 1914, England still ruled the seas, but Germany had acquired nearly all of Belgium, about one tenth of France, and part of Russian Poland. At the Eastern Front, as at the Western, the war seemed to have come to a deadlock. The Russians had done excellent work not only in driving the Austrians out of the passes of the Carpathian Mountains, but in occupying the greater part of Austrian Galicia. The results of the war for 1914 have been summed up in one sentence -"Germany had failed to conquer Europe, but Europe had made no progress toward conquering her."

IV

MODERN METHODS OF WARFARE

IF some dead soldier of our Civil War could come to life and see the present methods of carrying on warfare, he would be far more dazed than Rip Van Winkle ever was. The trench system has already been spoken of. The use of camouflage, the disguise or concealment of objects of war, is not new by any means, but it never was so elaborately done before. Trenches are concealed by sods and branches of trees; vessels are painted, the lower part of the hull to look like waves, the upper in sky-blue; an apparently solid rock in a field may prove to be a gray canvas protection for a man with a gun. A little ammunition shelter was decorated with a picture of a hen and her chicks, and it easily passed for a hencoop. The Emden changed her paint and set up an extra smokestack to persuade the English that she was one of their own cruisers. The English retaliated in kind by secretly building dummy dreadnaughts of wood, which lay idly in the harbors while the real dreadnaughts were serenely acting as convoy for transports.

Barbed wire has proved a better defense than stone walls. These can be easily shattered, but barbed wire, stretched from post to post in wild entanglements, "looking as if they had been woven by a crazy spider," is slow to yield, even to a storm of

shrapnel. It can be cut, of course, but this is rather a dangerous proceeding when under a brisk fire from the enemy. Moreover, the wire is sometimes charged with a high power of electricity, and then any attempt at cutting it has two chances of proving fatal.

Machine guns have proved of great general value, though they look anything but dangerous, "so small, so fine, and such bits of workmanship that one would think to see them that they were a child's playthings."

The famous French "75's" are light in weight, but in general artillery has been growing larger and larger and able to throw shells at a constantly increasing distance. The man who fires the gun has sometimes not even a glimpse of what he is trying to hit. His orders come from the man with a view, who is perhaps hidden in some innocent-looking farmhouse on a distant hill, far away from the scene of action, perhaps skillfully camouflaged in the top of a tree, perhaps high up in an airplane, whence he can "wireless" down his directions for the aim.

A weapon revived by the Germans from the Greek fire of ancient times is liquid fire, made of pitch and gasoline or similar substances. A large stream of this fire is started, then a small stream of some mixture that catches fire on reaching the air. This is so timed that it kindles the large stream at whatever moment the man in charge wishes. Besides the heat and flame, this causes a suffocating smell and a heavy smoke.