Present, or contemporary warfare may be taken to date from the general adoption of rifled firearms; the warfare of the past may fairly be limited for purposes of comparison or contrast, to the smooth-bore era; indeed, for those purposes there is no need to go outside the present century. Roughly speaking the first five and a half decades of the century were smooth-bore decades; the three and a half later decades have been rifled decades, of which about two and a half decades constitute the breechloading period. Considering the extraordinary advances since the end of the smooth-bore era in everything tending to promote celerity and decisiveness in the result of campaigns--the revolution in swiftness of shooting and length of range of firearms, the development in the science of gunnery, the increased devotion to military study, the vast additions to the military strength of the nations, looking to the facilities for rapid conveyance of troops and transportation of supplies afforded by railways and steam water-carriage, to the intensified artillery fire that can now be brought to bear on fortresses, to the manifold advantages afforded by the electric telegraph, and to the crushing cost of warfare, urging vigorous exertions toward the speedy decision of campaigns--reviewing, I say, the thousand and one circumstances encouraging to short, sharp, and decisive action in contemporary warfare, it is a strange and bewildering fact that the wars of the smooth-bore era were for the most part, shorter, sharper, and more decisive. Spite of inferiority of weapons the battles of that period were bloodier than those of the present, and it is a mathematically demonstrable proposition that the heavier the slaughter of combatants the nearer must be the end of a war. There is no pursuit now after victory won and the vanquished draws off shaken but not broken; in the smooth-bore era a vigorous pursuit scattered him to the four winds. When Wellington in the Peninsula wanted a fortress and being in a hurry could not wait the result of a formal siege or a starvation blockade, he carried it by storm. No fortress is ever stormed now, no matter how urgent the need for its reduction, no matter how obsolete its defences. The Germans in 1871 did attempt to carry by assault an outwork of Belfort, but failed utterly. It would almost seem that in the matter of forlorn hopes the Caucasian is played out.